Introduction
- Ernest Haeckel (1866): The study of the home life of organisms.
- Charles Krebs (1972): The scientific study of interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms.
On the inequality of species
- What do we conserve? …the abundant, the pretty, or the rare?
- Bird Count website: https://birdcount.in/ .
- We can measure relative trends between the different birds species. But how can we measure a composite trends in abundance?
Global Living Planet Index
- 1979: Index value = 1.
- By 2016, there has been a 68% reduction in the index value.
- The LPI quantifies the change in numbers of individuals in a seleted subset of animal populations.
- The LPI includes 20,811 populations and 4,392 species.
Trends:
- About half of the population sizes are increasing, the other half are decreasing.
- However thise populations that are decreasing are decreasing faster.
Elinor Ostrom’s Theory
- Beyond the individualism/communism opposition, real-life social system.
Neutral Theory
RA Fisher’s paper on the power law for distribution of species.
In statistics, it is assumed that all the species ‘behave’ similarly.
Ecology and Conservation of Cetaceans
- Cetaceans: Marine animals, big, whales, dolphins, etc.
- The size of Cetacea is 92 species.
- Oxygen: They use their stored supply of oxygen for breathing below water. In these family, breathing is a concious so the animal is always awake. They decide when and if they should breathe.
- Data recorded to study them:
- Photo-identification
- Filming (surface, underwater, aerial)
- Acoustic register
- Tags - recording devices (TDR; satellite, crittercam)
- Remote sampling - Biological samples - using a crossbow and sometimes drones:
- Genetics/Genomics
- Chemicals (Contaminants, stable isotopes, hormones)
- Biological (microbes and bacteria, prey)
- The data provides information about:
- Individual and sex determination
- Genetic diversity
- Population structure
- …TODO
- Bottlenose dolphin is one of the most common species in mainland Portugal - is estimated ~6500 individuals on our coast.
Metabolic ecology — how we can use metabolism to study the functioning of biological communities
- Metabolic Thoery of Ecology (Brown et al. 2004).
- Use chemostats for analysis.
- DAPI binds to DNA, and can be used to distinguish dead cells. As it only enters the cells when the cell wall is damaged.
Summary
- Species interactions alter how organisms use energy.
- Density-dependent energy use can drive patterns at larger scales.
- Populations and communities are not simply the sum of their parts.