Photo: Christmas Bird Count (Pool) Flickr group(CNN) -- As a hobby, Suzie Jirachareonkul, a teacher and mother of two, spends many of her nights searching for endangered toads on the country roads near her home outside Cape Town, South Africa.
She often finds them flattened on the street.
"They're so beautiful and it's just really hard to live with, especially when you're living on the road right here," the 33-year-old said of the toad deaths. "So we started doing something about it. We started saving them off the road in the middle of the rain."
When a scientist caught onto her efforts, Jirachareonkul and a friend assembled about 20 volunteers -- a group she calls the "Toad NUTS" -- to collect data on the endangered Western Leopard Toad.
The information they collect is being used in scientific research.
Read more here
Rod Page, Professor of Taxonomy at Glasgow University will be giving two talks in London about taxonomy on March 17th. These will be at the Natural History Museum and later at the British Library. Details as follows:
"Going digital: what's in it for taxonomy and taxonomists?"
Flett Theatre, NHM from 11-12.30, refreshments from 10.30."What's in a name: Taxonomy in Crisis"
British Library, 18-20.30.
NSF granted funds to do research on BCNM to STRI research associate Michael Kaspari from the University of Oklahoma ($324K) and Adam Kay Davidson, St. Thomas University ($316K) for the project “Toward stoichiometric theory of ant ecology--from colony performance to community composition," on Barro Colorado Nature Monument. This project explores a basic goal of evolutionary ecology: to understand how organisms respond to environmental challenges and to scale that information up to predict the behavior of communities and ecosystems.Also of interest is the fact that this was announced through their Twitter feed. Rock on Smithsonian!
The big goal is to detail the natural history of 50-75 common ant species, link their reproductive biology to the colony's niche, and access the degree to which those niches are phenol typically plastic.
Looks like the Encyclopedia of Life is now indexing videos as well as images from Flickr. Just upload your videos to the EOL group in Flickr and tag it with with a species name. The videos will should then be featured in EOL species pages. The Honeybee (Apis mellifera) page has an example. From EOL:Since the group began less than 6 months ago contributors have submitted over 13,000 photos and now over 200 videos which are shown in EOL species pages. Follow the instructions on our group homepage and learn how to submit and tag your photos and videos. We encourage everyone to check out the EOL Flickr group and start submitting photos and videos today!So.... let's get some ant videos up there!
"Dear Collegues/Friends and SPADE Users,Thank you for your use/interest/request of SPADE program in the past. (SPADE: Species Prediction And Diversity Estimation). I also thank many users for very helpful comments and feedbacks, which have led substantial improvement in SPADE. Now SPADE has been recently updated/modified and added two new parts: multiple-community similarity/diversity measures and genetic applications. In the genetic application part, we have featured Jost's differentiation measureD proposed in Jost (2008, Molecular Ecology,17, 4015-4026).
The latest version of SPADE (2009/Feb 13 Version) and the revised User Guide now can be freely downloaded online from http://chao.stat.nthu.edu.tw/softwareCE.html by just clicking SPADE there. The installation procedures have been greatly simplified. Please also note that the data input format for frequency or abundance data in one community case has been properly modified in order to be consistent with data format for multiple communities. Your comments, thoughts and suggestions are always welcome.".Best regards, Anne ChaoTsing Hua Distinguished Chair ProfessorInstitute of StatisticsNational Tsing Hua UniversityHsin-Chu, TAIWAN
"The latest edition of Linnaeus' Legacy is up at Greg Laden's Blog. This month's keywords: Not, a third of it is in Latin, now you get it for free, dahlias, something about the way, littlest sauropodomorph, martini, can of worms, Jocko, finches on mescaline, wench, tricks, oriole, parrots, bucket full of gasoline, extinction"
"Our study demonstrates that habitat fragmentation may have a differential effect on two ecologically highly similar keystone species. Moreover, it shows that species compensation might help in maintaining an important ecosystem function (i.e. raiding by swarm-raiding army ants) in fragmented tropical rainforests."
"According to research findings published in the journal Current Biology on Jan. 8, hydrocarbons on the outside cuticle of fertile ants form 'a particular chemical signature blend.' A cocktail that an ant apparently can't deny, cover up, or lie about and which brands a cheater much like the red "A" on the bosom of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter.'"
While looking for info on Ants, Nature's Secret Power, I stumbled across this post comparing ants laying trails to social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Ants do everything first!