Dr. Edward O. Wilson discusses the relationship between humanity and life, and his experience in biodiversity studies, arguing that we are at an important crux for the environment. Wilson advises students, teachers and parents on the ground-breaking fields of biology for the future and how they can learn from the biosphere and save it.

Dr. Edward O. Wilson discusses the relationship between humanity and life, and his experience in biodiversity studies, arguing that we are at an important crux for the environment. Wilson advises students, teachers and parents on the ground-breaking fields of biology for the future and how they can learn from the biosphere and save it.

Mobile Bay, Alabama, has served as an introduction site for several invasive species, including the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. Here we present evidence for the introduction of an exotic red alga, Grateloupia taiwanensis S.-M.Lin and H.-Y. Liang, to Mobile Bay, using the rbcL genetic marker to assist in identification as well as phylogenetic analysis. We have also sequenced the plastid and mitochondrial genomes of this alga.

The Arctic is undergoing rapid change with temperatures rising at rates twice the global average. Significant climate-induced changes to Arctic freshwater ecosystems have already been documented, and nutrient availability is predicted to increase in these systems. Unfortunately, the consequences of these changes for the future of freshwater biota are largely unknown. Thorough inventories are necessary to provide benchmarks allowing for the detection of biotic responses to a changing climate,...

For the first time in the history of evolutionary biology, naturalists and comparative biologists have access to the genome – the complete catalog of genes and regulatory structures – of an increasing number of species. At the same time, through online databases and specimen catalogs, scientists are gaining increasing access to a variety of ecological, morphological, and behavioral traits of large numbers of species across the Tree of Life. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to...

Canopy access has revolutionized our knowledge of biodiversity, photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, phenology, ecophysiology, herbivory, and ecosystem services — to name just a few. In this lecture of the Edward O. Biodiversity Symposium, Meg Lowman discusses her experiences with the first long-term ecological research conducted in the tropical rain forest canopies of Australia that addressed hypotheses on insect-plant interactions using SRT (single rope techniques) and canopy walkways.

Biological diversity is the result of the interface of ecology and evolution, where the ecological factors that affect a species translate into issues of natural selection, extinction, and speciation. In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists began to truly appreciate that evolutionary change in natural populations can occur very rapidly, quickly enough to be seen in a human lifetime, even during a typical grant cycle. This synthesis has important implications not only for our...

Alabama is one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in North America, especially because it is the largest suture zone hotspot for amphibians. Suture zones are regions where sister species and phylogeographic lineages come into contact. As such they represent areas that have either generated biodiversity through repeated speciation across multiple groups or are areas where secondary contact has occurred for multiple species. Combining ecological and genetic analyses of the health of...

Natural resource conservation has a history of thousands of years, but the protection of biodiversity as such is of recent vintage. In this talk, Sarkar explores how “biodiversity” should be defined, and whether biodiversity conservation is necessarily in conflict with other environmental values. Biodiversity conservation, he explains, must be accompanied by many other goals of “nature protection” including that of charismatic and other culturally important taxa.

There are two standard views about biodiversity. First, it encompasses all kinds of diversity at all levels of life’s organization. Second, biodiversity has value and should therefore be conserved across its full range. These views together present some challenges that require reconsideration of how we conceive biodiversity. It is not clear, for instance, that a single descriptive concept of biodiversity will be adequate. Alternatives include a value-laden normativism and several kinds of...

Evolution of RNA viruses occurs according to their high mutation rates that generate complex genetically heterogeneous populations referred to as quasispecies. The large collection of quasispecies leads to natural selection with elimination of noncompetitive (inferior) genomes and enhancement of superior genomes by fitness. Importantly, dissecting the persistent infection caused by mutation and selection of LCMV Cl 13 has illuminated mechanistically how human viral infections like HIV, HCV,...

Antarctica is not all ice and penguins: the McMurdo Dry Valley region, although one of the coldest, driest, and windiest ecosystems on earth, has vast expanses of soil inhabited only by invertebrates. In contrast to the diversity of soil life in temperate ecosystems, this cold desert ecosystem is dominated by one animal species, Scottnema lindsayae, a microbivorous soil nematode, but other species of nematodes, mites, rotifers, and tardigrades occur near meltstreams. These animals have...

Humans have a lot in common with fungi. And algae. Being able to track those similarities is crucial for science. Dr. Lopez-Bautista discusses the tree of life as it emerges as a teaching tool for biologists. He also discusses the uses of algae and fungi and how they factor into a valuable resource for humans.

Primates and snakes have always had a love-hate relationship. Man eats snakes, snakes eat man, and they compete for food in some situations. Dr. Harry W. Greene discusses humanity’s obsession with snakes and the bipolar relationship that has emerged, as well as the anatomical features that make snakes fascinating creatures.

Dr. Ryan Earley studied mangrove ecosystems in North and South America in subtropical and tropical climates. Here, he discusses his research into changing adaptation based on changing environments, and how a species of self-fertilizing fish learned to navigate on land from water.

Penguins are crucial to the planet, especially in the Antarctic seas. The biology and the behavior of these animals help to make them unique animals that serve a valuable purpose in the biosphere. Boersma discusses about the “three essentials in biology:” natural history, long-term studies, and communications through penguins.

Water has a tremendously diverse biosphere, and it’s not because of the big animals we can see — it’s because of the bacteria, archaea, and viruses that are the base of the foodwebs. These organisms make the planet habitable. Armbrust focuses on water currents and phytoplankton transitions, and how the life cycle operates in the ocean and the “rainforests” of the ocean.

Dr. Edward O. Wilson discusses the relationship between humanity and life, and his experience in biodiversity studies, arguing that we are at an important crux for the environment. Wilson advises students, teachers and parents on the ground-breaking fields of biology for the future and how they can learn from the biosphere and save it.