Invasion Ecology and Management Politics: Important Lessons From A Poorly Received Paper
Mark Davis and several of his colleagues wrote a comment in Nature this month which caught my eye, not because it is a new argument, but because it’s an old argument that drives ecologists and conservation biologists up the wall. The piece, titled “Don’t Judge Species On Their Origins,” argues that we should judge species … Read more
Do You Manage Your Invasives With That Model?
Once a species has invaded, it’s hard to make it disappear again. Therefore, researchers and managers are always looking for ways to manage without micromanaging: they look for patterns in the growth or spread of species that might indicate a threshold of manageability. A well-known case here in Hawaii is the introduction of decorator urchins … Read more
Alien Babies: To’au in He’eia Mangroves
While I was seining with the LAIP interns this past summer, we came across some interesting fish living near the mangroves. While some of the fish and nearly all the invertebrates we’ve seen are species that may spend their entire lives in the pond (the half-spotted goby, for example, or Podopthalmus vigil, the Hawai’ian swimming crab), … Read more
Back To Bacteria: A “Big, Rotten Loofah”
More on the mangrove story: This Tuesday we took sediment cores from two areas where mangrove overstory (prop roots and trunks) were cut down in 2007 and 2008. In these areas, dead stumps still stick out of the mud, and a thick, fibrous root mat stabilizes the sediments. Even though the overstory was removed four … Read more
What’s In A Sponge?
This weekend we found a sort of sponge raft drifting along the bottom of the pond. Composed of Gracilaria and the orange sponge Mycale sp., the piece was weighed down with sediment and tiny organisms living inside. The contents included two brittle stars, several polychaete worms, a few amphipods, and some mysterious organism (pictured below). Whether the sponge … Read more
