Archives: Ecology

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Million dollar question

If you had $1 million to go towards the environment, how would you spend it? I asked ~100 students in BIOL111 this question, to cap off the end of our “Ecology and the Environment” summer course. More below… The most popular answer? Education by far, with roughly 25% of all responses. Then came conservation... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Hipsters who hunt

An update on a previous post: my good friends Martin and Vanya are the official poster boys of a new movement. Collecting oyster mushrooms north of Kingston. Photo by Charlie Croskery. Read about it here, as told by Vanya’s sister-in-law, Emma Marris. It’s a great article. Charlie took the photos at the Croskery farm (more... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

A microscopic predator-prey chase

In terms of behaviour, animals have plants beat – though some would argue that plants have their own brand of intelligence. Not all photosynthesizing beasts are firmly planted, though, and many that live in the water can move. Aquatic algae, for instance, often have whip-like structures (called cilia and flagella) that they can use to... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

To save trees, major rethink is needed

When you stop to think about it, few things are weirder than a tree. Like us, they’re largish organisms made up of many cells, each with a central nucleus – but we have little else in common. Plants diverged from our early ancestors well before there was anything bigger than a single cell around.... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

You are what you feed

What makes you you? The problem of identity – and its flip-side, change – has been vexing philosophers ever since the discipline got started in ancient Greece. As early as 500 years BC, Heraclitus was musing about the ever-changing nature of a flowing river, recorded by his contemporary Plato with the enduring line, “You cannot step in... More

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Evolutionary rescue

Can evolution save us from the brink of collapse? Andy Gonzalez thinks so. Gonzalez, an ecologist from McGill University, gave an entertaining seminar to the department last Thursday on the subject. His research group works on the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss, using mathematical models and controlled experiments to investigate... More

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