Tag Archives: adaptation

The Return of Lahontan Cutthroat Trout

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 to see such an excellent story about local adaptation. In a nutshell, the trout was over-fished and also suffered devastating population declines in Pyramid Lake because of predation from introduced brook trout (and other exotic salmonids) and hybridization with introduced rainbows. This is, alas, an all too common story for trout endemics of western North America. A remanent population of Lahontan cutthroats, that were genetically very similar to the original Pyramid stock, was found in a Pilot Peak stream near the Utah border and samples from this population were brought to a USFWS breeding facility in cooperation with the Paiute Nation.  It sounds like the breeding/stocking program has been a tremendous success and the Lahontan cutties have now returned to Pyramid Lake. A big part of the story appears to be the intensive management of the main prey item of Lahontan cutties, the cui-ui sucker, which was devastated  following the construction of the Derby Dam in 1905.

This was all great news, but the thing that really caught my attention (because I'm currently teaching this class that focuses on adaptation) was the fact that the re-introduced Lahontan cutties have thrived so rapidly:

Since November, dozens of anglers have reported catching Pilot Peak cutthroats weighing 15 pounds or more. Biologists are astounded because inside Pyramid Lake these powerful fish, now adolescents, grew five times as fast as other trout species and are only a third of the way through their expected life span.

Can you say adaptation?! There is something about the interaction between this particular cutthroat species and the environment of Pyramid Lake that makes for giant fish as long as the juveniles can escape predation by exotic salmonids and adults can prey on their preferred species. Great news for anglers, great news for the Paiute Nation, great news for ecology.

Update on Stanford Workshop on Migration and Adaptation

Since my last update, we have added another faculty member to the workshop on Migration and Adaptation. Loren Landau, the Director of the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) (formerly Forced Migration Studies Programme, FMSP) at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa will be joining us to discuss conceptual issues in understanding African migration as well as research opportunities through ACMS. This means that we have the following confirmed speakers:

  • James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models of Migration; Population Projection
  • Shripad Tuljapurkar, Department of Biology, Stanford University (organizer): Stochastic Forecasting
  • Eric Lambin, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Pixels to People Approaches to Studying Migration
  • David Lobell, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Global Climate Change and Food Insecurity
  • William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
  • Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation
  • Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity
  • Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health
  • David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier
  • Loren Landau, African Centre for Migration Studies, Witwatersrand, Conceptual and Empirical Issues in African Migration

This is a great line-up and I'm very excited about this (and there are still a couple invitations pending based on complicated field schedules). We will hold the workshop at the IRiSS facility at 30 Alta Rd., bordering the main campus. This is a lovely spot for a workshop.

Details on applying for the workshop are contained here. We will pay for approved travel expenses of accepted students, post-docs, and junior faculty associated with NICHD-funded population centers.

Stanford Migration and Adaptation Workshop

Information on our NICHD-funded April formal demography workshop on migration and adaptation is now posted on the website Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR, pronounced "scooper").  SCPR is itself hosted by Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), which is also the umbrella organization for the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), a program that I currently direct. We will be having this little shindig at the new IRiSS facility on Alta Road, a lovely location on the hill behind Stanford's main campus, quite near the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. All of these workshops have been terrific, but I am particularly excited about this one because it brings together so many of the threads of work going on right here at Stanford on human ecology, demography, and the biophysical environment.  Much of this work is facilitated by the Woods Institute for the Environment, where I and a number of the other Stanford-based speakers sit.

As a quick teaser of the kind of work that we will discuss, I want to draw people's attention to two papers by Stanford faculty participating in the workshop that are just out this week.  Eric Lambin has a paper (which also happens to be his inaugural paper in PNAS as a member of the NAS) on the interactions between globalization, land use, and future land scarcity. I saw a talk on this last week and it was terrific. Lambin and co-author Patrick Meyfroidt argue that there are four socio-economic mechanisms (displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects) that are amplified by by the process of economic globalization and that can accelerate land conversion. David Lobell has a new paper out today in Nature Climate Change in which he and his co-authors capitalize on a treasure-trove of historical agricultural trials in Africa to measure the impact of warming on maize production.  They find that approximately 65% of areas will experience a decline in productivity with a one-degree rise in global temperature if rain patterns are optimal.  If rain is sub-optimal, as is likely to be the case, then every site would experience reduced productivity.  This supports David's contention that the effects on agricultural productivity of temperature increase from global climate change can not be understood except in the context of changes in rainfall as well.

Potential students who are interested in studying these issues at Stanford have a number of options.  If anthropology is your thing, we have a Ph.D. focus area in Ecology and Environment within the Department of Anthropology.  Bill Durham, Lisa Curran, Rebecca Bird, Douglas Bird, and I all teach in this area. Another option, for the more interdisciplinarily inclined, is E-IPER.  This is a topic I will have to take up in more detail in a later post since I actually have to do some work organizing our workshop now!

New Formal Demography Workshop: Migration and Adaptation

We will be having another of our occasional Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography this April 28th-30th. The theme this time will be "Migration and Adaptation," and we have a terrific lineup of speakers coming. As in the past, the workshop is funded by NICHD and receives substantial suport from the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS). What is somewhat different this time is that we actually have our own center now, The Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR). Here's the basic idea for the workshop:

Mobility is a common form of human adaptation to social or environmental risks.  Forms of human mobility vary with regard to permanency and spatial scale.  For example, foragers or pastoralists may move seasonally in response to resource scarcity and opportunity throughout a more or less stable greater home range. Smallholders and agrarian peasants might be displaced on a more permanent basis as a result of conflict or extreme resource scarcity, migrating internally to cities or other relatively nearby localities perceived to be less risky.  International economic migrants may travel long distances on a more or less permanent basis in search of economic opportunity abroad.

Global climate change is predicted to increase migration rates substantially by the middle of the 21st century.  This increase in migration is likely to result from multiple, interacting causal mechanisms including an increase in adverse weather events (e.g., droughts, floods), an increase in resource-related conflicts, or declining viability of local environments arising from various forms of land-use/land-cover change.  These increases will add to the already substantial movement of human population from rural to urban areas, in response to internal social displacement, and from other economic migration.

Understanding human migration requires the input from scientists from a wide range of disciplines. We are particularly interested in approaches that combine the formalism of demography, on-the-ground social research, and remotely-sensed information of the biophysical environment, the so-called "pixels to people" approach.

In this workshop, we will bring together demographers, anthropologists, economists, and geographers to develop a methodological toolkit for understanding migration as an adaptation to risk.  The specific aim of the workshop is to promote knowledge of methods and perspectives from different disciplines, disseminate information about the growing wealth of demographic data on the biophysical environment and human migration, and to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary work. The format will consist of lectures by invited researchers to an audience of other researchers, selected graduate students, and junior faculty. The three-day workshop will have approximately ten faculty and 20 students, whose travel, lodging, and meals will be covered.  The format provides substantial time for discussion. The workshop will be held at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), Stanford 28-30 April 2011.

Confirmed speakers include:

  • James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models;
    Population Projection
  • Shripad Tuljapurkar, Department of Biology, Stanford University (organizer): Stochastic Forecasting
  • Eric Lambin, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Pixels to People
  • David Lobell, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Global Climate Change and Food Insecurity
  • William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
  • Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation
  • Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity
  • Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health
  • David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier

A (rather large) printable flier for the workshop can be found here.  It includes information on how to apply.  Hopefully, we will soon have an all official-like webpage through IRiSS as well, which I will point to when it goes live.