Posted by KristenM on May 7th, 2012
The milky blue waters of this Iceland lagoon are teeming with cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae. (Marie-II)
Beneath the surface of the ocean, an invisible army of workers is fighting to keep climate change in check. Many have been silently absorbing or burying carbon for billions of years, and humanity has just begun to take notice of them. These unassuming laborers are bacteria.
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Posted by KristenM on April 26th, 2012
Dave Clark/SERC
It’s national Poem in Your Pocket Day, and brevity has been the soul of wit since (approximately) 1603. We’re celebrating by showcasing some of the shortest nature poems in the history of the written language.
“Night Thoughts of a Tortoise Suffering from Insomnia on a Lawn”
The world is very flat.
There is no doubt of that.
-E.V. Rieu, (1887-1972)
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Posted by KristenM on April 9th, 2012
Photo courtesy of Samantha Reed
Posted in Classes and Events, Programs, SERC Sites and Scenes | 5 Responses »
Posted by KristenM on April 2nd, 2012
Vanessa Beauchamp/Towson University
Fourteen years ago, a green, hairy and incredibly sticky plant appeared in a Maryland park. Now it has biologists all over the state worried. But does this South Asian forest grass have what it takes to be a serious invader?
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Posted by KristenM on March 15th, 2012
Ascidia sydneiensis. Rosana Rocha, Universidade Federal do Paraná
Tunicates. Ascidians. Filter-feeders. Sea grapes. Sea squirts. They go by many names, all describing some of the most colorful invaders in the ocean. A photo gallery from the marine invasions lab offers a glimpse of the most stunning.
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Posted in Ecology, Invasive Species | 1 Response »
Posted by KristenM on February 24th, 2012
Nemodus Photos
Sometimes Mother Nature completely outdoes anything we’ve created for ourselves. Accomplishments like the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions can seem almost laughable when there are
lizards that can walk on water. When that happens, smart engineers try to take a lesson from it. It’s called biomimicry: technology inspired by nature.
Examples include gecko tape, shape-shifting airplane wings and Velcro©. Last week a group of teenage students in SERC’s home-school program finished their own research on animal physiology and brought a few more examples to our attention. Here are four ways birds and amphibians outclass humanity – and some wacky yet brilliant ways we can mimic them.
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Posted in Classes and Events, Ecology | 4 Responses »
Posted by KristenM on February 7th, 2012
Invasion was a godsend for the rough periwinkle snail, which managed to escape its flatworm parasites. (World Register of Marine Species)
Most organisms have several types of parasites associated with them. However, when species are introduced, they may lose some of their natural parasites through the invasion process. Or sometimes, parasites that survive the journey don’t do very well in the new environment. In essence invasion acts as a filter limiting the number of parasites that are transported and introduced. In science this process is called the parasite escape hypothesis.
Take the common cat parasite Toxoplasma gondii. T. gondii‘s complex two-host life cycle makes it difficult for it to adapt to new places. The parasite has two phases, a sexual phase and an asexual phase. The sexual phase can only take place in the cat (primary host), but the asexual phase can occur in several mammal species (secondary host) including cats, mice, humans, and birds. Because the parasite must infect a cat to reproduce and survive, its preferred secondary host is a mouse. If a mouse infected with T. gondii were introduced into an area with no cats, the parasite would not be able to survive.
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Posted by KristenM on January 30th, 2012
Downy rattlesnake orchid. (Melissa McCormick/SERC)
Orchids can be notoriously picky plants – a fact which makes conserving the endangered ones a difficult job for ecologists. In a paper published this month in the journal
Molecular Ecology, SERC ecologists revealed that an orchid’s survival hinges on two factors: a forest’s age and its fungi.
Roughly 10 percent of all plant species are orchids, making them the largest plant family on Earth. But habitat loss has rendered many threatened or endangered. This is partly due to their intimate relationship with the soil. Orchids depend entirely on microscopic fungi in the early stages of their lives. Without the nutrients orchids get digesting these host fungi, their seeds often won’t germinate and baby orchids won’t grow. And not every fungus works for every orchid. If there’s a mismatch, the fungus is effectively useless.
But while researchers have known about the orchid-fungus relationship for years, very little is known about what the fungi need to survive. And it turns out the fungi can be just as picky as the orchids.
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Posted in Ecology | 4 Responses »
Posted by KristenM on January 24th, 2012
Blue mussels (Credit: Meriseal)
Some species can survive just about anywhere. Take blue mussels, a group of shellfish whose habitat stretches from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. Over the last several decades, biologists have thrown all kinds of tests at them – heat, cold, saltwater, freshwater, low oxygen. They’ve even tried drying them out. Almost nothing fazes these animals. For invasion scientists trying to figure out how far they could spread, that’s a scary prospect.
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Posted in Ecology, Fisheries, Interns, Invasive Species, Publications | 3 Responses »
Posted by KristenM on January 9th, 2012
SERC's Green Village during Snowmageddon February 2010 (Stephen Sanford)
Remember Snowmageddon 2010, the east coast storms that dumped up to three feet of snow over the mid-Atlantic? The February snowstorm was the largest in the region in nearly 90 years, resulting in the heaviest snowfall on record for Delaware (26.5 inches) and the third heaviest snowfall in Baltimore (24.8 inches). The storm made a big impression on Dr. João Canning-Clode and other scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, who began to wonder if the storm, and the December/January cold snap that preceded it, would lead to the deaths and potential disappearance of marine invaders from southern climates.
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Posted in Climate Change, Ecology, Invasive Species, Publications | 1 Response »
