This week I was honoured with the pleasure to take part on an amazing pioneering gathering of global experts to launch a worldwide microbial conservation initiative. The meeting, held at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the University of California San Diego, gathered researchers from all over the world working on the most diverse threatened microbial environments as well as conservation practitioners, including representatives from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and their Species Survival Commission.
The group aims at raising awareness of the importance of conserving microbes and microbial communities, as well as developing sound strategies to achieve these goals.
As part of the meeting I had the opportunity to learn more about a diverse array of interesting microbial environments, such as the microbial mats of Cuatro Ciénagas in Mexico, an incredibly diverse microbial environment that is under threat due to different human pressures. Other interesting environments from corals, to plants and their rhizosphere, to the cryosphere (frozen environments in the Arctic and Antarctic) also took the stage, highlighting the diversity of habitats and communities that are in urgent need of conservation.
A Science correspondent joined the meeting and wrote an interesting piece about the group’s aims and objectives.
Many synergies emerged from discussions during the meeting including potential avenues to apply the theoretical ecological models we develop at the Computational Ecology Lab to the successful conservation of complex communities: microbial and macrobial!
A huge shout out to Jack and Kent for letting me part of this amazing initiative. Thanks guys!
Resource partitioning is a fundamental ecological mechanism driving biodiversity. It encapsulates the idea that different species, usually closely related or belonging to the same guild, tend to exploit different resources to minimise interspecific competition and thus enhance coexistence.
The concept was originally studied in detail by Robert MacArthur in 1958 is his seminal work on warblers of the genus Dendroica (now Setophaga) in coniferous forests of the Northeastern USA. In his study, MacArthur described how 5 congeneric species from the genus Setophaga, of similar sizes and shapes and all mainly insectivorous, could coexist in the same habitat. As in turns out, the Cape May (S. tigrina), Myrtle (S. coronata), Black-throated green (S. virens), Blackburnian (S. fusca) and Bay-breasted (S. castanea) warblers are able to live together because they forage in different parts of the conifers in the temperate forests where they reside, thus potentially accessing different prey species.
Last week, during the Tropical Marine Ecology field course in the Red Sea, I had the pleasure to help a group of keen marine biology students revisit this hypothesis in a marine system. Team Albatross, formed by Will, Alex, Neo, Leanne, Jenny, Rafe, Hannah and Rosie (from left to right in the picture) set out to study resource partitioning across 5 species of butterflyfish of the genus Chaetodon.
After days of intense field work, observing the behaviour of many fish across the reef of Abu Dabbab, the team was able to show resource partitioning in this genus of fish. The Threadfin (C. auriga), Chevron (C. trifascialis), Red Sea Racoon (C. fasciatus), Masked (C. semilarvatus) and Exquisite (C. austriacus) butterflyfish split their foraging efforts not only across different prey items including several species of corals, jellyfish and algae, but they also forage at different heights in the reef and at day and night.
Overall a very interesting project, loads of fun and adventure, and why not… also a little bit of thinking!
The link for the video recording and summary of my talk Modelling the assembly and disassembly of complex ecological systems at the Modeling Talk Series of Google / Alphabet is now live!
In this talk I presented a summary of modelling work we have been conducting at the lab over the last few years in an effort to better understand how complex species interaction networks assemble and how they respond to different perturbations from warming and invasions to habitat loss.
There are also many other interesting talks in the series that are worth checking out!
Today I am visiting the Silwood Park Campus of Imperial College London, where I was invited to present the lab’s research on Ecological networks across scales from micro to macro in a research seminar as part of the Ecology and Evolution Seminar Series at Silwood Park.
I had great interesting discussions with Prof Samraat Pawar, my host over there at Silwood on the modelling of coalescent microbial communities. We discussed interesting ideas related to one of his recent papers on the role of competition and cooperation in these complex systems with her Masters student Jinyie. Synergies between our research were immediately apparent and we hope to collaborate in the future on these ideas!
I also had the chance to catch up with Tom Bell and Bonnie Waring, on topics related to the assembly of microbial communities in vivo and in vitro. They have very exciting research going on with amazing experimental setups.
Thanks Samraat for the great day at Silwood!
Today Lucie defended her PhD thesis and became a Dr after passing her viva with minor corrections.
Her thesis entitled Conservation and disturbance of complex food webs across spatial scales encompassed a range of interesting studies about the effects of different anthropogenic disturbances on the the structure of complex food webs.
She had the pleasure to have Dr Elisa Thébault from the Sorbonne University and Dr Laura Graham from the University of Birmingham as the external examiners. They had a very interesting discussion about Lucie’s work and joined us for celebrations afterwards!
Congratulations Lucie!