In-the-field

Polyploidy and Diversification of the Creosote Bush

Anonymous — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 20:57:07 +0000

Polyploidy and Diversification of the Creosote Bush Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/17/2017 - 14:57

Polyploidy - whole genome duplication - is common among flowering plants, but its role in driving patterns of biodiversity, structuring plant communities, and influencing plant-animal interactions remains poorly known. Will Weaver, a recent graduate of EBIO, and Julienne Ng, a postdoc in the Smith Lab, accompanied Rob Laport to the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and California this spring to investigate pollinator visitation and reproductive interactions between diploids (two copies of the genome), tetraploids (four copies of the genome), and hexaploids (six copies of the genome) of the creosote bush (Larrea tridentata). It was a stellar year for flowers in the desert southwest, with many plants blooming abundantly that are usually quite sparse. It was also a good year for native bees, the primary pollinators of creosote bush with 20 specialist species, and the team was able to collect a lot of data on ploidy-specific visitation. The abundant bloom also helped with making controlled crosses between the ploidies where they co-occur, information crucial for understanding the role genome duplication plays in driving patterns of diversification.

Arizona Site

California Site

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Namibia Fairy Circles

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 14:08:12 +0000

Namibia Fairy Circles Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 08:08

EBIO Graduate Student - Lauren Shoemaker, recalls her time spent in Namibia investigating the formation of the famed Namibian Fairy Circles. Lauren, Nichole Barger and Holly Barnard spent half a month in the NamibRand Nature Reserve. Fairy Circles are generally described to be circular patches of land, devoid of vegetation and tend to last between 30 and 60 years. Read more about Lauren's experiences on the her Namibia Fairy Circle's blog.

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Attractive males advertise clean territories

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Feb 2016 18:12:24 +0000

Attractive males advertise clean territories Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/01/2016 - 11:12

Amanda Hund.

I am a PhD student in EBIO working with Dr. Rebecca Safran. My research focuses on understanding how parasites may play an important role in how new species form. Specifically, I am interested in how parasites influence the evolution of sexual traits across closely related populations.

To explore these questions, I work with three subspecies of barn swallows that are found in Colorado, the Czech Republic, and Israel. Each of these subspecies use different sexual traits to select their mates: plumage color in Colorado, tail streamers in the Czech Republic, and both color and tail in Israel. These three populations are also infected by different communities of parasites. My research has shown that different sexual traits in at least two of the populations are signaling information to females about the costly parasites in a male's territory. These parasites reduce the health and survival of nestlings as well as influence their ability to develop their own attractive sexual traits in the future. In barn swallows, I have found evidence that sexual traits have evolved to advertise valuable information to females about local parasites.

This video was filmed at one of my field sites in Boulder Colorado and highlights some of my work with barn swallows.

Several of Amanda's field sites are located just outside the city of Boulder

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The Wog Wog Project

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 20:30:32 +0000

The Wog Wog Project Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/14/2015 - 14:30

[video:https://vimeo.com/64823649]

Spending 10 hours a day in 100 degree heat trudging through the Australian bush may sound like most people’s worst nightmare, but for students Kika Tarsi and Erin Polka it’s all in a day’s work. Kika and Erin are involved in a research project being conducted by EBIO in partnership with CSIRO Australia known as the The Wog Wog Project.

The Wog Wog Project is a study taking place in southeastern Australia which looks at how plants and animals are affected by habitat fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation occurs when a natural environment is divided into smaller pieces causing the physical layout of the environment to change.Kika first became passionate about the issue after studying how bird populations were being affected by habitat fragmentation. “I fell in love with the question so critical in today’s world: how do species cope with a diminishing, increasingly fragmented landscape?” explains Kika. Erin, on the other hand, got involved in the project after visiting Professor Kendi Davies’s Wog Wog lab on campus to photograph some of the more than 700 beetle species that are one subject of the study. “I was hooked. I was also engrossed long enough for Paige, an undergraduate assistant, to come in and casually mention that they were looking into hiring a new undergrad. Needless to say I jumped on it,” says Erin.

Researchers from the Wog Wog Project travel to Australia three times a year to collect beetles. To catch these samples pitfall traps containing a preservative are placed into the ground causing insects to fall in and die. However, obtaining these samples is no easy feat. “Days in the field are hellacious! We get drenched in torrential rain, spend half the day sawing through trees down in the road, constantly have to dig bogged trucks out of the mud and cook dinner huddled under a hole-ridden tarp.” explains Kika.

While days in the field may be strenuous and exhausting, Erin and Kika both agree that the people they have met on this adventure have made everything worthwhile. “Sitting around at night and hanging out together afterwards, chattering about science, make the long days totally worth it. In the end, we all manage to have a fun time,” Erin says. Kika also explains that she really appreciates the unique view that Australians have on ecological systems and knows it is something she could never find at home.

Ultimately, the Wog Wog Project hopes it can help scientists answer important questions about how habitat destruction contributes to the extinction of species and how to best cope with habitat fragmentation in the years to come. As Kika states, “The world’s forests are constantly in a state of crisis and that means everything for the biodiversity. I have never understood why people don’t see that. Saving biodiversity is saving ourselves, and yet we never take it seriously.”

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Microbes in Central Park soil: If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere.

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 06:00:00 +0000

Microbes in Central Park soil: If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/01/2014 - 00:00

Soil microbes that thrive in the deserts, rainforests, prairies and forests of the world can also be found living beneath New York City’s Central Park, according to a surprising new study led by Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The research team analyzed 596 soil samples collected from across Central Park’s 843 acres and discovered a stunning diversity of below-ground life, most of which had never been documented before.

Only 8.5 percent to 16.2 percent of the organisms discovered in the park soils, depending on their type, had been previously entered into existing databases that describe microbial life, according to the study results published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We found thousands of different organisms, and it was shocking how few had ever been described,” said Noah Fierer, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU-Boulder and corresponding author of the study. “Not only do they not have a name, but we don’t know anything about them. We don’t know what sort of conditions they like to live under or what role they may play in soil habitat and soil fertility.”

The study was led by Kelly Ramirez, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University, now at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in The Netherlands. Ramirez did her research in the Soil Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Lab at CSU, headed by biology Professor Diana Wall, director of the School of Global Environmental Sustainability and a corresponding author on the study.

Other co-authors from CSU are soil science Professor Eugene Kelly and biology doctoral student Ashley Shaw. Other CU-Boulder co-authors are doctoral students Jonathan Leff and Christopher Steebock, and postdoctoral researcher Albert Barberan.

Wall, who will be speaking at the induction ceremony at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences later this month, said Ramirez’s work uncovered another melting pot of diversity in New York City -- within the soil of Central Park.

“The soil microbes in Central Park benefit us, benefit soil health, and are linked tightly to the beauty of the trees and other plants we see,” she said. “The nation’s food, cities, clean air and water and economy are all dependent on healthy, fertile soils and that motivates us to understand this fascinating hidden life beneath our feet.”

The scientists also compared the below-ground biodiversity in Central Park to 52 soil samples taken from locations spanning the globe, from Alaska to Antarctica. The team was surprised to find that the breadth of biodiversity beneath Central Park is similar to the biodiversity found across the world, from the frozen Artic tundra to hot deserts and nearly everything in between. The only area that did not have soil microbial communities that overlapped with the samples taken from Central Park was Antarctica, where Wall has done extensive research.

“If you want to find unique diversity and if you want to find a wide range of different below-ground organisms, you don’t have to travel around the world,” said Fierer, who is also a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “You can walk across Central Park.”

The types of plants and animals that are able to live in a particular biome, like the desert, are largely determined by the climate. But microbes appear to be more concerned about the environment in the soil, such as the acidity and the carbon availability, than how hot or dry the climate is. This allows diverse microbial communities to thrive wherever the soil conditions are equally diverse.

“No one would ever expect to find an overlap in the types of trees we see in Central Park and the type of trees we see in a tropical forest,” Fierer said. “But that doesn’t seem to be true for the microbes living in the soil. We found all these community types just within Central Park. Below-ground biodiversity doesn’t follow the same rules as the plants and animals living above ground.”

- See more at: http://www.colorado.edu/news/features/microbes-central-park-soil-if-they-can-make-it-there-they-can-make-it-anywhere#sthash.8fga7nGr.dpuf

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New CU-Boulder study shows differences in mammal responses to climate change.

Anonymous — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 07:00:00 +0000

New CU-Boulder study shows differences in mammal responses to climate change. Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/27/2014 - 00:00

If you were a shrew snuffling around a North American forest, you would be 27 times less likely to respond to climate change than if you were a moose grazing nearby.

That is just one of the findings of a new University of Colorado Boulder assessment led by Assistant Professor Christy McCain that looked at more than 1,000 different scientific studies on North American mammal responses to human-caused climate change. The CU-Boulder team eventually selected 140 scientific papers containing population responses from 73 North American mammal species for their analysis.

The studies assessed by the team examined seven different responses to climate change by individual mammal species: local extinctions of species known as extirpations, range contractions, range shifts, changes in abundance, seasonal responses, body size and genetic diversity. The researchers used statistical models to uncover whether the responses of the 73 mammals to a changing climate were related to aspects of their physiology and behavior or the location of the study population.

The analysis showed only 52 percent of the mammal species responded as expected to climate change, while 7 percent responded the opposite of expectations and the remaining 41 percent had no detectable response. The two main traits tied to climate change responses in the CU-Boulder study were large mammal body size and restricted times during a 24-hour day when particular mammal species are active, she said.

A paper on the study by McCain and former CU-Boulder postdoctoral fellow Sarah King was published online Jan. 22 in the journal Global Change Biology. The National Science Foundation funded the study. King is currently a research associate at Colorado State University.

While body size was by far the best predictor for response to climate change -- almost all of the largest mammals responded negatively -- the new study also showed that mammals active only during the day or only at night were twice as likely to respond to climate change as mammals that had flexible activity times, she said.

“This is the first time anyone has identified specific traits that tell us which mammals are responding to climate change and which are not,” said McCain of CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department.

McCain said she and King were surprised by some of the findings. “Overall the study suggests our large, charismatic fauna -- animals like foxes, elk, reindeer and bighorn sheep -- may be at more risk from climate change,” she said. “The thinking that all animals will respond similarly and uniformly to temperature change is clearly not the case.”

The researchers also found that species with higher latitudinal and elevation ranges, like polar bears, American pikas and shadow chipmunks, were more likely to respond to climate change than mammals living lower in latitude and elevation. The ability of mammals to hibernate, burrow and nest was not a good predictor of whether a species responded to climate change or not. American pikas have been extirpated from some of their previously occupied sites in the West, as have shadow chipmunks, which are in decline in California’s Yosemite National Park.

One of the most intriguing study findings was that some small mammals may shelter from climate change by using a wider array of “micro-climates” available in the vegetation and soil, she said. McCain compared the findings with the events at the K-T boundary 66 million years ago when an asteroid smacked Earth, drastically changing the climate and killing off the big dinosaurs but sparing many of the small mammals that found suitable shelter underground to protect them from the cataclysmic event.

“I think the most fascinating thing about our study is that there may be certain traits like body size and activity behaviors that allow some smaller mammals to expand the range of temperature and humidity available to them,” said McCain, also a curator of vertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. “These areas and conditions are not available to bigger mammals that live above the vegetation and experience only ambient temperatures.”

The new study builds on a growing body of global information documenting the shifting behaviors and environments of organisms like flowers, butterflies and birds in response to a warming world, said McCain.

“If we can determine which mammals are responding to climate change and the ones that are at risk of disappearing, then we can tailor conservation efforts more toward those individual species,” said McCain. “Hopefully, this potential loss or decline of our national iconic mammals will spur more people to curb climate impacts by reducing overuse of fossil fuels.”

For more information on the ecology and evolutionary biology department visit http://ebio.colorado.edu. For more information on the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History visit http://cumuseum-archive.colorado.edu/About/directory.html.

- See more at: http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2014/01/22/new-cu-boulder-study-shows-differences-mammal-responses-climate-change#sthash.MynvU6WA.dpuf

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