Conservation biology – let’s get integrated!

This was initially posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=600

Conserving our world’s biodiversity is currently one of the biggest challenges we face. I wrote a post recently about some of the issues palaeontologists face when trying to make our science relative to current conservation management and biodiversity issues (and have written elsewhere about this too). This is very much a developing issue within which palaeontology is framing itself, as with ever squeezing science budgets around the world, scientists are being forced to find the hook or application that makes their research ‘relevant’ to broader society. The role that palaeontology can play for both climate change and biodiversity patterns and processes is the natural progression of science accompanying such shifts.

Feeding at both ends of the food chain

In terrestrial environments, predator body size is largely correlated with prey body size. The opposite is found for many predators in the marine environment – baleen whales in particular comprise some of the world’s largest mammals and yet they feed on something far smaller (plankton). The leopard seal is unusual in that it feeds both at the top and at the bottom of the food chain, consuming large prey, such as penguins and other seals, and small prey, such as krill, an abundant basal component of the Antarctic food web. While leopard seals are well known as raptorial predators with a ‘grip and tear’ feeding styles, a large portion of their diet (krill) is too small to be eaten in this way. For this, they use filter feeding to separate the krill from seawater.

Can fossil mammals help us with our conservation efforts?

This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=466

How can the dead help the living? This is a question a lot of fossil-fanatics have bent a lot of time towards over recent years, partially due to a desire to make palaeontology ‘relevant’ as a modern science, and secondly to help guide our efforts in conservation biology. A new series, edited by my supervisor Dr. Phil Mannion and others, focusses on the way we interpret palaeobiodiversity, biodiversity in the fossil record, for different groups and the issues and solutions facing the field. The final article in the volume struck me in particular.

How can fossils help us to protect these now and in the future? Source.

Shuffling to safety

Seabirds are well adapted to acquire their prey. Those that feed on bivalves close to the surface have short, strong bills to break into shells and access molluscan meat, and those that feed on bivalves buried deeper in the sand have much longer, slender bills to access their prey. The association between bill morphology and the prey type of different bird species is a frequently cited example of niche differentiation, where animals living in close proximity have evolved distinct feeding strategies which prevent them from being in direct competition with each other (known as resource partitioning).

Did dinosaurs lactate..?

The fossil record is brutally frustrating; it mostly preserves only vestiges of deaths long past as body fossils, with occasional glimpses of life being gleaned from their surroundings and any trace fossils, or activity fossils that we might find. One question palaeontologists have long been seeking the answer for is how good were dinosaurs as parents? Modern birds are descended from dinosaurs, and are pretty awesome parents in their nesting, brooding, and raising of their chicks from birth until they can quite literally fly the nest. But birds are the only extant group of dinosaurs out of three major lineages.

Partial skeleton of an oviraptorid dinosaur brooding over a nest of eggs. Source.