The ecology of the future and the future of ecology

 

Researchers working with underrepresented groups to study the ecological impact of climate change and to craft citizen science tools, aim to explore pressing scientific questions while recruiting a new generation of ecology researchers Shaliek Morgan, an REU student from Shaw University, checks on an ant colony. Credit and Larger Version July 17, 2015 Biologists in North Carolina are trying to get a glimpse of the future through a project designed to shed light on how rising temperatures will affect the insects and microbial life that play critical roles in the environment. But the researchers are also hoping to shape the future, working with college students from underrepresented groups and designing citizen science tools to give middle-school students everywhere the chance to be involved in scientific discovery. The research revolves around a patch of forest in North Carolina. Scattered among the trees are a dozen rooms with neither roofs nor floors. Ringed with plastic ductwork that pumps warm air, these "warming chambers" allow the researchers to manipulate the temperature of small sections of forest. And for the past five years, with support from National Science Foundation's (NSF) Dimensions of Biodiversity program, researchers have been studying those patches of forest to see how life has responded to slight increases in temperature. The goal of the study was to get insights into how forest ecosystems will change as a result of global climate change. And in 2014, the researchers took on a new goal: to help shape the future of ecology research itself. Rob Dunn, a professor at North Carolina (NC) State University and primary investigator on the project, worked with two postdoctoral researchers in his lab to get a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant from NSF. NC State undergraduates were already involved in the warming chambers research project, but the REU was designed to be a collaboration between NC State and Shaw University--a historically black university in Raleigh, N.C.--for the express purpose of engaging African-American undergrads in ecological research. The funding, which supplemented the original biodiversity grant, allowed the NC State research team to support two Shaw undergraduates to do fieldwork on the warming chambers project during the summer of 2014. The REU focused on a specific research question: what impact do warming temperatures have on ant immune function? The goal was to determine how insect-disease interactions may change as a result of climate change. "We found that behavioral aspects of immunity in ants did change in warmer environments," says Mary Jane Epps, one of the postdoctoral researchers in Dunn's lab who collaborated on the REU. "For example, we found that ants spent more time grooming themselves and each other at higher temperatures. There are two papers coming out of that 2014 REU, and each of the students will be a co-author on one of them." But the results of that REU extend beyond the scientific findings. "One of the reasons I pursued this REU is because African Americans are not well represented in the field of ecology--which is ironic, since it's a field that studies diversity," says DeAnna Beasley, another of the Dunn's postdocs who collaborated on the REU. "Many students have a very narrow view of what science is; they think it's something you only do in a laboratory," Beasley says. "We were able to expose these students to wildlife ecology, and now one of them is considering graduate studies in ecology--based on his experiences with us and with Eric Butler, his mentor at Shaw." The project was so successful that Dunn, Beasley and Epps were awarded a new REU for 2015, this time focusing on how insect pathogens respond to warmer temperatures. Specifically, the researchers are evaluating soil samples from the warming chambers to determine the presence and prevalence of fungal pathogens that attack insects and how that prevalence changes based on environmental temperatures. "One Shaw student from 2014 returned this summer, and we're working with a new Shaw student as well," Epps says. The researchers also plan to extend the REU project into the fall semester so that another Shaw student can be involved. "It's important to note that these projects are not only about giving students from underrepresented groups a chance to get hands-on experience, or to get them excited about science. These projects are also about addressing significant questions about our environment." "And we expect to get another paper out of this summer's work," Beasley says. In addition, Beasley, Dunn and the Shaw students will be working with three middle school teachers who are part of NC State's Kenan Fellows Program to use the insect pathogens project as the basis for new teaching tools. The teachers are working with Beasley and the Shaw students in field and lab research looking at ant immunity and insect pathogens at both urban and forest sites. Based on this experience, the teachers will develop a project-based science lesson plan to engage middle school students in authentic scientific research. "We'll work together throughout the school year to refine the curriculum, and next summer the teachers will teach the new lesson plan to 40 teachers at a professional development workshop hosted by NC State's Friday Institute for Educational Innovation," Beasley says. This work, which is funded by a grant from NSF's Division of Research on Learning, will allow middle school teachers and students anywhere in the country (or abroad) to collect and analyze soil samples for pathogens that harm insects. Ultimately, the goal is for those middle school classrooms to plug their findings into a national database that can track the diversity of pathogens in different environments. "This project is not only creating opportunities for the undergrads at Shaw, but giving middle school students everywhere the chance to be part of a meaningful scientific inquiry," Beasley says. "We're talking about contributing to our understanding of the world around us, and hopefully inspiring future scientists while we're at it." Research Experiences for Undergraduates projects take place each summer at universities around the country. Students interested in learning more about the program can find information on the REU website. Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University Maria C. Zacharias, (703) 292-8454 mzachari@nsf.gov Investigators Robert Dunn Julie Urban Jenifer Corn Angela Duncan Ashlie Thompson Margaret Lowman Related Institutions/Organizations North Carolina State University Locations Raleigh , North Carolina Related Programs Math and Science Partnerships Dimensions of Biodiversity Related Awards #1319293 Students Discover: Improving Middle School STEM Outcomes through Scaling Citizen Science Projects #1136717 Dimensions: Collaborative: The climate cascade: functional and evolutionary consequences of climatic change on species, trait, and genetic diversity in a temperate ant community Years Research Conducted 2011 - 2018 Total Grants $4,850,691 Related Websites Rob Dunn Lab: http://robdunnlab.com/ Warming Chambers page: http://robdunnlab.com/projects/warming-chambers/ NC State feature on warming chambers work: https://news.ncsu.edu/2015/06/warming-chambers-2015/ source : National Science Foundation – www.nsf.gov

Climate change and the ecology of fear

 

June 27, 2014

Northeastern University College of Science

Climate change is predicted to have major impacts on the many species that call our rocky shorelines home. Indeed, species living in these intertidal habitats, which spend half their day exposed to air and the other half submerged by water, may be subjected to a double whammy as both air and water temperatures rise. Given the reliance of human society on nearshore coastal ecosystems, it is critical that we better understand how climate change will affect them.

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A state-​​of-​​the-​​art heating and cooling system holds the water and air tem­per­a­ture in Trussell’s exper­i­mental habi­tats at exactly 2.5 degrees Cel­sius above the cur­rent tem­per­a­tures in Nahant bay.

Fear isn't just a human emotion -- it's also a pow­erful eco­log­ical phe­nom­enon. Geoff Trussell, pro­fessor and director of Northeastern's Marine Sci­ence Center in Nahant, Mass­a­chu­setts, has been studying the ecology of fear since he first came to the uni­ver­sity back in 2002.

He's dis­cov­ered some sur­prising things: When prey living in the inter­tidal zone sense a predator nearby, they are much less effi­cient at con­verting energy into growth. They pro­duce so much ner­vous energy in the form of ele­vated metab­o­lism, stress hor­mones, heat-​​shock pro­teins, and antiox­i­dant enzymes that there isn't a lot left over to build new tissues.

Trussell, who is chair of the Depart­ment of Marine and Envi­ron­mental Sci­ences, believes this fact can be a crit­ical driver for deter­mining how an overall ecosystem will fare. Resources and predator abun­dance will always fluc­tuate, but it's how the middle species deal with those fluc­tu­a­tions that deter­mines the way the whole system will respond. As he explained, "It's that species in the middle that have to trade off their need to feed with the risk of being eaten by a predator that's ulti­mately going to shape how the system behaves."

But there's one thing that's been missing from this cal­culus: the role of cli­mate change. Some studies have exam­ined how cli­mate change inter­acts with fear, Trussell said, but most of them haven't been very real­istic. The problem, he explained, is that they all imagine a con­stantly ele­vated tem­per­a­ture based on cli­mate change pro­jec­tions put forth by the Inter­gov­ern­mental Panel on Cli­mate Change. They don't account for nat­ural cli­mate vari­a­tion seen on a local scale.

"If you bake any­thing under a high tem­per­a­ture all the time, you're going to get an impact," Trussell said. So in new research pub­lished in the journal Global Change Biology, Trussell and his team took a dif­ferent approach. The researchers built a state-​​of-​​the-​​art system that allows them to con­stantly adjust the water and air tem­per­a­tures in their exper­i­mental habi­tats, holding them 2.5 degrees Cel­sius above actual tem­per­a­ture that is con­tin­u­ously mea­sured in Nahant.

The con­ser­v­a­tive nature of their approach makes their striking results even more sig­nif­i­cant, Trussell said. They found that when a prey species, in this case a snail called Nucella Lapillus, sensed the chem­ical cues of a predator, the inva­sive green crab, it ate fewer mus­sels and thus as expected expe­ri­enced less growth.

But when the team intro­duced the warming sce­nario, that effect was even more pro­nounced. Despite eating just as many mus­sels as in the non-​​warming sce­nario, the snails actu­ally lost weight under the warming conditions.

"You've got these ani­mals that are already burning a lot of energy because they're wor­ried about get­ting eaten," Trussell explained. "And then you throw on top of that the stress that's imposed by tem­per­a­ture increases and even­tu­ally what you end up seeing is that the ani­mals struggle to make a living."

The com­bined effects of pre­da­tion risk and warming seem to create even bigger chal­lenges for these middle species, which Trussell believes are inte­gral to the overall health of an ecosystem. The results, he said, sug­gest that the impacts of cli­mate change may be most sig­nif­i­cant in areas where the fear of being eaten is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant to com­mu­nity dynamics.

"Very rarely are species out there in iso­la­tion just dealing with tem­per­a­ture and its poten­tial increases. They're inter­acting with other species as well and all the chal­lenges that they present, Trussell said. "So looking at how cli­mate is impacting these inter­acting species is what we really need to do if we're going to under­stand the eco­log­ical con­se­quences of cli­mate change.