Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online
This morning, Plymouth Marine Laboratory launched a new public service announcement about ocean acidification entitled “Connecting science, industry, policy and public”. According to the Official MPA Blog:
Depending on your view of phylogenetics, a recent publication in Nature reporting the discovery of a new kingdom-level branch on the tree of life, basal to Kingdom Fungi, is either a major revision of our current view of taxonomy or completely unsurprising and expected. While we mostly refer to the four kingdoms within Domain Eukarya as Protista, Plantae, Fungi, and Animalia, it’s understood by the scientific community that Protista is essentially a catch-all category, not a true clade, for eukaryotes that don’t quite fit into the other three groups. While this is convenient for organization, it fails to adequately express the diversity of protists. Four kingdoms is a useful system, but there’s no reason why diversity at the kingdom level couldn’t be much higher. A strict cladist could create hundreds, if not thousands of kingdoms from Protista alone.
I’m on my way to the 2nd International Marine Conservation Congress in Victoria, British Columbia. This gathering, organized by the Society for Conservation Biology, brings together leading scientists and conservationists from around the world.
Read More “Off to the International Marine Conservation Congress!” »
The wildfire that ignited in Dare County last week is still burning, as many coastal residents were reminded last night when the wind changed and brought smoke inland. Fortunately, the incident command is reporting that the fire is more than 50% contained, has not reached the town of Stumpy Point, and did not penetrate to … Read More “Short update on the North Carolina Wildfire and Red Wolves” »
Question: If your elected officials fail basic taxonomy, promote anti-science curriculum, and consistently attempt to undermine the fundamental underpinning of all biology, what happens when they start trying to legislate from this flawed view of reality?
Read More “Florida Senate fails basic biology, accidentally outlaws sex.” »
Foucault saw the concepts of knowledge and power as one entity, which he called “pouvoir-savoir”, based on the philosophy that knowledge and power are co-evolved. There are a number of examples where Foucault’s assertion seem to be correct. In France, a group of patients with muscular dystrophy coordinated and collected vast amounts of collective data on the rare disease by detailed recordkeeping by family members. They even held their own conferences and shared information, eventually bringing in a couple of doctors to do standard medical analysis on their data. Armed with knowledge of the disease, they were able to confront the medical establishment, which had previously ignored their cases because so little was known about the disease and the doctors did not want to look ignorant. Public attention brought by these events also brought funding to an otherwise unprofitable treatment regiment (Rabeharisoa and Callon in Jasanoff 2004). In other parts of the world, knowledge of medicinal plants and other helpful plant genotypes has been linked to indigenous rights movement through intellectual property (Whatmore 2002). Plant germplasms have become a way for communities to connect to international groups supporting biodiversity, which in turn helps secure indigenous rights over both intellectual and land properties.
In Beaufort, the first sign that something was amiss occurred on Sunday night. The air became thick with haze and smelled like of burning mulch. At first we thought it was just an overzealous barbecue somewhere down the road, but as we drove over the Morehead City highrise bridge, we discovered that the smoke was everywhere. This wasn’t an isolated grilling accident, trash burn, or house on fire, some thing was burning, something big. It could only be a forest fire, and, judging by the direction of the wind, it was blowing in from somewhere near the Outer Banks.
Bonehenge is our community outreach project of choice here at Southern Fried Science. Over the last few years we’ve been raising money and publicity to help make Bonehenge a reality. There is a widget on the left side of the page where you can make a donation to help build Bonhenge. We’ll match all donations up to $250 dollars, so you can make you contribution count double. Here are three reasons why you should contribute to Bonehenge:
Read More “Three reasons why you should donate to Bonehenge” »
Yellowstone National Park was established to preserve the American West, largely held up as the iconic American landscape. Picturesque Yellowstone houses the hopes and dreams of the frontier, the wilderness that is a large part of American heritage, and the final refuge for North American wildlife. Despite such a colorful and large part of American history, Yellowstone should perhaps be famous not for its astounding trees and bouncing elk, but instead for the ecosystems that depend on Yellowstone’s geysers. They are the unsung heroes of modern biotechnology and place Yellowstone’s wilderness leaps and bounds above other temperate forests in terms of biodiversity.
