Abstract(s)
By Alice M. Hotopp, Bailey P. McLaughlin, Hannah N. Mittelstaedt, Melanie B. Prentice
Scientific writing aims to stand objectively – to distance the ecologist from the ecology. Here we begin with, and then break from, the standard format of a scientific Abstract (the brief summary of a research paper). As students and practitioners of ecology, we shed the norms of scientific writing to more expansively explore what our research teaches us about connections between the natural world and ourselves.
Microscopic
Microorganism communities can shape host phenotype evolution but are often comprised of thousands of taxa with varied impacts on hosts. Identification of taxa influencing host evolution relies on first describing the wondrous diversity of the microbial world. Relies on first understanding that bodies – our bodies – are ecosystems. That our skin, hair, teeth, fingernails, belly buttons, and eyelashes are habitats, niches, and homes. That we are bacteria dividing and dying and metabolizing and colonizing and growing. That we are generations and cycles and revolutions of life and death. That we too, to some distant eye, are microscopic.
-A. M. Hotopp
Deeper Shallows
The opalescent nudibranch (Hermissenda crassicornis) is a small gastropod found within the temperate intertidal zone along the West Coast of North America. Like all sea slugs in their clade, they possess finger-like projections along their backs, called cerata, used for respiration. They are neither rare nor readily abundant throughout their range. Unassumingly roving the shallows. Yet, within this temperate climate they are a flash of color. Blue and orange racing stripes run down their bodies otherwise covered in a blaze of orange flames. A delegate from the tropics. Or so it seems. Indeed, these vibrant creatures thrive in these cold waters. Beneath a dock, in rock pools, peeking out during low tide. To the observer keen enough to notice, they are harmless, delicate, luminous beauties. Yet they protect themselves fiercely. They sequester nematocysts, stinging cells, from their anemone prey and save them in their Day-Glo appendages for later use. Deploying their defense when threatened by a predator. Or when scooped from their habitat by a professor. Or when placed in a petri dish, and peered at through a microscope. Or when affronted by a student who is convinced they were mail-ordered from a warm coral reef for lab-demonstration purposes. Not plucked from the icy waters she’s visited her whole life, never knowing such alien beauty was waiting to be noticed. She is transfixed and will be from this point on. Keeping her eyes peeled at every low tide, searching every steel gray tidepool for these fiery slugs now that she knows what she’s looking for.
-H. N. Mittelstaedt
Flight
The size, shape, and coloration of a single feather can reflect the many selection pressures experienced by birds. For example, body contour feathers, the non-flight feathers that cover bird bodies, serve diverse functions, including waterproofing, protection from UV radiation, microbial defense, thermoregulation, sexual signaling, camouflage, communication, and inspiring awe. Have you ever looked at a feather? I mean, really looked at a feather? Did you gasp at its exponential branching? At its screams of color and pattern? At how it felt like a soft breeze on your skin? Imagine your body enveloped in its own feathered cloak. Sleek, shining in the sunlight. Would it feel like flying, to grow something so beautiful?
–A. M. Hotopp
Boundary
Meta-ecosystem theory describes how the transfer of material subsidies across ecosystem boundaries affects ecosystem processes and food webs. At the land-sea interface, seaweed acts as a conduit, carrying the nutrients of the ocean upland to the starving beach and well-sated saltmarsh. A host of insects, crustaceans, worms, and creepy crawlies rejoice in these deposits as lifegiving manna in one location, and an embarrassment of riches in the other. Yet are these differences and boundaries so stark? Beach, marsh, seaweed bed, either awash in seawater or sunbaked in alteration. Nutrients swirl between, through, in, out, beyond. A bird may pluck a snack from each. Yet the sparrow nests only in the lush grasses of the marsh, the amphipods hop more abundantly between sand and stranded seaweed in the other. The researcher takes samples of oozing, putrid piles of seaweed from each. Taking her measurements, swatting mosquitoes. Asking herself how such a tidy theory led her to wonder about which ecosystem welcomes this mess of half-rotten, storm-cast seaweed more. Asking how a circuitous idea showed her the simple truth. How waves move across ecosystem boundaries that were never there at all.
-H. N. Mittelstaedt
Some Like it Hot
Describing the role of climate as a biogeographic control on species’ distributions has a long history in the ecological literature and is particularly relevant for accurately defining a species’ ecological niche. As it turns out (and as I’m sure you can relate, reader), finding your niche isn’t always easy. Imagine trying to find someone, or something, else’s. For this, we ecologists should, I suppose, be grateful. The endeavor keeps us employed. A man named Hutchinson had a hunch-inson about how the ecological niche might be structured, in two parts. For a given species, a maple tree for example, the realized ecological niche represents those climate conditions in which the species can and does survive. The fundamental ecological niche, on the other hand, represents those climate conditions in which the species could survive but which are not actively experienced by that species because of dispersal barriers or interactions with competitors or predators that limit its distribution. The realized niche is readily knowable. The fundamental niche is not, usually. And yet, the fundamental niche is, *eh-hem*, fundamental to understanding the breadth of conditions that a species can truly tolerate. As we look towards a future of global change and warming, this becomes essential. Some like it hot. Surely. But probably not too hot. And deciphering what exactly “too hot” is, is what might safeguard species.
-B. P. McLaughlin
Waste
In the past decade, sea star wasting disease (SSWD) has been responsible for the loss of billions of sea stars across 20 species, primarily along the Pacific Coast of North America. The result has been trophic cascades and the loss of ecosystems supporting diverse marine communities. While we increasingly understand its impacts, we forget our role, our contributions, ourselves. You see, we came to this place, and we changed it. Not you or me, but us. We dumped, drained, dug, spilled and took. Man, we took a lot. Man took a lot. We left and returned, at our own convenience, and how perfectly convenient it was. But we never returned empty-handed. We brought back some of our favorite things: oil, gas, minerals, and let them spill across the surface. And in return, dropped the toys we’d tired of down to the depths – Beanie Babies, BlackBerries, bottles of Banana Boat and Bud Light. Let that sink in. We brought others too. Some just tiny passengers, pathogens. Hitchhikers we picked up at another time and place. Out of sight, out of mind. We left them behind to take up residence in a space they don’t belong. And now it’s sick: a feverish, acidic, watery brine. Its inhabitants wasting away, while we waste time, wondering just how things could have turned out this way.
-M. B. Prentice
Trees as They Walk Through Time
North American tree species have shifted the position of their geographic ranges an average of 50 km over recent decades. These observed shifts occur in all cardinal directions, failing to conform to conventional expectations of uniform poleward-moving migrations, thought to be instigated by a warming world. We know this because we observe juvenile trees moving away from their parents, the adults. Peering through their young branches, a picture of tomorrow comes into focus. Those that have not conceded to the future, seed the future. Adults encourage their offspring to march on, march along. Through the fruits of their labor. Freed from the flesh, seeds float through the air, glide through the water, sail through the gut of an animal. Land. On the land. In a place of permanence. With conditions they can tolerate. This is how a stationary species migrates, as a new generation. A collective that will grow. A future unfolding. The trees, they’ve done this before. When the world changed then. We’ve found clues of their footsteps past. Microscopic, clandestine clues. Pollen pressed into the sediment, they show us where they’ve been. Granules sealed underground, buried in the muck, compressed by the weight of the world. They wait for the world. To warm, or cool. It’s hard to say. Conditioned on conditions that we’re still trying to work out. Yet, somehow, it’s maybe already too late. For some. For others, they’ll maybe run, flourish across the landscape. We’re not sure, but the trees will tell us, show us, in time. And we can retrace. Because of the clues they’ve left us, about how they’ve walked. About where they’ve been, about where they might be going next.
-B. P. McLaughlin
Practice
The introduction of the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) to North America has led to agricultural damage, the spread of infectious disease, and impacts to native cavity-nesting birds. European starlings, named one of the “100 World’s Worst” invasive species, are who I will practice loving today. To practice loving starlings, there are things I need to relearn. Fascination with iridescence. Close attention to soft warbling. Enchantment with murmuration. There are things I need to unlearn. Non-native. Invasive. Pest. The boxes separating those deserving to live from those deserving to die. I am learning to ask who is non-native and who is invasive, the starlings, or those who released them? I am learning to ask what else were the birds to do when uncaged that day in 1890, but take flight over Central Park? What else but survive and flock together, shine like stars? Today, as I practice loving starlings, there are things I am relearning. Things I am unlearning.
-A. M. Hotopp