tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66877294650369966662009-02-21T02:02:35.622-08:00aquabloggershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13567237393225370713noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6687729465036996666.post-51768914036487568352007-01-14T16:53:00.000-08:002007-01-14T17:02:15.584-08:00Ever since I was a grad school young’un, I’ve been interested in the extent to which theories from classical ecology, which mostly seem to have been developed from observations of clams and trees and other big living things I know nothing about, can be extended to microbial ecology. Now, I should make clear that I also know very little about microbial ecology – I’m a DOC chemist, basically – and this interest is not strong enough to drive me to do something extreme, like trying to get a PhD by studying it. It is not even the sort of interest that would make me wish I was studying it full time, even as I actually study something much safer for my PhD work. No, this is the sort of interest that I think about occasionally while I’m eating Doritos, before I get distracted by something more <http://www.goheels.com/> interesting <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/> .<br /> <br />With that made clear, check out this paper (Van der gast et al 2005, environmental microbiology 7(8) 1220 - 1226, email us for the pdf), which tests the species-area relationship in a new system. The species-area relationship, as you’ll remember, posits that the species richness of an island (or other discrete area) is related to its area, by s=cA^z, where s is species richness, c is a species-specific scaling parameter, A is island area, and z is a constant that turns out to be fairly stable across taxa and location. <br /> <br />The neat thing about this paper is that they organisms they looked at were bacteria, and the “islands” were reservoirs of lubricant for different machines in a machine shop at Oxford University. The fluid reservoirs vary from 9-180 liters, and species diversity was measured by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (reservoir volume was used instead of area). Niftily, not only did the relationship hold, but z was around 0.25, right in the middle of the typical range for parrots and bugs and whatnot on real islands.<br /> <br />I think there might be some bigger implications to this paper – for one thing, the species-area relationship implies the possibility of local extinctions, which are not usually thought to be likely for bactera – but mainly I like it because the authors saw lubricant reservoirs, and thought about islands.<br /> <br />Cheers,<br />Drew<br /><br />An addendum: <br /><br />Cell density in the lubricant reservoirs was typically 10^10 cells per liter, or one hundred billion to 1 trillion “individuals” per reservoir. That seems like a pretty big number to me – in classical studies of the species-area hypothesis, were there anywhere near this many individuals per island? I discount social insects, by the way, since they reproduce as a unit and can’t function individually. What do you think?<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6687729465036996666-5176891403648756835?l=aquabloggers.blogspot.com'/></div>aquabloggershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13567237393225370713noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6687729465036996666.post-5191154469344496112007-01-14T15:31:00.000-08:002007-01-14T15:32:20.073-08:00A few years back, Mary was taking a class in evolutionary biology. One of the lectures was about large mammals that evolved quickly after the K-T extinction event, which killed off the dinosaurs. The point of the lecture was that when an ecological niche suddenly becomes vacant, other organisms can quickly evolve to fill it. One example was some sort of hamster-like mammal which was considerably larger than any modern rodent.<br /><br />Drew heard about this third-hand, and got the idea that there was an ancient species of house-sized hamsters, which were twenty feet tall with legs bigger than tree trunks. This was the most exciting thing he had heard about all week. The class of giant, mostly non-existent creatures became known as “giant pig-dogs”, and we both stayed on the lookout for more example of huge animals which used to exist and didn’t seem quite possible (insert examples, for instance to the terrorbirds).<br /><br />The point of this was that it was science, but it was also fun. I think most people want to become scientists because it shows us things that are outside of our everyday experience, which are provably real but don’t seem like they could be. In the everyday experience of being a scientist, however, it is easy to get bored. A project typically lasts several years or more from inception to completion, but I find that the exciting phase, when the project seems new and different and full of possibilities, is often over pretty quickly. It is hard to sense of wonder and eagerness that is the best part of doing science.<br /><br />The goal of this blog is to have a conversation about things that seem exciting, new, and different. We’re both ocean scientists, from pretty different backgrounds: Mary studies marine ecology; Drew studies the chemistry of organic matter in the ocean, so we’ll keep things more or less focused on the ocean. This blog will be our forum (with contributions from like-minded folk) to maintain that excitement.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6687729465036996666-519115446934449611?l=aquabloggers.blogspot.com'/></div>aquabloggershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13567237393225370713noreply@blogger.com0