Not "pulling up the ladder" Sardelis, Stephanie; Drew, Joshua A
PloS one,
07/2016, Letnik:
11, Številka:
7, Art. e0160015
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The scientific community faces numerous challenges in achieving gender equality among its participants. One method of highlighting the contributions made by female scientists is through their ...selection as featured speakers in symposia held at the conferences of professional societies. Because they are specially invited, symposia speakers obtain a prestigious platform from which to display their scientific research, which can elevate the recognition of female scientists. We investigated the number of female symposium speakers in two professional societies (the Society of Conservation Biology (SCB) from 1999 to 2015, and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) from 2005 to 2015), in relation to the number of female symposium organizers. Overall, we found that 36.4% of symposia organizers and 31.7% of symposia speakers were women at the Society of Conservation Biology conferences, while 19.1% of organizers and 28% of speakers were women at the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists conferences. For each additional female organizer at the SCB and ASIH conferences, there was an average increase of 95% and 70% female speakers, respectively. As such, we found a significant positive relationship between the number of women organizing a symposium and the number of women speaking in that symposium. We did not, however, find a significant increase in the number of women speakers or organizers per symposium over time at either conference, suggesting a need for revitalized efforts to diversify our scientific societies. To further those ends, we suggest facilitating gender equality in professional societies by removing barriers to participation, including assisting with travel, making conferences child-friendly, and developing thorough, mandatory Codes of Conduct for all conferences.
Tourism represents an important opportunity to provide sustainable funding for many ecosystems, including marine systems. Tourism that is reliant on aggregating predator species in a specific area ...using food provisioning raises questions about the long-term ecological impacts to the ecosystem at large? Here, using opportunistically collected video footage, we document that 61 different species of fish across 16 families are consuming tuna flesh at two separate shark dive tourism operations in the Republic of Fiji. Of these fish, we have resolved 55 to species level. Notably, 35 (63%) of the identified species we observed consuming tuna flesh were from ostensibly non-piscivorous fishes, including four Acanthuridae species, a group primarily recognized as browsers or grazers of algae and epibenthic detritus. Our results indicate that shark diving is having a direct impact on species other than sharks and that many species are facultatively expanding their trophic niches to accommodate the hyperabundance of resources provided by ecotourism.
The Indo-Pacific is home to Earth's most biodiverse coral reefs. Diversity on these reefs decreases from the Coral Triangle east through the islands of Melanesia. Despite this pattern having been ...identified during the early 20th century, our knowledge about the interaction between pattern and process remains incomplete. To evaluate the structure of coral reef fish communities across Melanesia, we obtained distributional records for 396 reef fish species in five taxa across seven countries. We used hierarchical clustering, nestedness, and multiple linear regression analyses to evaluate the community structure. We also compiled data on life history traits (pelagic larval duration, body size and schooling behavior) to help elucidate the ecological mechanisms behind community structure. Species richness for these taxa along the gradient was significantly related to longitude but not habitat area. Communities are significantly nested, indicating that species-poor communities are largely composed of subsets of the species found on species rich reefs. These trends are robust across taxonomic groups except for the Pomacentridae, which exhibit an anti-nested pattern, perhaps due to a large number of endemic species. Correlations between life history traits and the number of reefs on which species occurred indicate that dispersal and survival ability contribute to determining community structure. We conclude that distance from the Coral Triangle dominates community structure in reef fish; however, conservation of the most species-rich areas will not be sufficient alone to conserve the vivid splendor of this region.
Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) represents multiple bodies of knowledge accumulated through many generations of close interactions between people and the natural world. TEK and its application ...via customary ecological management plans can be useful in modern conservation programs. I disaggregate the term TEK into its constituent parts and show several ways in which TEK can strengthen research designs by increasing locality-specific knowledge, including environmental linkages occurring in those localities. Examples of the uses of TEK in conservation include folk taxonomy in systematics in Micronesia, species knowledge for conservation in Kiribati, and fishers' knowledge of ecological interactions for reserve design in Belize. When conservationists recognize the utility of TEK, they can engage in an equitable exchange of knowledge and foster shared responsibility with indigenous people. These types of exchanges can also provide an opportunity for indigenous people to develop a scientific infrastructure.
Wildlife-focused tourism is often considered as having the potential to play an integral part of threatened species conservation efforts, particularly through financial support. We focused on the ...direct financing of conservation by investigating tourists' willingness to pay to snorkel with reef manta rays (Mobula alfredi) at Barefoot Manta, an ecotourism resort in the Yasawa group of islands in Fiji. Our results indicate that 82.4% of people surveyed would be willing to pay a mean value of ~ USD $9.2 (SE 0.9) more than the current cost, a 28% increase. Also, 89% of people surveyed would be willing to pay a mean value of ~ USD $10.2 (SE 0.9) more for a hypothetical scenario where they would snorkel with 50% fewer people, a 31% increase. We also investigated tourists' willingness to make voluntary donations to the local community above an existing payment of ~ USD $10 that is built into the current snorkel payment of ~ USD $32.5. On average, 91.3% of the tourists interviewed were willing to donate additional funds with an average additional donation of ~ USD $8.6 (SE 0.5) to the community to pay for educational and environmental support, an 86% increase. There were few significant relationships between willingness to pay and demographic factors (including age, income, nationality, education, and others), suggesting that willingness to pay was widely held by the tourist population staying at Barefoot Manta Resort. Together, these results indicate that wildlife-based nature tourism could represent a potential, but not unlimited, income source to fund conservation in the Yasawa group, Fiji islands, and that conservation can arise from partnerships between local communities and the tourism sector.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the number one neurovegetative disease, but its treatment options are relatively few and ineffective. In efforts to discover new strategies for AD therapy, natural ...products have aroused interest in the research community and in the pharmaceutical industry for their neuroprotective activity, targeting different pathological mechanisms associated with AD. A wide variety of natural products from different origins have been evaluated preclinically and clinically for their neuroprotective mechanisms in preventing and attenuating the multifactorial pathologies of AD. This review mainly focuses on the possible neuroprotective mechanisms from natural products that may be beneficial in AD treatment and the natural product mixtures or extracts from different sources that have demonstrated neuroprotective activity in preclinical and/or clinical studies. It is believed that natural product mixtures or extracts containing multiple bioactive compounds that can work additively or synergistically to exhibit multiple neuroprotective mechanisms might be an effective approach in AD drug discovery.
Delineating barriers to connectivity is important in marine reserve design as they describe the strength and number of connections among a reserve's constituent parts, and ultimately help ...characterize the resilience of the system to perturbations at each node. Here we demonstrate the utility of multi-taxa phylogeography in the design of a system of marine protected areas within Fiji. Gathering mtDNA control region data from five species of coral reef fish in five genera and two families, we find a range of population structure patterns, from those experiencing little (Chrysiptera talboti, Halichoeres hortulanus, and Pomacentrus maafu), to moderate (Amphiprion barberi, Φ(st) = 0.14 and Amblyglyphidodon orbicularis Φ(st) = 0.05) barriers to dispersal. Furthermore estimates of gene flow over ecological time scales suggest species-specific, asymmetric migration among the regions within Fiji. The diversity among species-specific results underscores the limitations of generalizing from single-taxon studies, including the inability to differentiate between a species-specific result and a replication of concordant phylogeographic patterns, and suggests that greater taxonomic coverage results in greater resolution of community dynamics within Fiji. Our results indicate that the Fijian reefs should not be managed as a single unit, and that closely related species can express dramatically different levels of population connectivity.
The growing field of historical ecology describes population abundances, biodiversity, spatial structure, and ecological functioning in the past, which are important to understanding ecological ...dynamics and recovery potential. However, because historical ecological analyses often incorporate nontraditional data sources (i.e., archival materials and oral histories) and may reveal unexpected changes to species and populations, the results are subject to critiques of objectivity and quality control, which may hamper their broad application. Here, we argue that surprising results revealed by historical sources are essential for ecology and conservation, providing new hypotheses that can be tested with additional data and new understandings of ecological dynamics that have immediate conservation implications. We outline four best practices in conducting conservation-relevant historical ecology research using nontraditional sources, and we argue that if these practices are considered in designing historical ecological analyses, the results can provide reliable insight into past change, current ecosystem structure, and future recovery targets.
Invasive lionfish threaten native fishes and ecosystem health in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean. Controlling their spread and population growth can be difficult given their early ...maturity, high fecundity, a long larval dispersal period, and preference for structure. Mitigation efforts are further complicated by the existence of large and numerous deep water refugia. Despite the potential importance of these refugia, their connection with shallow water populations and their role in recruiting pelagic larvae is poorly understood. We examined the post-settlement dispersal patterns of invasive lionfish using otolith δ
13
C and δ
18
O stable isotope analysis and Bayesian stock mixture analysis. We find that there is settlement within both deep- and shallow-water habitats. It is estimated that 34.5% of the shallow-water population is composed of individuals that moved from deep-water habitat and into these shallow regions post-settlement. Only 4.1% of the deep-water population is composed of individuals that settled in shallow-water habitat before dispersing. These results demonstrate a link between deep and shallow habitats within the coastal waters of Florida, with the flow of individuals from deep to shallow water being the predominate dispersal direction of post-settlement individuals. We suggest that post-settlement dispersal can contribute to the invasion of new habitat and potentially hinder shallow-water removal efforts in currently colonized areas.
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