#ecological applications

[xtruss]

Humans Have Substantially Altered The Relationship Between Wolves and Deer, Finds Study

— By Lori Fligge | University of Minnesota | October 30, 2023

A combined photo collage: A breeding female wolf traveling on a logging road carrying a deer fawn back to her pups in June 2023. Credit: Voyageurs Wolf Project

New research from the University of Minnesota's Voyageurs Wolf Project found that human activities in northern Minnesota—logging, road and trail creation, and infrastructure development—have profoundly impacted where wolves hunt and kill deer fawns. By altering forest ecosystems, humans have created an environment that possibly favors the predators.

This research, recently published in Ecological Applications, is a collaboration between the University of Minnesota, Northern Michigan University, the University of Manitoba, Voyageurs National Park, and the Voyageurs Wolf Project.

"The premise is really quite simple: human activities change where deer are on the landscape, and wolves go where the deer are," said co-lead author Thomas Gable, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota and project lead for the Voyageurs Wolf Project.

The Researchers Found:

Wolves disproportionately hunt and kill deer fawns around recently logged areas—those logged within the past five years. This is likely because clear-cut forests provide dense stands of young saplings, supplying prime food for deer and excellent hiding spots for newborn fawns. Wolves seem to know these recently-logged areas are good hunting spots, turning the nursery grounds into risky areas for deer fawns during summer.

More than expected, wolves tend to kill deer fawns closer to human infrastructure, like cabins, year-round residences and barns. This is likely in part due to the fact that supplemental feeding of deer by people is common in the region, and this likely congregates deer near human-developed areas. The high concentration of deer near human development, in turn, attracts wolves to areas near people.

Wolves preferentially hunted fawns from linear features—roads, powerlines, ATV/UTV trails, and hunting lanes— and disproportionately killed fawns closer to these features than would be expected. This was unsurprising to the research team, as wolves face the same general issues that people do when traveling in the woods, and just like humans, wolves often prefer to travel on linear corridors than through dense forest.

"When we put all of the pieces together, it is pretty clear that the cumulative effects of all major aspects of human activity in the Northwoods—logging, infrastructure development, and road and trail development—have fundamentally changed where and how wolves hunt deer fawns here," said Sean Johnson-Bice, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Manitoba and co-lead author of the study.

"The rules of this predator-prey game change when people alter ecosystems, and it's possible we have created conditions that may have tipped the scales in the predators' favor."

Future research is needed to understand whether human activities have simply influenced where wolves end up killing deer fawns or if human activities have actually increased wolf hunting efficiency of deer. The team is exploring various approaches to examining this question.

[dravencore]

philosophical debates and fights to the death won't fix him but @carrionkid and I agree that gardening would

[buzzardss]

that stupid bum (WHO INTRODUCED ME TO HIS WHOLE FAMILY BTW. JUST BTW) has ghosted me but bc of it ive never been locked in academically more than i have these past 2 weeks.

[exopelagic]

what WAS the normal child response to learning abt climate change actually. bc I’m pretty sure ‘depressed for at least 6 months and becoming deeply fascinated by apocalypses for ~3 years’ was prooooobably not it but who am I to say

[flavia8]

They are all wildly different to each other and only a few are in my preferred field

[softpeachydarling]

Just found out I got accepted to my top choice masters program with a full scholarship!

I'm going to be studying data science + AI.

[medicinemane]

Man... the vast majority of people just uh... do not get geopolitical stuff at all

[hmdigitalindia]

The COM-100 is a professional-grade digital meter designed for measuring water quality. It is widely used in various applications such as hydroponics, aquariums, water filtration, and laboratory testing. The COM-100 is a professional grade level EC/TDS/Temp meter ideal for all water quality testing, hydroponics, water purification applications, wastewater regulation, aquaculture, colloidal silver, labs & scientific testing, pools & spas, ecology testing, boilers & cooling towers, water treatment and more.

[artcalledky]

[jcmarchi]

Characterizing social networks

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/characterizing-social-networks/

Characterizing social networks

People tend to connect with others who are like them. Alumni from the same alma mater are more likely to collaborate over a research project together, or individuals with the same political beliefs are more likely to join the same political parties, attend rallies, and engage in online discussions. This sociology concept, called homophily, has been observed in many network science studies. But if like-minded individuals cluster in online and offline spaces to reinforce each other’s ideas and form synergies, what does that mean for society?

Researchers at MIT wanted to investigate homophily further to understand how groups of three or more interact in complex societal settings. Prior research on understanding homophily has studied relationships between pairs of people. For example, when two members of Congress co-sponsor a bill, they are likely to be from the same political party.

However, less is known about whether group interactions between three or more people are likely to occur between similar individuals. If three members of Congress co-sponsor a bill together, are all three likely to be members of the same party, or would we expect more bipartisanship? When the researchers tried to extend traditional methods to measure homophily in these larger group interactions, they found the results can be misleading.

“We found that homophily observed in pairs, or one-to-one interactions, can make it seem like there’s more homophily in larger groups than there really is,” says Arnab Sarker, graduate student in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) and lead author of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The previous measure didn’t account for the way in which two people already know each other in friendship settings,” he adds.

To address this issue, Sarker, along with co-authors Natalie Northrup ’22 and Ali Jadbabaie, the JR East Professor of Engineering, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and core faculty member of IDSS, developed a new way of measuring homophily. Borrowing tools from algebraic topology, a subfield in mathematics typically applied in physics, they developed a new measure to understand whether homophily occurred in group interactions.

The new measure, called simplicial homophily, separates the homophily seen in one-on-one interactions from those in larger group interactions and is based on the mathematical concept of a simplicial complex. The researchers tested this new measure with real-world data from 16 different datasets and found that simplicial homophily provides more accurate insights into how similar things interact in larger groups. Interestingly, the new measure can better identify instances where there is a lack of similarity in larger group interactions, thus rectifying a weakness observed in the previous measure.

One such example of this instance was demonstrated in the dataset from the global hotel booking website, Trivago. They found that when travelers are looking at two hotels in one session, they often pick hotels that are close to one another geographically. But when they look at more than two hotels in one session, they are more likely to be searching for hotels that are farther apart from one another (for example, if they are taking a vacation with multiple stops). The new method showed “anti-homophily” — instead of similar hotels being chosen together, different hotels were chosen together.

“Our measure controls for pairwise connections and is suggesting that there’s more diversity in the hotels that people are looking for as group size increases, which is an interesting economic result,” says Sarker.

Additionally, they discovered that simplicial homophily can help identify when certain characteristics are important for predicting if groups will interact in the future. They found that when there’s a lot of similarity or a lot of difference between individuals who already interact in groups, then knowing individual characteristics can help predict their connection to each other in the future.

Northrup was an undergraduate researcher on the project and worked with Sarker and Jadbabaie over three semesters before she graduated. The project gave her an opportunity to take some of the concepts she learned in the classroom and apply them.

“Working on this project, I really dove into building out the higher-order network model, and understanding the network, the math, and being able to implement it at a large scale,” says Northrup, who was in the civil and environmental engineering systems track with a double major in economics.

The new measure opens up opportunities to study complex group interactions in a broad range of network applications, from ecology to traffic and socioeconomics. One of the areas Sarker has interest in exploring is the group dynamics of people finding jobs through social networks. “Does higher-order homophily affect how people get information about jobs?” he asks.    

Northrup adds that it could also be used to evaluate interventions or specific policies to connect people with job opportunities outside of their network. “You can even use it as a measurement to evaluate how effective that might be.”

The research was supported through funding from a Vannevar Bush Fellowship from the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and from the U.S. Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative.

[wormsdyke]

Hi, was reading ur tags and I'm intrigued. You got any more interesting facts/examples of parasitism??

i would LOVE to talk more about parasitism!!! i’m by no means an expert but i think it’s super neat!!

something i didn’t know until studying ecology more is that finding parasites in an ecosystem can be an indicator of a really healthy environment! they fill an ecological niche, just like any other creature, and their absence would disrupt their community just like any other creature.

for example, i helped study a particular stream’s health by sampling fishes from it, then dissecting them and searching for parasitic worms. if i dissected a healthy adult bluegill and found it had heart worms, i might consider that a good thing for the stream’s biodiversity. it shows that the bluegill population is stable enough to produce healthy reproductive adults, and the worm population is stable enough to exist within the host body in a small enough capacity not to hinder its growth. win-win!

there’s a lot of parasites that are very careful in how they depend on their host! many spend their entire lives on/within a host’s body and rely on it for nutrition, so they need their host alive. (this is called endoparasitism - meaning the parasite lives inside the host body. the alternate is ectoparasitism - where the parasite lives on the host’s surface.)

some parasites move from host to host through the food chain, so they need to keep a low enough profile to be carried along. for example, a parasite might deposit its eggs onto the gills of an aquatic insect, where the eggs stay dormant and use the insect’s body as shelter. the eggs won’t develop and hatch until the host insect is eaten by a fish, giving the parasites a larger host body to grow into. they might develop into larvae in the fish’s heart and and just hang out there, remaining larvae, until the fish is eaten by a bird! now the parasite is in an even bigger host body, and it could mature into its adult form. it might make its home in the bird’s intestines, so its eggs can be dropped with the bird’s feces - and the cycle repeats!! the host organisms could live a complete life and successfully reproduce without the parasite causing it any problems!

not every parasite is that gentle though. there’s multiple millions of different parasitic species each with their own survival strategies, many of which are much more disruptive to the host. for example, some species of parasitic wasps have venom they can use to immobilize or affect the behavior of catterpillars, allowing the wasps to lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, sometimes completely filling the host body with eggs and killing it. so, you know, a bit less pleasant of an experience for the host.

i think it’s Loxothylacus panopaei (loxo), the parasitic barnacle that castrates mud crabs, laying their eggs in the host’s body and altering the hosts behavior to make it protect and nurture the parasitic eggs. in female mud crabs, this means they are prevented from laying their own eggs and instead care for the parasitic eggs. but get this - male mud crabs naturally have narrower bodies with no internal space for eggs, and no nurturing or protective behaviors for their own eggs. but when infected and controlled by loxo, male mud crabs’ bodies will widen to resemble the females, creating a space for loxo to lay eggs in them too. then the loxo causes the male crab to care for the eggs like a female would. this means loxo essentially doubled the amount of hosts it can use, and it reproduces crazy fast with this strategy. loxo’s intense and effective reproductive strategy means it’s spreading fast, invading regions where the crab populations haven’t evolved to have any defense against the parasite, and mud crab populations are in danger because of it. there’s ongoing efforts to study the interactions between loxo and mud crabs and to protect vulnerable populations in the chesapeake bay region.

compared to bluegill example, it just goes to show how much diversity there is among parasites and their impact. the heart worms in the bluegills and the barnacles on the mud crabs employ crazy different strategies with crazy different effects on their hosts. but they both have to have a degree of caution with their hosts - maintaining a population at the ecosystem’s carrying capacity requires the parasite to infect as many hosts as it can, but leave enough hosts alive long enough to reproduce so that the future generations of parasites will have hosts too. ecology is just a constant series of cost-benefit analyses and evolutionary microadjustments - how much can we take, but still ensure our children will have enough to survive?

parasitism is so fascinating to me as a case study in the way we interact with the natural world and apply our own morals onto nonhuman organisms. i think it’s easy to think of parasites as bad, mean creatures. i remember learning about forms of symbiosis in grade school science, where mutualism (where both of the organisms benefit from their interactions) was described like a happy friendship between two animals, and parasitism sounded like bullying. and i completely understand that gut reaction - seeing a deer turned pale and sickly from ticks draining their blood makes my heart ache, and i don’t think it’s wrong to feel that way. i don’t think compassion for the world around us is ever a bad thing. but i think it can be easy to follow that heartache into a somewhat pessimistic path. like, Cryphonectria parasitica (the fungus that causes chestnut blight) doesn’t have an evil plan to kill a chestnut tree. it’s an organism which has a sole motive of survival and reproduction, and parasitism is the method it’s evolved to achieve that.

anthropomorphizing can sometimes keep us from remembering that wildlife conservation cannot be limited to animals we think are cute. creepy crawlies have to be included in conservation efforts because excluding any member of an ecosystem disrupts every member of the ecosystem. we see this in cases like the absence of keystone species creating havoc down the food chain (think wolf restoration efforts in yellowstone) but similar problems can happen when we lose primary consumers from food chains too.

that’s not just a theoretical statement - there’s something like a 50% decrease in insect numbers globally caused by habitat loss, climate change, pollution, etc. i think education about invertebrate ecology and parasitology is so important in destigmatizing them so we can afford them the compassion and efforts they deserve to protect them. i love this ted talk by danae wolf, a conservation photographer who focuses on insects and spiders, where she expands on this topic. it’s not specific to parasites, but i think the insights she has are applicable there as well and overall worth the watch!

anyways!!!!!!!!! thank you so much for this ask!!!!!! i love ecology and parasitology and wildlife conservation and was so excited to write a short essay about it i hope you don’t mind!!!!!!!! again i’m no expert im just autistic with half a degree in wildlife conservation but it’s a joy to talk about and i would love to hear from others if anyone has things to add :D

[killrisma]

I need to create a 10 piece art portfolio for college applications by October 10th… pray for me, y’all

[neuroux]

Visual Perception: How Our Brains Interpret the World

They say that perception is reality, but what if the way we perceive the world around us isn't actually accurate? Our brains are incredibly complex, and the way they interpret visual information is a fascinating topic that has enticed scientists for decades. Did you know that our brains can process visual information up to 60,000 times faster than text? Or that over 50% of our brain is dedicated to processing visual information? In this blog, we will delve into the world of visual perception, exploring how our brains interpret the visual world around us and the captivating science behind it.

The Fundamentals of Visual Perception

The human brain visually perceives everything to make sense of the surrounding world. How? Let’s take this example. When you see pizza on the table, your brain assesses its color, shape, and texture to label it as food. Or when you play a video game, your brain visually perceives the graphics to judge how far your enemy is, how fast your character is moving, and what should be your reaction time. Visual perception does so much more than just recognize objects. It also helps the human brain understand depth, motion, spatial relationships, etc.

Visual Processing in the Brain

At the back of the brain, in the primary visual cortex, visual impulses from the retina are first processed. Here, the signals are divided into many characteristics, such as color, shape, direction, and movement.

Perception of Color

Color perception is a complex process that involves the interaction of multiple areas in the brain. The human eye contains three types of cones sensitive to different wavelengths of light. These cones are responsible for our ability to perceive colors, which are perceived by the brain to create the perception of color.

Perception of Shape and Form

The perception of shape and form is also a complex process involving multiple areas of the brain. The brain processes the signals from the retina and breaks down the features of an object, such as its edges and contours. These features are then combined to create the perception of shape and form.

Perception of Motion

The perception of motion is the ability to detect and interpret changes in the position of objects in the visual field over time. It allows us to perceive movement in our surroundings, track moving objects, and navigate through our environment. 

There are two main types of motion perception: first-order and second-order motion. First-order motion refers to the perception of changes in the position of an object itself, while second-order motion refers to the perception of changes in the texture, contrast, or other properties of an object that create the illusion of motion. Motion perception is influenced by different factors, including the speed, direction, and trajectory of an object, as well as its contrast and luminance. It is also influenced by contextual factors, such as the presence of other moving objects in the visual field and the overall structure of the visual scene.

The Role of Experience in Visual Perception

Visual perception is not just a passive process of receiving visual information from the environment. Our past experiences and knowledge also influence how we perceive the world around us. For example, if you are looking at a painting by Picasso, your brain will interpret the distorted shapes and colors differently than if you were looking at a realistic photograph.

Our expectations and biases can also influence our visual perception. A classic example is the "duck-rabbit illusion," where the same image can be interpreted as either a duck or a rabbit, depending on our expectations and past experiences. Scientists deploy many techniques to assess visual perception and the ecological momentary assessment application from NeuroUX is one brilliant way to work with real-time data and analyze visual perception. Their cognitive testing applications with 15+ validated tests are used by researchers and clinicians to get real-time data for studies.

Source: https://ecologicalmomentaryassessment.blogspot.com/2023/04/visual-perception-how-our-brains.html

[dubaiecosmart]

Commercial Kitchen Ecology Units...

Eco Smart International offers a range of Best air quality solutions for commercial, industrial, and residential applications. Their products are designed to provide effective solutions to ensure clean, healthy air, and can be customized to meet the specific requirements of each sector. With their advanced air quality technology, Eco Smart is helping to improve indoor air quality and promote a healthier, more productive environment for all.

To More Detais, Visit Us: ecosmartintl.com

Call On: Whatsapp:  0 552 65 7763,

                  Phone:   +971 4 295 3303

Drop us a mail: dubai@ecosmart-intl.com

[reasonsforhope]

"In the Canary Islands, in Barcelona, and in Chile, a unique fog catcher design is sustaining dry forests with water without emissions, or even infrastructure.

Replicating how pine needles catch water, the structure need only be brought on-site and set up, without roads, powerlines, or irrigation channels.

Fog catching is an ancient practice—renamed “cloud milking” by an EU-funded ecology project on the Canary Islands known as LIFE Nieblas (nieblas means fog).

“In recent years, the Canaries have undergone a severe process of desertification and we’ve lost a lot of forest through agriculture. And then in 2007 and 2009, as a result of climate change, there were major fires in forested areas that are normally wet,” said Gustavo Viera, the technical director of the publicly-funded project in the Canaries.

The Canaries routinely experience blankets of fog that cloak the islands’ slopes and forests, but strong winds made fog-catching nets an unfeasible solution. In regions such as the Atacama Desert in Chile or the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, erecting nets that capture moisture particles out of passing currents of fog is a traditional practice.

LIFE Nieblas needed a solution that could resist powerful winds, and to that end designed wind chime-like rows of artificial pine needles, which are also great at plucking moisture from the air. However, unlike nets or palms, they efficiently let the wind pass through them.

The water is discharged without any electricity. There are no irrigation channels, and no machinery is needed to transport the structures. The natural course of streams and creeks need not be altered, nor is there a need to drill down to create wells. The solution is completely carbon-free.

WATER IN THE DESERTS: 

China Announces Completion of a 1,800-Mile Green Belt Around the World’s Most-Hostile Desert

Billions of People Could Benefit from This Breakthrough in Desalination That Ensures Freshwater for the World

Scientists Perfecting New Way to Turn Desert Air into Water at Much Higher Yields

Sahara Desert Is Turning Green Amid Unusual Rains in Parts of North Africa

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala

In the ravine of Andén in Gran Canaria, a 35.8-hectare (96 acres) mixture of native laurel trees irrigated by the fog catchers enjoys a survival rate of 86%, double the figure of traditional reforestation.

“The Canaries are the perfect laboratory to develop these techniques,” said Vicenç Carabassa, the project’s head scientist, who works for the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications at the University of Barcelona. “But there are other areas where the conditions are optimal and where there is a tradition of water capture from fog, such as Chile and Morocco.”

In Chile’s Coquimbo province, the town of Chungungo is collecting around 250 gallons a day from a combination of locally-made fog catchers and LIFE Nieblas’ pine needle design, the Guardian reports."

-via Good News Network, December 30, 2024