Journal Club

Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members

Category Archives: Ecology

Journal Club: Protein vs protein, study comprehensively compares the environmental impacts of livestock and seafood

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Marcus Woo

The most environmentally friendly protein sources include clams, sardines, and cod. Not surprisingly, beef has the worst environmental impact. Somewhat surprisingly, farmed salmon is relatively innocuous; but catfish is not. These are the conclusions of a recent study that compares … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Damaged reefs get quieter, causing fewer fish to hear their way home

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Carolyn Beans

A healthy coral reef creates quite the underwater racket. Reef croakers croak, damselfish woop-woop-woop, and clown fish sound thuds like a woodpecker at a tree. But a new study reports that climate-change related disturbances can turn down the volume … Continue reading →

Journal Club: How traditional people tamed the Amazon rainforest

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Natasha Gilbert

The Amazon rainforest is often thought of as an untamed wilderness. But a growing number of studies, for example one in 2015 and another in 2017, show that local people have domesticated the forests for millennia, weaving patches of useful … Continue reading →

Journal Club: In the mouse gut, a bacteria-killing virus evolves to attack a new strain

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Carolyn Beans

In scientists’ quest to understand how gut microbes affect human health, bacteria take center stage. But bacteriophages, the viruses that attack the bacteria, are often overlooked, says microbiologist Luisa De Sordi of the Institut Pasteur in France. “We keep an … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Study of volcanic gases offers new fundamental insights into the Earth’s carbon cycle

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Leslie Willoughby

To understand how the planet’s climate will evolve and has evolved over geologic time, scientists need to understand the Earth’s carbon cycle. In work recently published in Science, researchers offer new insights into that cycle, upending calculations about just how … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Ancient diet helps tell the story of Easter Island

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Carolyn Beans

Famous for its towering stone human figures, Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, has long been shrouded in mystery, with the demise of its people the subject of an intense debate. Now, new findings about what its residents ate hundreds of … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Antarctic cyanobacteria show no changes due to warming—yet

Posted on July 12, 2017 by Amber Dance

Captain Robert Scott’s Antarctic Discovery expedition took place over 100 years ago—and yet its participants recently racked up another contribution to science. Thanks to the samples of bacterial mats they collected from polar ponds—samples that were pressed, dried, and stored … Continue reading →

Journal Club: Analysis of bony fishes suggests convergent evolution is more prevalent than previously thought

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Jessica P. Johnson

Habitats and environmental pressures shape a variety of animal morphologies and behaviors over vast evolutionary time scales. These environmental pressures can sometimes produce nearly identical traits, even in completely unrelated lineages. This phenomenon, called convergent evolution, results in modern species that appear very similar despite … Continue reading →

Journal Club: A physicist’s take on the age-old ecological puzzle of how species form communities

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Carolyn Beans

Ecologists have long searched for the rules that govern how individual species join together to form a community. Whether forest or desert, the problem is complex. Myriad factors influence a community’s composition and stability —from how strongly species compete to … Continue reading →

Journal Club: In a first, deep sea robots get a close look at giant larvaceans, a key player in the biological carbon pump

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Gayathri Vaidyanathan

Closer inspection of the giant larvacean, seen here in an undersea video taken by a remotely operated vehicle, could reveal clues about how the deep sea sequesters carbon. Image Credit: © 2017 MBARI In the deeps off Monteray Bay, Calif., … Continue reading →