Tag Archives: ecosystem

Alien Invasion!

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Seafood Salad
Photo: Flotsam and leftover sea life

Aliens invade Florida

Here’s an article about an emerging problem involving an invasive species of snails. These snails (Giant African Land Snail) originally come from Africa. They are highly confiscated at airports because they are typically smuggled in for the pet trade. In the wild, they don’t have native predators so they can explode in numbers. They’re pests because they like to devour stucco in buildings for the calcium content since this helps them grow their shells.

I usually have a pretty good way to deal with such pests. However, these snails can carry disease, like rat lungworm that can cause meningitis in humans.

Skin Swap and Contact Sports

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Brooklyn Bombshells Blockers

Photo: Gotham Girls Roller Derby Championship


Ever wonder how many germs transfer between people on contact? Ever wonder if contact would change the distribution of microbes on your body? A recent paper reveals just that.

Wired magazine states:

After each bout, though, the samples told a different story: the teams’ microbiomes converged, having more species in common. For example, before Emerald City played Silicon Valley, members of the two teams shared 28.2% of their bacterial communities. After the bout, the overlap was up to 32.7%, the team reports today in PeerJ.

The article states:

In these culture-based studies, handshaking, as well as hand-contact with other parts of the body and room surfaces, have been identified as strong vectors of health care service infections, such as with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Klebsiella spp.(Casewell & Phillips, 1977; Davis et al., 2012; Pittet et al., 2006). Given that human contact with surfaces, and especially the skin surfaces of others, has been shown to transfer individual microbial taxa, activities which involve human to human contact could be hypothesized to result in the sharing of skin microbial communities.

How does this make you feel?

Citation:
Meadow et al. (2013) Significant changes in the skin microbiome mediated by the sport of roller derby. PeerJ 1:e53 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.53

Balance

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Fall

Photo: A dead gray squirrel after a juvenile hawk dropped it in the Mill Pond of Van Cortlandt Park

Here’s an article about an invasive species and the effects on a native species.

In this article, we see that the Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), a creature we are all too familiar with, invading the domain of the Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris). These two squirrels are highly related. As we can see, they fall within the same Genus. While the Grey Squirrel species adapted to the North American environment, the red squirrel adapted to Eurasia. Here, we see the effects of introducing an invasive (in the late 1800s) and the effect on a native species. Both squirrels share a similar diet and physical form that is specialized for a very similar environment. So why are the Grays of North America out-competing the Reds? The article points to the resistance of the Grays to pox viruses.Some time in history, resistance to pox viruses was a selective pressure. Those who carried the resistance trait lived and propagated this feature. Now, it is a further advantage when competing with the native Red Squirrel species.

Where else have we seen something like this historically even within the same species? Think about the Columbian Exchange and how that reshaped the booming population of the world at that time.