| (no subject) |
[Apr. 24th, 2009|12:02 pm] |
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I'm getting the feeling that the majority of the friends I had here are no longer about... |
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| 1 tide, 2 tide, red tide, blue tide |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|03:00 pm] |
ECOLOGY: All Washed Up Caroline AshToxic algal blooms, or red tides, caused by dinoflagellates pose a danger for humans and many other vertebrates. In November 2007, a late red tide of Akashiwo sanguinea in Monterey Bay caused a mass stranding and high mortality of winter visiting seabirds. Jessup et al. report that the birds' plumage had become coated in a sticky green froth exuded from the algae that contained surfactant mycosporinelike amino acids, which acted like a detergent to strip the feathers of their natural waterproofing oils. Consequently, the soaking birds, already weakened from migration, became hypothermic, and many died. If the surviving birds were cleaned as if they had been caught in an oil spill, then most made a full recovery. The algae seemed to have no other toxic activity, although inhaling aerosolized green scum apparently caused lung pathology. With the major shifts currently affecting the marine environment that are favoring other types of red tides, this kind of algal hazard is likely to become a more widespread occurrence. -- CA PLoS ONE 4, e4550 (2009). |
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| Vernal Equinox |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|11:09 am] |
for those of you who think I live in sunny san diego... it is god damn cloudy today. |
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| some like it hot |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|01:33 pm] |
PHYSIOLOGY: Mad Dogs and Englishmen Andrew M. SugdenIt is well established that organisms respond to climate change by adapting, by shifting their geographic distribution, or--in the unluckier cases--by becoming extinct. Most models of responses to climate change focus on changes in distribution, usually based on "climatic envelope" concepts: that is, the range of climatic conditions that a species can endure. For cold-blooded animals such as reptiles and insects, a missing element from such models has been the ability of these organisms to regulate their body temperature by behavioral means, such as not going out in the midday sun, which has the potential to buffer their geographic response to changing climate. By including such thermoregulatory behavior in biophysical models of temperature responses of Australian ectotherms, Kearney et al. show that the challenge for many such species in a warming world will be to stay cool. If moving with the climate is not an option, which it will not be for many tropical organisms, survival will depend on factors such as the availability of shade and the ability of ectotherm species to alter their seasonal or daily patterns of activity. -- AMS Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106, 10.1073/pnas.0808913106 (2009). |
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