monkey's uncle

The New York Times had a terrific story on Wednesday on the recovery of an endemic trout previously believed to be extinct since the 1940s in Pyramid Lake, Nevada. As I am currently teaching my class, Ecology, Evolution, and Human Health, with its emphasis on adaptation as local process and human-environment interaction, I was happy [...]

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I am recently back from the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease (EEID) Principal Investigators’ Meeting hosted by the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia in lovely Athens. This is a remarable event, and a remarkable field, and I can’t remember ever being so energized after returning from a professional conference (which [...]

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A new paper written by Dan Salkeld (formerly of Stanford), Kerry Padgett (CA Department of Public Health), and myself just came out in the journal Ecology Letters this week. One of the most important ideas in disease ecology is a hypothesis known as the “dilution effect”. The basic idea behind the dilution effect hypothesis is [...]

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Well, it certainly has been a while since I’ve written anything here. Life has gotten busy with new projects, new responsibilities, etc. Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on campus sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Young Environmental Scholars Conference. I was asked to stand-in for a faculty member who had to [...]

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I was thrilled to hear Dan Salkeld‘s excellent (and long!) radio interview on Colorado Public Radio about our recent paper on understanding plague epizootics in prairie dogs.  There is a remarkable amount of information contained in this interview.  If you want to learn about plague ecology, then this is an excellent introduction.

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We have a new paper in the Early Edition of PNAS on the ecology of plague in prairie dogs. The Stanford News Service did a nice little write-up of the paper (and Mark Shwartz’s full version is available on the Woods Institute site) and it has now been picked up by a number of media [...]

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Related to my recent posts, it looks like the marine mammal die-offs in the Pacific continue.  A new story reports a die-off of right whales off Argentina. As with the sea lion die-off off Central California, a shortage of food (this time copepods) and possibly marine toxins are implicated.

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Information sent today from Promed-Mail indicates that domoic acid is indeed implicated in the sea-lion die-off in California.  Domoic acid is a neurotoxin produced by certain algal blooms that can bioaccumulate as it moves up trophic chains. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has a terrific resource page with extensive references on domoic acid. The report on [...]

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I just read this story about the alarming number of dead sea lions showing up around Monterey Bay in Central California.  We were just down at Moss Landing State Beach and saw for ourselves evidence of this die-off.  The sea lion had a couple of bites taken out of it but its unclear whether they [...]

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A long-anticipated paper (by me anyway!) has finally been published in this week’s issue of Nature.  In this paper, we show that wild chimpanzees living in the Gombe National Park in western Tanzania on the shores of Lake Tanganyika appear to die from AIDS-like illness when infected with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV).  Many African [...]

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