Archive for the ‘pollution’ Tag

Disturbing the seas

In my last post, I explored the large issues facing harbor seals throughout the 20th century, including competition with humans, pollution, and disease. In looking at the last decade or so, these themes continue to be important but I think that they have become more indirect in nature in some cases. Although seals still eat […]

Harboring organochlorines

A quick look at harbor seal population trends around the world suggests that there have been ups, downs, and even some unknowns- catastrophic crashes in one part of the world while numbers grew in another and scientists couldn’t determine the pattern in a third. This wide-spread species shows corresponding variation in population status, but three […]

Lights out

In my last post, I mentioned some of the challenges facing firefly populations around the world, including habitat loss and pollution, and this week I wanted to get a better sense of our options for halting population declines and making a human-dominated landscape more firefly-friendly. To be honest, I was kind of hoping to find […]

A bright future for fireflies?

My appreciation for most insects was late in developing- I very much recognize their contributions to world ecosystems today and am aware that they are integral to so many of the ecological processes we depend upon (like pollination and decomposition), but that wasn’t always the case. Now I have a better understanding of how many […]

Posted August 3, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Insects

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Giving frogs a leg up

In some ways, the picture of amphibian survival I’ve painted over the past few weeks is pretty grim: we know that species are disappearing around the world, in some cases faster than we can identify them; we know that disease is playing a role, as well as pollution and a changing climate; and we know […]

Silence (and raspy-ness) will fall

I have to say that frog researchers are doing, and have done, some pretty amazing things to learn more about the big issues facing amphibians and how we can improve their chances. (It would never have occurred to me that you could track frogs.) And their results are helping us better understand not only the […]

Posted February 17, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Amphibians

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A disappearing act

I’ve spent the last few days trying to get a sense of how frogs are faring around  the world, and what I found was generally depressing- according the to the first Global Amphibian Assessment which was completed in 2004, at least 43% of amphibian species are in decline worldwide (Ben-Ari 2005). This trend seems to […]

Posted February 10, 2013 by Mirka Zapletal in Amphibians

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