by Kristen Minogue
Nemodus Photos
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4 Ways Birds (and Salamanders) Make Humans Look Primitive
Friday, February 24th, 2012Click to continue »
Invaders escape persecution from parasites
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012by Monaca Noble
Invasion was a godsend for the rough periwinkle snail, which managed to escape its flatworm parasites. (World Register of Marine Species)
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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Endangered Orchids: Why Planting New Forests Isn’t Enough
Monday, January 30th, 2012by Kristen Minogue
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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Toughest Shellfish in the Sea?
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012by Kristen Minogue
Blue mussels (Credit: Meriseal)
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Snowmageddon vs. Caribbean Creep
Monday, January 9th, 2012by Monaca Noble
SERC's Green Village during Snowmageddon February 2010 (Stephen Sanford)
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How Plants (Occasionally) Escape the Food Chain
Friday, December 23rd, 2011by Kristen Minogue
Leaf shredded by insects. Credit: Marina LaForgia
It’s a trick worthy of any spy thriller: to elude an enemy, hide among something it won’t notice. Or, to be extra safe, something it finds incredibly disgusting. It turns out the same strategy can work for plants that don’t want to get eaten. Sometimes.
For the last seven months, intern Marina LaForgia has kept tabs on tree saplings in more than a dozen different environments and watched the game of ecological survival play out. As she tracked their progress, she searched for an answer to a deceptively simple question: Is diversity good for plants? When it comes to the food chain, will hungry herbivores pass over tasty plants if they’re surrounded by less palatable ones?
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Small Lagoon Fights Off Occupation
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011by Monaca Noble
On a thin strip of land between Bolinas Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean lies the neighborhood of Seadrift, a community battling an invasion of crabs that have taken over their lagoon.
European green crab (BrentMWilson)
Seadrift is a small subdivision at the northern tip of Stinson Beach, Calif., sandwiched between Bolinas Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean on a narrow sand spit. It surrounds a small enclosure called the Seadrift Lagoon, an artificial lagoon created for the subdivision. It’s a popular site for visitors, and the lagoon provides recreational enjoyment for the entire community. But for the last two decades one unwelcome visitor has proven to be very bad company.
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Six Endangered Species of the Chesapeake
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011by Kristen Minogue
Bat infected with deadly white-nose syndrome.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
The last Western Black Rhino appeared in Cameroon in 2000. Now they’re gone, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which declared the rare subspecies officially extinct Nov. 10. As thousands more species go extinct across the world every year, the Chesapeake Bay watershed is fighting to save its own endangered flora and fauna. Maryland counts 362 plants and animals on its endangered list – and that’s not including the ones that have already been wiped out from the state. Whales, bats, turtles and orchids: here are six of Chesapeake’s most wanted.
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Why We Like Science
Friday, November 4th, 2011
Above: One perk of student research at SERC. Photo courtesy of the Phytoplankton Lab
It’s impossible to work here without some compulsion to understand the natural world – whether it’s colonial tunicates that bear a creepy resemblance to the Borg or endangered orchids that need microscopic fungi to survive. So when Smithsonian Magazine launched a “Why I Like Science” series on their blog Surprising Science, we took full advantage of the opportunity to share our enthusiasm. Here’s how four staff responded when asked why science is cool.
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Hurricanes, Snakeheads and Dead Zones: What 2011 Weather Meant for the Chesapeake
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011by Kristen Minogue
Credit: NOAA Photo Library