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

Jérôme Chave
  • 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

Inês Carvalho
  • 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

Giulia Ghedini
  • 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.