Video of overland dispersal and drought escape behavior in a flightless aquatic insect, the giant water bug Abedus herberti (Hemiptera: Belostomaidae). April 9, 2009 High Creek, Galiuro Mountains, Arizona (AZ) USA.
Video of overland dispersal and drought escape behavior in a flightless aquatic insect, the giant water bug Abedus herberti (Hemiptera: Belostomaidae). April 9, 2009 High Creek, Galiuro Mountains, Arizona (AZ) USA.
Although it is generally assumed that the intensifying abiotic environment is the primary effect of drought on aquatic organisms, drought-induced top predator extinctions may be an important underlying mechanism. I used manipulative experiments to disentangle the impacts of drying and top predator extinctions on arid-land aquatic invertebrate communities. I then...
Frequent or lengthy predation risk can cause one of two modifications of prey feeding
behavior: 1) postponement of feeding to less risky periods, or 2) resumption of feeding
behavior despite persistent risk. North Pacific flatfishes exhibit both of these responses when confronted with temporal variation in risk, and this experimental...
Video of overland dispersal and drought escape behavior in a flightless aquatic insect, the giant water bug Abedus herberti (Hemiptera: Belostomaidae). April 9, 2009 High Creek, Galiuro Mountains, Arizona (AZ) USA.
We explored whether anti-predator behavior and intrinsic growth are co-evolved traits in 3 co-occurring juvenile flatfish species: English sole Pleuronectes vetulus, Pacific halibut Hippoglossus stenolepis and northern rock sole Lepidopsetta polyxystra. English sole are risk prone, adopting behavior that renders them more vulnerable to predation, while northern rock sole are...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Functional trait analysis is an appealing approach to study differences among biological communities because traits determine species' responses to the environment and their impacts on ecosystem functioning. Despite a rapidly expanding quantitative literature, it remains challenging to conceptualize concurrent changes in multiple trait dimensions (“trait space”) and select quantitative functional...
AIM:
Meta-community structure is a function of both local (site-specific) and regional (landscape-level) ecological factors, and the relative importance of each may be mediated by the dispersal ability of organisms. Here, we used aquatic invertebrate communities to investigate the relationship between local and regional factors in explaining distance decay relationships...
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
Full Text:
1,2,8
, Kate S Boersma
1,3,9
, Miguel Cañedo-7
Argüelles
1,4,10
, Kristin L Jaeger
5,6,11
, Julian
Hydrology is a fundamental factor influencing ecosystem dynamics, life-history strategies, and diversity patterns in running-water habitats. However, it remains unclear how hydrology may structure the taxonomic and functional composition of communities, especially in systems with high spatiotemporal variability in flow. We examined invertebrate diversity from 7 desert streams in the...
With the ongoing crisis of biodiversity loss and limited resources for conservation, the concept of biodiversity hotspots has been useful in determining conservation priority areas. However, there has been limited research into how temporal variability in biodiversity may influence conservation area prioritization. To address this information gap, we present an...
While there is a persistent inverse relationship between latitude and species diversity across many taxa and ecosystems, deviations from this norm offer an opportunity to understand the conditions that contribute to large-scale diversity patterns. Marine systems, in particular, provide such an opportunity, as marine diversity does not always follow a...
Invasive plants have the capacity to transform landscapes and alter ecosystem function, causing significant economic and ecological damage. These effects include displacement and reduction of native flora and fauna, altered fire regimes, modification of biotic and abiotic soil properties, as well as local, regional, and global economic impacts. With such...
Understanding the mechanisms that regulate local species diversity and community structure is a perennial goal of ecology. Local community structure can be viewed as the result of numerous local and regional processes; these processes act as filters that reduce the regional species pool down to the observed local community. In...
Biodiversity loss in highly diverse systems such as coral reefs has been linked to significant declines in the ecosystem functions and services provided by marine species. Ecological functioning of coral reefs and the resistance of coral reef fish communities to disturbance depend on the functional traits of species that promotes...
The United States of America and the world are faced with three massive intertwining challenges at this time: COVID-19, racial inequity, and climate change. As a species, humans must come together and collectively address these challenges to preserve our humanity and make our world a more just and livable place...
Floods are major disturbance events for riverine ecosystems, directly and indirectly impacting organisms and their habitat. In this study I investigated the role of riverine floods and flow alteration in regulating aquatic macroinvertebrate population and community structure. I examined this problem using a variety of methods: a meta-analytic review of...
Floods are a key component of the ecology and management of riverine
ecosystems around the globe, but it is not clear whether floods have predictable effects on
organisms that can allow us to generalize across regions and continents. To address this, we
conducted a global-scale meta-analysis to investigate effects of...
1. Ecological communities can be relatively stable for long periods of time, and then, often as a result of disturbance, transition rapidly to a novel state. When communities fail to recover to pre-disturbance configurations, they are said to have experienced a regime shift or to be in an alternative stable state....
Managed honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) colonies are important pollinators of many cultivated crops. Honey bee colony declines averaging 30% annually in the United States for the past 7 years have caused significant concern and hence have been a topic of intensive investigation. These declines are reportedly due to multiple...
Atherosclerosis is the underlying cause of ischemic heart disease and stroke and is the leading cause of death worldwide, especially in developed countries. As an inflammatory disease of arteries in a hyperlipidemic milieu, expression of adhesion molecules, such as endothelial-leukocyte adhesion molecule-1 (E-selectin) and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), on endothelial...
Biological invasions create complex ecological
and societal issues worldwide. Most of the
knowledge about invasions comes only from successful
invaders, but less is known about which processes
determine the differential success of invasions. In this
review, we develop a framework to identify the main
dimensions driving the success and failure...
The gonadal steroids, testosterone and estradiol, are known to be important
modulators of neuronal functions and behaviors in most vertebrate species. These
steroid hormones also elicit changes in neuropeptide synthesis and secretion, alter
specific neurohormone receptor levels, and alter neuronal morphology and
electrophysiology. Many of the actions of androgens and...
Identification of critical habitat for all life stages of commercially exploited fish populations is critical for effective management. Despite a clear need for basic biological information on juvenile rockfish life history, there have been very few efforts to describe distribution and habitat of this life stage, particularly along the Oregon...
Phytoplankton and microzooplankton comprise the base and the first link of the marine food web, respectively. These microbes are key drivers of marine carbon and nutrient cycles. Phytoplankton convert atmospheric CO₂ into organic carbon, and microzooplankton consume phytoplankton, packaging phytoplankton carbon into particulate forms that have a variety of fates:...
Most wild animals are concurrently infected with multiple parasite species for most of their lives. These parasite species assemble into rich and diverse communities, with parasites using host tissues for growth and reproduction as well as evolving strategies to evade the host immune system. The net effect of these ecological...
The ongoing worldwide loss of biodiversity has been described as a "biodiversity crisis," "the Anthropocene defaunation," and alternatively "an extinction spasm." More recently, many scientists have come to the conclusion that we are witnesses to Earth's sixth major mass extinction event, which has the potential to fundamentally alter basic ecological...
My thesis explored the effects of environmental variability on population
dynamics and community composition of aquatic insects. Environmental variability in
the form of flow regime in streams can limit the distribution and life-history traits of
aquatic insects. I used tributaries to the McKenzie River in Oregon with dramatically
different flow...
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are a widely distributed baleen whale species, well known for their diverse acoustic behavior. On high-latitude foraging grounds, humpback whales produce a suite of non-song vocalizations (“calls”) in concert with foraging and social behavior. In this dissertation I investigated the role of calls in the acoustic...
Natural selection, in its most basic form, is described as a process in which traitsincrease or decrease in frequency depending on their fitness, and only the trait withthe highest fitness will remain in the population. Yet, populations rarely have asingle `optimal' trait. The way natural selection maintains this observed variationwithin...
Understanding the movement behavior and foraging strategies of individuals across multiple spatial and temporal scales is essential not only for understanding the biological requirements of individuals but also for linking individual strategies to population level effects. Glacial fjords scattered throughout south-central and southeastern Alaska host some of the largest seasonal...
The objectives of this dissertation were to describe the complex oceanographic conditions around the Galápagos Archipelago (eastern equatorial Pacific), their seasonal variability, and their effects on patterns of cetacean occurrence. The physical and ecological factors leading to a plume of high phytoplankton biomass in the wake of the Galápagos were...
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...
Understanding and modeling microbial responses and feedbacks to climate change is hampered by a lack of a framework in the pelagic environment by which to link local mechanism to large scale patterns. Where terrestrial ecology draws from landscape theory and practice to address issues of scale, the pelagic seascape concept...
The potential for nanomedicine to reduce toxicity and improve therapeutic response to radiation is vast. Clinically, this potential has thus far only begun to be realized with the recent success of the radioenhancing nanoparticle, NBTXR3 by Nanobiotix. Radioenhancing nanoparticles, however, represent only a small class of nanomaterials that may be...
Published January 1993. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community...
The influence of the physical environment on organisms has long been a subject of ecological research. But, the complex drivers of environmental variation, and the multiple scales at which this can occur, make studying this topic a difficult challenge. In rocky intertidal habitats, oceanographic- and climate-scale variability influence benthic communities...
Emerging infectious diseases in wild animals threaten global biodiversity as well as domestic animal and human health. Their unprecedented increase in conjunction with anthropogenically induced range shifts of endemic pathogens exposes hosts to novel parasite combinations, lending urgency to research on disease dynamics in wildlife systems. In natural populations, hosts...
Pollution by pesticides is a ubiquitous concern for wildlife. The effects of
pesticides are especially concerning in aquatic environments, which are particularly
vulnerable as they have several exposure routes for the influx of chemicals. These
effects are of particular concern as biodiversity loss reaches unprecedented rates. This
includes recent declines...
Studies of the effects of forest harvest on streams and fish have a long history in the Pacific Northwest. Results of this work have prompted development of new forest harvest practices that are more protective of these resources, but the effectiveness of these new practices has not been fully evaluated....
The causes of the global biodiversity crisis are varied and complex. Anthropogenic threats may act in isolation, or interact additively or synergistically with each other or with natural stressors to affect sensitive taxa. The recent emergence of many infectious diseases in wildlife has brought attention to the role of disease...
The high productivity of Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems (EBUE), some of the most productive ecosystems in the globe, is attributed to the nutrient rich waters brought up through upwelling. Climate change scenarios for coastal upwelling systems, predict an intensification of coastal upwelling winds. Associated with intensification in upwelling are biogeochemical...
Infectious diseases are a growing concern for both humans and wildlife. The negative effects of infectious disease have been exemplified by the recent global amphibian population declines associated with disease outbreaks. Although multiple pathogens and factors play a role in these declines, the aquatic fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), has...
This dissertation focuses on the evolutionary forces of genetic drift and gene flow in frog populations. The balance of these two forces and the force of mutation largely determine the amount of neutral genetic variation within populations as well as the degree of genetic similarity among populations. The stochastic evolutionary...
Giant otters (Pteronura brasiliensis) and humans in the Lower Yasuní Basin (Ecuador) have similar food and space requirements: they consume comparable arrays of fish species, and they use similar aquatic and terrestrial habitats. Resource partitioning could facilitate coexistence by allowing each species exclusive access to some resources.
My research examines...
Vertebrates communicate with one another and coordinate intraspecific reproduction by using a variety of sexually dimorphic signals, such as plumage, ornaments, sounds, and/or scents. These sexual dimorphisms are maintained by physiological factors, typically sex-specific hormones (though see Chapter 3 for an exception). The purpose of the research in this dissertation...
Most climate change predictions focus on the response of individual species to changing local conditions and ignore species interactions, largely due to the lack of a sound theoretical foundation for how interactions are expected to change with climate and how to incorporate them into climate change models. Much of the...
The majority of research in environmental education (EE) has focused on measuring knowledge, attitudes, and behavior using quantitative tools and methods. Few studies have attempted to elicit and characterize children's conceptions of the environment or nature, particularly those resulting from a residential EE experience, which contextualize knowledge, attitudes, and may...
Depleted species of rockfish (Sebastes spp.) from the Northeast Pacific experience high discard mortality due to "barotrauma," induced from the rapid change in pressure during capture. Research suggests rockfish have the potential to survive barotrauma if immediately recompressed, but the potential for long-term recovery is unknown. In this project, we...