by Mayda Nathan
Many insects visit black mangrove flowers, including bumblebees (left) and Pseudomyrmex ants (right). But which pollinators are the most important? (Mayda Nathan)
But how can we make predictions about invaders that are…native?
In other words, what happens when an organism starts to spread out from its native range into adjacent territory—without hitchhiking along with humans? And why does this happen in the first place?
North America is home to over 200 species of orchids. More than half are endangered or threatened somewhere in their territories. Some fall prey to poaching. Others fall to habitat loss. But much of their survival depends on something smaller: microscopic fungi in the soil. In the early–and sometimes later–stages of their lives, orchids depend on the symbiotic relationships they form with these fungi to obtain nutrients. If the soil is altered the fungi can disappear, and the orchids soon follow.
May 17 is Endangered Species Day. This year we’re highlighting some of the silent victims in the orchid gallery below.
Ghost Orchid (Dendrophylax lindenii)
This ethereal leafless orchid haunts the swamps of Florida’s deep south, the only state where it can be found. It is a frequent target of poaching, and generally dies within a year of being taken out of the wild.
Status: Endangered in Florida.
Ghost orchid (NC Orchid)
Brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) caused the local extinction of more than half of Guam’s native birds and lizards after they invaded the island in the 1940s. (National Park Service)
For decades, ecologists have assumed the worst invasive species—such as brown tree snakes and kudzu—have an “away-field advantage.” They succeed because they do better in their new territories than they do at home. A new study led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center reveals that this fundamental assumption is not nearly as common as people might think.
by Kristen Minogue, Regina Eisert and Olav Oftedal
Because they must learn to navigate under sea ice in just over a month, baby Weddell seals are born with near adult-sized brains. (Samuel Blanc)
When it comes to brain size, Homo sapiens generally get the most credit. But to find the baby mammals with the proportionally largest brains on the planet, Smithsonian scientists had to search in Antarctica. In a study published online in April, they found Weddell seal pups have the most developed brains at birth recorded for any mammal so far.
By the time they are born, baby Weddell seal brains have already reached 70 percent of their adult size. (The brain of a human infant is a mere 25 percent of its adult size.) But the researchers found this rapid development carries a hefty price tag.
by Matt Ogburn and Tuck Hines
Photo: Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
To some following the blue crab recovery, the news earlier this month may have come as a shock. In 2012, the Chesapeake-wide Winter Dredge Survey estimated a record 764 million blue crabs in the Bay—the highest seen since 1991. Juvenile crab densities jumped to their highest levels ever. Then the 2013 survey released April 19 saw both those numbers drop.
Managers greeted the dwindling juvenile population with some depression. But those numbers may not matter as much, according to biologists Tuck Hines and Matt Ogburn of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Ecologists at SERC have been tracking blue crabs for more than 30 years, almost a decade before the winter dredge survey began. They’ve discovered the population that really needs watching is the spawning females. Here is what the numbers are telling us:
by Monaca Noble and Paul Fofonoff
The European green crab has been on the east coast of the U.S. since 1817. (SERC)
The title question was raised by one of the readers of last month’s feature story on green crabs (Carcinus maenas). The reader asked, “If the green crab was first seen here [the East Coast of the US] in 1817, is it still considered an invasive species 200 years later? How far back do you go to claim something is invasive vs. native?” Several groups of people have drawn their own lines in the sand, but we wanted to examine current thoughts and perceptions. The following article is based on views expressed in a recent listserve discussion.
The term invasive was used in the green crab article because the crab is on the list of the world’s 100 worst invasive species. But it is also commonly used as a synonym of introduced. Which brings us to the importance of terms and definitions.
As one respondent pointed out, there are different interpretations of the term “invasive.” Some people define invasive in terms of a species’ ecological impact or behavior, while others use it to refer to a species’ origin, and sometimes both are part of the definition. If a species’ characterization as invasive is based only on its ecological behavior, then it is possible for a species to be both native and invasive. But if the species’ origin is part of the definition, then only nonnative species can be invasive. Others add another dimension to the word by making the mode of introduction important. Species can be spread naturally through dispersal and/or through human-mediated transport. Some people use invasive in reference to human-mediated introductions of nonnative species. Unfortunately, when we hear the word “invasive” we rarely know the definition behind it.
But whether something is considered invasive appears to be largely a matter of perception rather than just definition, and there are many contributing factors that muddy the water. Most responses from the discussion fell into three perception categories represented by these questions:
1) Do we benefit from the species, or is it harmful?
2) Is the species part of what we consider the natural landscape?
3) Is the species native?
Maybe our problem is that we view nature in the time frame of a biologist’s career-span.”
by Kristen Minogue
Lumbricus rubellus, a European earthworm that is now one of the most common in the eastern U.S. More than 10,000 years ago, Pleistocene glaciers wiped out native earthworms. Today virtually all earthworms in the U.S. north of Pennsylvania are invasive. (Holger Casselmann)
But for wild orchids, they’re more of a menace. Earthworms could prevent roughly half a forest’s orchid seeds from even germinating, ecologists from Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Johns Hopkins University discovered in a study published online this March in Annals of Botany Plants.
The small size of orchid seeds (they are barely the size of dust grains) makes them particularly vulnerable. As earthworms chew up forest litter, they ingest orchid seeds as well. When that happens, two things can keep the seeds from germinating: One, the process of passing through an earthworm’s gut can render them unviable. Or two, if the seeds survive ingestion, they can end up buried so deep that they can’t access the fungi they need to germinate and grow. As a general rule, deeper soils are much less likely to have those fungi.
by Kristen Minogue
SERC pond on the morning of March 25. The short-lived spring snowstorm dumped up to 6 inches throughout Maryland, but most of it melted within 24 hours. (Kristen Minogue)
If the massive snowstorms that pummeled the northeast this winter—and at least one downpour in spring—seem out of place in a warming world, climate scientists have a message: Don’t fret, it’s just physics.
For several years, scientists have anticipated a future of “less snow, more blizzards” in the winters ahead. The message may sound like a paradox. But for the planet, it boils down to one simple truth: Warm air holds more moisture than cold air.
by Monaca Noble and Linda McCann
European green crabs are eating and marching their way up the west coast.
One of nine marine invertebrates to make the list of the world’s 100 worst invasive species, they’ve had major economic impacts on shellfisheries in New England, including blue mussels, the Virginia oyster (Crassostrea virginica) and Bay scallops. Impacts are mounting on the west coast too, where losses to bivalve fisheries (Pacific littleneck, Japanese littleneck, softshell clams and blue mussels) are projected to reach $20,000-60,000 per year. Ecologically, their impact has been no less severe, as they prey on and compete with other crabs, bivalves, gastropods like snails and slugs, and many other invertebrates.
European Green Crab Carcinus maenas. Green crabs have visited every continent but Antarctica. They’ve colonized parts of the Americas from Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. (Arthro)
Green crabs are exceptional world travelers, making it from their native region along the European Coast to six major regions of the world, including the Northwest Atlantic (Maryland to Newfoundland), the Northeast Pacific (California to British Columbia), Patagonia, South Africa, Japan and Australia. Their mode of transport may vary, but evidence suggests they’ve been transported with the live-bait trade and in ships’ ballast water.
Green crabs have been on the East Coast of the US for about 200 years, according the NEMESIS database. They made their first appearance near New Jersey in 1817. From there they moved north, reaching the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia in 1953, the Gulf of St. Lawrence by 1994, and finally, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland in 2007. Their southward expansion stopped at the Chesapeake Bay; possibly they couldn’t compete with the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus).
by Katrina Lohan
Sunset from the dock at the Bocas del Toro Marine Station, Smithsonian. (Katrina Lohan)
We had very little trouble finding two of the oyster species we needed at three different places. But with only three days left in our trip, we had yet to find Ostrea sp. at more than one location. With our hopes high, we headed toward Portobelo to see if we could find a saline river-like environment that had Ostrea sp. in high enough abundance for us to sample. The drive was gorgeous! We drove along the Atlantic Coast of Panama and stopped at five separate “rivers”, though most of them were pretty small and should probably be called streams instead. We also briefly drove into Portobelo so that we could drive past the old Spanish forts in the city.
We only found Ostrea sp. at one of the rivers, and we didn’t find enough to sample there. Our final stop on our way back to Naos was the French Canal. We had borrowed an inflatable canoe from Mark Torchin, which took us about 20 minutes to pump up. Once we did, we were able to get the canoe into the water and used it to more closely investigate what oysters were growing on the bridge pilings. We had our fingers crossed that it would be Ostrea sp. but, alas, it was Crassostrea sp. instead. Well, I can’t be too upset. While we didn’t get the ideal sampling we were hoping for, it was still a very successful trip!
Next month we head to Merida, Mexico to continue our sampling adventures. Stay tuned!
