ecology – Quanta Magazine

Simple Equation Predicts the Shapes of Carbon-Capturing Wetlands

Gabriel Popkin — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:09:01 +0000

A visit to a peat bog will make you rethink everything you know about the surface of our planet. A bog is land, sort of, but not in the solid-ground sense you’re used to. If you try walking across one’s surface, you may feel the soft organic muck known as peat undulate beneath you — or you may sink into it yourself. From the surface, it’s hard to know whether the waterlogged peat extends 3 feet...

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Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on ‘Keystone Species’

Lesley Evans Ogden — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 14:27:09 +0000

Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks...

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The Quest for Simple Rules to Build a Microbial Community

Dan Samorodnitsky — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:26:05 +0000

Bacteria don’t throw dinner parties or tell jokes, but they are social in their own way. When the presence of food gives them an opportunity to grow, reproduce and evolve, they will rapidly, even eagerly, form communities. Like a port city springing up along a waterway, a diverse community of bacteria and other microbes will recognize a good situation for growth and build itself up.

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‘Species Repulsion’ Enables High Biodiversity in Tropical Trees

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 14:14:02 +0000

For ecologists, tropical rainforests hold many enigmas. A single hectare can contain hundreds of tree species, far more than in forests closer to the poles. Somehow these species coexist in such dizzying abundance that, as naturalists and ecologists have sometimes noted, tropical forests can feel like botanical gardens, where every plant is something new. For such throngs of species to be packed...

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In a Fierce Desert, Microbe ‘Crusts’ Show How Life Tamed the Land

Zack Savitsky — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:55:39 +0000

In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly 150-square-mile national park on the southern coast of the Atacama Desert, which is often described as the driest place on Earth. They found themselves in a flat, gravelly wasteland interrupted by occasional hills...

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