Questions tagged [ecology]
The study of the spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of organisms, including causes and consequences (Scheiner, S.M. and Willig, M.R., 2008. A general theory of ecology. Theoretical Ecology, 1(1), pp.21-28. doi:10.1007/s12080-007-0002-0)
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If the environment had been in balance, how many people would there have been?
In ecological balance, I learned that the top predators consume herbivores to keep their numbers in check and ensure that there are enough grasses to support the system's entire ecology. Moreover, the ...
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Does Ramon Margalef really stated in 1972 general criteria for Shannon-Wiener index interpretation?
I work as field biologist in Chilean System of Environmental Impact Assesment. Several reports made by colleagues use Shannon-Wiener index for characterizing the richness study area, with the ...
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How does an engineered supressive Lethal (when present in 2 copies) gene drive spread through a population until causing population extinction?
I understand that at the molecular level a CRISPR mediated gene drive works by copying the altered gene (and the drive containing CAS enzyme, and guide RNA) into the other chromosome containing the ...
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How selective are wolves about the size of their prey?
For an animal that lives and hunts socially like a wolf, is there a lower threshold to the size of prey items they will hunt? A pack wouldn't have much trouble with catching say a rabbit, but would ...
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Would fewer cows mean less methane emission?
Rotting grass produces the same amount of methane as cows that digest grass (see this source). So if cows did not eat the grass, it would still emit methane. Therefore, if there were fewer cows, would ...
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Why is livestock bad for the climate?
It is always told that eating meat is bad for our climate. This is most often explained by mentioning following reasons (Source):
Methane is produced when digesting the food and also the faeces of ...
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How do I construct sample-based rarefaction curves if the area (or volume) sampled is not consistent between samples?
My apologies if a similar question has been asked previously but I cannot find an answer.
I have data from multiple zooplankton tows from different study sites and I am trying to construct sample-...
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Larval abalone devlopmental times - what does ~ °C.days or °C hr-1 mean
I'm looking a number of papers on abalone larval development and the term °C.days or °C hrs-1 keeps coming up. The numbers before these terms are much larger than they would be if this term actually ...
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Confused About Why Red Queen Hypothesis Wouldn't Apply to Deer's Color Vision [duplicate]
In this site,https://www.livescience.com/why-are-tigers-orange, it says ""But there seems to be no evolutionary pressure, particularly for deer, which are the main prey of the tiger, to ...
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Do moose usually browse woody foilage approximately perpendicular to the long axis of the branch?
I am trying to improve my understanding of moose browsing behavior. One basic question is whether browsing on woody vegetation can tell us anything about the orientation of the moose's head. The ...
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What is the difference between "ecological succession" and the term "stage of regeneration", is there a difference between them?
In ecology what is the meaning of the term "ecological succession" and the term "stage of regeneration", is there a difference between them?
Edit 1: Perhaps the term "Stage of ...
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Examples of bifurcations in real-life systems
Does period-doubling bifurcation and Neimark-Sacker bifurcation happen in real-life systems? Are there some examples? I'm particularly interested in biological host-parasitoid and predator-prey models....
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Ecology: Indices to calculate species overlap in a community?
Experimental design: I sampled the abundances of four species for each month of the year. I did this across 6 sites. I want to calculate the temporal niche overlap for all the species at each site. ...
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What could be a refuge in host-parasitoid models
I was reading about refuge effect in host-parasitoid models and I found somewhere that refuge does not have to be only a place in habitat where hosts can hide, but also some "situation" ...
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Refuge impact on growth rate
I have a question related to the refuge effect in ecological models. The assumption is that the population of hosts/prey is divided into two groups. One group consists of individuals that are safe ...
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Ecosystem Control Theory
I've used EcoNet online tool to analyze an ecosystem. You can run the default model by pressing "run model" in order to follow my question.
Among the extended results there are 2 'Control ...
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Do cheetahs compete with lions?
Do cheetahs compete with lions for the same prey?
A quick Google search says the answer is no:
Lions hunt big animals such as buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, and zebra. What prey do cheetahs hunt? ...
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What unmanned monitoring techniques are available to measure coral reef health?
Most biological data for coral reef monitoring are collected by human observers. This could be resource-intensive for long-term studies and thus hard to maintain consistency on large spatial scale. ...
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Ecology of the environment for the ruffed grouse
I live in a coastal New England town and while reading a local history I noticed frequent mention of the "partridge" as being a commonplace bird in the area. Now, however, this bird which is ...
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Why does the ecosystem of my house seem inverted?
My understanding of a typical ecosystem is that it is like a pyramid, with the mass of prey at the base and the apex predators at the peak.
However, the arthropod ecosystem in my house seems to be the ...
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Should soundscape ecology be a component of STEM education? [closed]
I'd like to see soundscape ecology be included in STEM education. I realize there is so much to teach and so little time, but think that primary and secondary students would be highly motivated and ...
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How long does an Audiomoth acoustic logger record for?
I'm wanting to record bat echolocation calls using an Audiomoth recorder. However, I can't find out anywhere how long these recorders can record for on a full charge.
What is the longest duration ...
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Has anyone seen/read interspecies competition that is different at spatial scale for the same group of animals?
I work at a highly fragmented wildlife sanctuary in North Borneo, Malaysia. We have 8 species of hornbills here and from our observation they've grown to be less territorial in terms of where they ...
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Can we infer the orientation of a moose's head from the teeth patterns on tree trunks?
Background
I am interested in studying the distribution and patterns of behaviour of moose (Alces alces).
Moose chew bark off of the trunks of trees, especially Populus tremuloides. See some of the ...
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Are animal whiskers a useful monitoring tool?
I have come across studies that have used stable isotope values from seal/sea lion whiskers to infer foraging ecology. However, I am also aware that whiskers can fall off and then grow back. Is there ...
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Temporal space-use modeling - How can I quantify temporal variation into a single value without losing magnitude?
For my ecological research on the impacts of intensity of space-use on vegetation structure I need to quantify temporal variation in the intensity of space-use across years (resulting in a single ...
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Which anaerobic environments would exist without aerobic life?
All of the anaerobic environments I can think of are that way because a layer of aerobic life above them separates them from oxygen. If the aerobic life were removed, the anaerobic compartment would ...
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How does genetic feedback shape the evolution of whole ecosystems?
While looking into the organization of ecosystems and how evolution shapes it, I've been reading "Ecology" (1975) by Eugene Odum. In chapter 6, p. 167, Odum speaks about the mutualistic ...
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How do I explain "effective number of types" to a lay audience?
I know how to calculate effective number of types. I can't figure out how to explain it to an audience that has no ecology training or background. Suppose one has 12 (for example) groups, each with a ...
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Where to find morphometric data for fish?
I need data regarding the aspect ratio for caudal fins of different Elasmobranchii. It should be some easily retrievable information but apparently fishbase doesn't have this type of data for many ...
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Abilities used to survive against natural enemies: directional selection or frequency-dependent selection?
Regarding abilities used to survive predators and parasites, are they subjected more to directional selection or frequency-dependent selection?
It's usually that host-parasite coevolution is ...
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What does genetic diversity in one species have to do with survival rate when an epidemic spreads?
I was studying about genes, and soon remembered that the more diverse the genetics of one species, the less the chance of the species to go extinct from natural disaster.
One instance was an epidemic ...
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Can SARS-COV2 strain competition be modelled by inter-species lotka volterra equations?
Currently studying infectious diseases epidemiology and never studied ecology. But I was wondering if the interspecies Lotka Volterra equations could model and explain strain dominance.
r = could be ...
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Population numbers in the presence of restricted resources
I wonder if the following simple system is considered in population dynamics, under which name, and in which textbooks.
Consider a population $X$ (also indicating its number of individuals) with a ...
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What is harvest mortality and how is it calculated?
My background is not in biology, however for the work I'm currently doing, I am reading some papers in ecology and the term "harvest mortality" appears. I could not find the meaning of this ...
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the effect of aquatic photoautotrophs on CO2 concentration in the air
The CO2 concentration in the air is more strongly influenced by the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere. A given explanation is that the northern hemisphere contains more terrestrial ...
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Is there a way to use presence-absence data to inform a sampling design for a more specific survey?
I am currently in the process of designing a spatial survey to assess the abundance/density of woody debris across an ecosystem with multiple defined habitats (i.e. I am interested in not only the ...
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Does surface to volume ratio matter for cold-blooded species with regards to temperature?
While surface grows quadratically with scale, volume growth is cubic. Temperature exchange (gain and loss) of animals is mostly dependant on surface area (the more area, the faster) whereas heat ...
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does more biomass mean more energy?
I am a high school student and I am very confused about ecological pyramids. My textbook states that the biomass of zooplankton in an aquatic ecosystem is more than that of phytoplankton (I don't know ...
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Apply Shannon-Weiner index to evaluate single-cell sample balance?
I would like to identify single-cell clusters where each sample is evenly represented in it. Is it OK to calculate the Shannon-Weiner index from the sample counting data of each cluster? I am worrying ...
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What is the effect of an acidic solution on hydrolytic enzymes?
I'm working on a school research project and my research question is "What is the effect of increasing concentrations of Acid X on hydrolytic enzymes, measured through the loss of mass of leaf ...
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Is there an published method for removing the effect of isolation by distance from genetic distances?
Isolation by distance is the phenomena that (even partial) reproductive isolation due to geographical distance between reproductive populations will result in greater genetic distance between those ...
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Have orcas ever been observed to be eaten by another species?
Orcas are well known to prey on just about everything that lives in the ocean, even including great white sharks. Yet in a lot of cases I know that the food chain is not unidirectional, there are many ...
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Which trophic level has the highest population in a food chain?
The basic trophic levels in any food chain are the producers, the consumers and the decomposers. Most of the websites I've searched say they are the decomposers. But shouldn't it be the producers? In ...
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How to convert system of equations with explicit substrate consumption into an implicit one?
I have a description of competition between two bacteria that is described by the system of equations:
S = substrate, μ = bacterial division rate, K = half saturation constant, y = yield (cells per ...
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Why did ALL dinosaurs go extinct?
Why did all dinosaurs, rather than just some of them, go extinct during the K-T extinction event? Birds are an exception, but being able to fly, they are also a very special kind of creature, and ...
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Apportionment models, niche theory, neutral theory
I am trying to understand the relation between apportionment models, niche theory, and neutral theory of biodiversity. Wikipedia seems to suggest that the first two are the same thing, whereas the ...
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Sediment Size and Mayfly (Explanation + Literature)
I am doing investigation into association of sediment size with the movement of mayfly nymphs in a choice chamber, sampling the organisms from a stream. I will be doing a chi square test to determine ...
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Co-culture models of bacterial invasion: where to find them?
I am interested in models showing how pathogenic bacteria (namely Escherichia coli O157) can overcome commensal species (thus, causing a disease). This is a basic concept in biology but I can't find a ...
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How can I learn botany/plant ID by myself?
I am interested in sources and methods regarding botany and plant ID, and being a self-taught person. Textbooks, sites etc.
Thank you all in advance!
