[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]For students who are interested in working for the federal government, an upcoming Federal Agency Panel session sponsored by Career and Professional Development will be held on Monday, October 8th in Fralin Auditorium at 6:00pm to 7:30pm.
The session will feature four panelists from different federal government agencies – the FBI, NSA, EPA, and the USDA (US Forest Service). The first hour of the event will feature a question and answer session involving our panelists; then we will shift to an informal networking reception at 7:00pm where students will have the opportunity to mingle with the federal agency representatives over light refreshments.
Students can register for this event through Handshake.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Questions can be directed to:
Jonathan E. Byers
Assistant Director, Career and Professional Development
Darwin’s Galapagos: Evolution in the Anthropocene is a new course that will be offered by Drs. Ignacio Moore, William Hopkins and Peter Graham in Spring 2019.
Department of Biology/Fish and Wildlife Conservation
Course Number: 3954 Course Title: Darwin’s Galapagos: Evolution in the Anthropocene Credits: 4
Semester: Spring 2019 Time: TBD
Co-taught by professors in 3 departments:
Ignacio Moore, Biological Sciences William Hopkins, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Peter Graham, English[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Course Description:
Voyage in Charles Darwin’s wake in the Galapagos Islands and see firsthand what inspired the unifying concept of life on earth: evolution by natural selection. Gain historical and on-the spot perspectives on how Darwin’s big idea took shape, and learn how current evolutionary processes are influenced by rapid environmental changes caused by human pressures such as introduced species, over-fishing, pollution, climate change, and ecotourism.
The course is open to all majors and is reading-, writing-, and discussion-intensive. Students will have extensive readings each week followed by in class discussion and reflective essays. 10-day trip to the Galapagos will occur over spring break. Students enrolling in the course should be good swimmers and not be prone to sea sickness.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”25459″ img_size=”large” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”right” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://www.globalchange.vt.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Galapagos-2019-Flyer_web.pdf”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
“I think this article nicely underscores the tension between the right of people to own non-regulated animals and the reality that many cannot handle them. They believe they are doing the humane thing by releasing them into the wild, only to accidentally initiate an invasion. Fairly common story actually. Demonstrates the need for both better education of the public (and pet trade in particular) and tighter regulation of trade animals.”
– Jacob Barney, Associate Professor of Invasive Plant Ecology in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences[/vc_cta][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Birds like Roseate Spoonbills and Burrowing Owls are ending up in the stomachs of hungry pythons and nile monitors. Is it too late to stop them?
t’s a sweaty morning last June on the outskirts of Tampa, and droves of reptile enthusiasts are streaming into an air-conditioned expo center. Some have woken early to trek out to the Florida State Fairgrounds to get first crack at the animals of Repticon, a weekend-long extravaganza that’s similar to a baseball card convention, except instead of mint-condition Mickey Mantles and Pete Roses there are green anacondas and meat-eating lizards. One vendor’s table is covered in flimsy plastic catering trays that are filled with ball pythons. Others are selling Asian water monitors, gargoyle geckos, yellow rat snakes, and bearded dragons. A guy strolls by wearing a “Snakes Lives Matter” t-shirt. Another man, who has a three-foot-long lizard slung across his chest like a bandolier, is at a nearby booth admiring a young boa constrictor that’s twirling around his girlfriend’s fingers. Price? $100. Sold.
Roughly 60 Repticons take place each year, from Phoenix to Oklahoma City to Baltimore, attracting an estimated 200,000 visitors. These shows represent but a tiny sliver of the live-reptile trade, a loosely regulated industry that spans the globe and generates an estimated $1.2 billion in revenue annually, according to the United States Association of Reptile Keepers. In much of the continental United States, these cold-blooded creatures aren’t likely to fare well outdoors should they escape or be set free. But the sub-tropics of South Florida are different, and the best adapted have not only survived in the wild, they have thrived. To date the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, or FWC, has identified 50 types of non-native lizards, turtles, crocodilians, and snakes within state limits, more than anywhere else in the world.
For the birds of Florida, this blitz of exotic predators poses an existential-scale threat. The Burmese pythons, which stalk wading birds in the Everglades, have become so menacing that the state has hosted derby-style competitions to catch them. Farther north, Nile monitors—the largest lizard in Africa—have been terrorizing a population of Burrowing Owls in the city of Cape Coral. And on the outskirts of Florida City, just outside Everglades National Park, egg-eating Argentine tegus could soon raid the nesting grounds of one of the last remaining populations of the endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow. Each of these reptiles found their way to Florida via the pet trade—but while most people acknowledge that’s a leaky pipeline, few agree on whether and how to plug it.
Take Ed Poelsma, who’s wandering Repticon with Pugsly, a five-and-a-half-foot-long black-throated monitor that’s a close relative of the Komodo dragon. Pugsly is a stunning creature that looks to be from prehistoric times, with claws like steak knives, camouflaged skin, and a muscular tail. What does Pugsly eat? “Meat,” Poelsma says. “He would eat anything you put in his cage that’s meat. Literally anything.” No, Pugsly has never bitten Poelsma, and yes, he considers the giant lizard to be part of his family. He takes Pugsly for walks in his neighborhood, maintains an Instagram page for the animal, and happily answers questions from curious onlookers. You don’t need a permit to buy a Pugsly of your own, and that’s how Poelsma thinks it should be. “If you want to look at invasive animals in the wild, the very worst thing in the world is a domestic cat,” he tells me. “Go to the local ASPCA or local pound and look at all the dogs and cats . . . But everybody wants to blame the reptile owners for being an irresponsible pet owner.”
Five-year-old Drew Belliston walks “Rock,” an Argentine black and white tegu, in his backyard. A Florida trapper caught Rock as a yearling in the wild and sold it at a reptile expo. Drew’s father Devin, who owns several other lizards and reptiles, acquired Rock when the original owner could no longer keep it. Photo: Karine Aigner
It’s a sentiment that almost everyone I meet at Repticon echoes, including Greg Graziani, who has starred on National Geographic’s The Python Hunters and now runs a reptile-breeding facility and serves as an amnesty point for FWC. If someone wants to get rid of a reptile they shouldn’t have or can no longer control, Graziani can arrange a no-questions-asked drop off. Of course invasive reptiles are a problem, he says, but so are invasive plants, trees, and mammals. And as for the risks Argentine tegus, Burmese pythons, and Nile monitors pose to the menagerie of birds that depend on Florida’s lush landscapes, Graziani is empathetic but unconvinced. “The bird people are worried,” he says. “I understand their concern. But I haven’t seen the science.”
Truth is, scientists have never seen anything quite like this.
It’s the Monday morning after Repticon and I’m in a vacant lot in Cape Coral watching Bob Mondgock smack a package of frozen chicken with the claw end of a hammer. He pries free a hunk of raw poultry and tosses it to the back of a spring-plated trap in hopes of luring in one of the invasive Nile monitors that haunt this Gulf Coast city.
Over the years Mondgock has tangled with more monitors than he can remember. He works for the Cape Coral Environmental Resources Division, a six-person unit that might very well have been the inspiration for Parks and Recreation. Mondgock is the Ron Swanson of the group: a mustachioed Libertarian who will under no circumstances let me turn on my tape recorder. Before getting back into the truck, he clips an armful of fronds from a nearby bush and piles it around the trap. It’s less about camouflage than it is about making sure there’s enough shade to keep curious cats and raccoons from baking to death if they get stuck.
A graduate student and biological technician at the University of Florida baits a tegu trap with an egg and a potato. The egg is the tegu bait and the potato serves as a source of hydration to prevent death if a mammal gets trapped instead. The traps are checked daily. Photo: Karine Aigner
Nile monitors have no business in this hemisphere. As their name implies, they should be basking along the shores of Africa’s Nile Delta, but they got popular in the pet trade and rumor has it that the owner of a now defunct pet store, scheming a source of free inventory, let some loose behind his shop so they would breed in the wild. Unsurprisingly, the lizards quickly fanned out across Cape Coral’s extensive canal system. The first sighting likely dates back to before 1990, though it wasn’t until the early 2000s that they began regularly popping up in people’s backyards. If you’re not accustomed to large lizards, an adult Nile monitor dashing across your lawn might be terrifying. They can top seven feet, swim like Michael Phelps, and eat rodents, birds, rabbits, wasp nests, venomous rattlesnakes, poisonous cane toads, and, according to some residents, cats and dogs.
There’s no telling how many Nile monitors are out here. Since 2000, the city has logged more than 2,500 sightings and trapped 564 of the animals. Over all those years, though, no one has uncovered a monitor nest, an unsettling tidbit given that the lizards can lay up to 60 eggs at a time. Conservative estimates put their population at 1,000, a lowball number in Mondgock’s eyes. The city usually sets traps in response to residents calling in sightings, he explains, and many residents are so accustomed to the animals that they don’t bother calling one in. Today Mondgock will bait 11 traps, all within view of nice homes with pools, screened-in porches, and garages.
As we drive from site to site, we pass a handful of dusty lots where Burrowing Owls perch on wooden stakes and look like adorable stuffed animals. That the city is home to one of the world’s largest populations of Burrowing Owls is a point of pride among some residents, not to mention a good tourism draw. The owls are staring down a long list of threats, including significant habitat loss, and FWC declared them a threatened species in November 2016.
It’s known that Nile monitors eat Burrowing Owls—after all, the lizards are expert burrowers and ground hunters. What’s unknown is the number of owls they have devoured. One of the first confirmed cases dates to May 2005, when a woman saw a large monitor in her yard with one of the tiny tawny owls clenched in its jaws. Unfazed, she grabbed a flowerpot and threw it at the lizard. It dropped the owl and bolted away, but the bird did not survive. At least two other instances of monitors eating owls have been reported, and it seems certain that other attacks have gone unseen and undocumented.
Owls aren’t the only birds in monitors’ crosshairs. The lizards hunt cooperatively and are known to team up to lure birds off their nests so they can pillage the eggs, according to a report by Todd Campbell, a biologist at the University of Tampa and a leading expert on Nile monitors. “Many of Florida’s wading birds would be an easy target while foraging in mangroves and along tidal creeks and artificial canals,” the 2008 report warns, “and Nile monitors are excellent tree-climbers, so the nests of wading birds are also at risk.”
Cape Coral is home to one of the largest populations of Burrowing Owls. Nile monitors, invasive lizards that also abound in the area, are known to eat the birds—but just how often is still a mystery. Photo: Karine Aigner
Back at Repticon, I saw at least five different types of monitors for sale. It’s a family of lizards that has roughly 70 species and only two—the Komodo dragon and the Nile monitor—are now tightly regulated here. FWC classifies the Nile monitor as a Conditional Species, along with only seven other reptiles, including the Burmese python and reticulated python (at nearly 30 feet, one of the largest snakes in the world).These species can’t be sold as pets, but with the right permits you can have them for commercial, research, and exhibition purposes. Dozens of other monitor species—crocodile monitors, Argus monitors, tree monitors—can be brought and sold no problem.
It’s a situation that draws criticism from both sides. Those who would like to see more control over the reptile trade consider it a gaping regulatory hole that could allow new invasive species to flourish. Those in the pet trade see it as evidence of how arbitrary and inconsistent the rules are. When I met Ed Poelsma and Pugsly at Repticon we were standing a few feet away from a female Asian water monitor that had a $1,000 price tag. Under the right conditions, it could grow up to 8 feet long, weigh 100 pounds, live for 15 years, and is every bit as capable of surviving in a South Florida suburb as a Nile monitor. The two animals have similar diets, reproductive habits, and hunting tactics. “A Nile monitor is basically the African version of an Asian water monitor,” Poelsma told me, pointing at the one for sale. Yet one is regulated and one is not.
Mondgock, the city employee, isn’t keen on discussing whether or how the pet trade should be controlled other than saying that Nile monitors “ARE. NOT. PETS.” He’s been bitten, scratched, peed on, and pooped on enough times (he was chasing them, not the other way around, he says) to know that these animals never play nice.
Two days after we part ways, one of the 11 traps we set nabs a three-foot Nile monitor that was first spotted climbing a resident’s front door. Like nearly all the monitors Mondgock traps, it was placed into a sealed plastic tube and exposed to a lethal dose of chloroform. Death by asphyxiation—a grisly fate, but what other options are there?
Biological invasions aren’t necessarily blitzkriegs. It doesn’t matter if a pet store releases a few dozen lizards or a hurricane damages a breeding facility and sets free hundreds of snakes, as has happened. Some of the invaders die off, scooped up by predators or unable to adjust to their new environs. Others find food, find a mate, and survive. It’s in those early days of their arrival, before generations of the species are hatched, that there’s a chance at eradication. But with each new egg that’s fertilized and each animal that reaches sexual maturity, the monetary and ecological costs of the problem goes up. Biologists call this the invasion curve, and right now Nile monitors fall somewhere in the middle. Any hope of eradication in Florida faded long ago, but it may be possible to keep them contained to a few small pockets around the state—one is in Cape Coral, another is in Palm Beach County, where President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
Containing the booming Burmese python population has become virtually impossible for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and so the agency and its partners created the month-long Python Challenge to enlist the help of the public. Pythons are believed to have decimated the Everglades’ populations of small mammals, but they will also eat waterbirds like herons, egrets, ibises, and spoonbills. Photo: Karine Aigner
Keep following the invasion curve upward, past the point of containment, past the Nile monitor, all the way to the top, and you will find the Burmese python. This apex predator can grow more than 18 feet long and was for a long time one of the most popular snakes in the pet trade. Now, there are estimated tens or hundreds of thousands of Burmese pythons in South Florida and they’re eating everything—rabbits, rats, bobcats, deer, even alligators. On the invasion curve, they fall in the “resource protection and long-term management” section. In other words, they’re taking over, and our only hope is to safeguard what they have not yet destroyed.
“Pythons are definitely eating birds,” says Brian Smith, a biologist who works for Cherokee Nation Technologies, a company contracted by the United States Geological Survey to help manage the invasive Burmese python population. A few years ago, Smith went to capture a python in Everglades National Park. The snake was in a shallow marsh and Smith noticed a bulge in its stomach. He moved in and grabbed the python near the base of its head. Suddenly two bird feet popped out of the snake’s mouth. A moment later, another two feet shot out. The snake writhed and in one fell swoop regurgitated a pair of full-grown Great Blue Herons. Smith couldn’t believe his eyes as the corpses poured out and flopped to the ground. Both birds’ heads were missing; other than that the animals were intact and easy to identify.
Smith’s gruesome anecdote raises an important question: Could Burmese pythons devour resident birds of the Everglades the same way they did the small mammals? In 2012, a team of researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that marsh rabbits, raccoons, and opossums had all but vanished from sight in Everglades National Park. One of the culprits, they suggested, was the arrival of the Burmese python, which records show was established in the park around 2000. If that’s the case, it took the snakes just a decade to eat their way through that section of the ecological menu. Knowing whether they have completely shifted their diet to wading birds for their next course is difficult to determine, though.
Christina Romagosa is a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida, where she specializes in biological invasions. After a Burmese python is captured, it is euthanized and necropsied by biologists who remove the gut contents, freeze them, and then send them to Romagosa’s lab to decipher. Photo: Karine Aigner
“I think that it is possible,” says Christina Romagosa, an assistant research professor at the University of Florida, “but I am having a hard time showing it because we really don’t know what’s out there for them to eat.” Some evidence sits on Romagosa’s desk: several plastic bags containing the remains of a Roseate Spoonbill. One is filled with bones; another has the bird’s feet. The biggest bag holds dozens of soft pink feathers, some still in sheath. A few days earlier, the remains of the spoonbill were found in the gut of a Burmese python that had been run over by a motorist. “It looks like maybe this bird was molting,” Romagosa speculates.
It is anyone’s guess as to what one heap of python poop might reveal. There can be tufts of mammal fur, fragments of bird feathers, crushed bones, disembodied beaks, and occasionally flecks of eggshell, and accurately identifying what species trace evidence originated from is tedious. Sometimes the bird parts are so degraded that Romagosa cannot identify the species, so she ships them off to Carla Dove, head of the Smithsonian Institution’s Feather Identification Laboratory. Dove is very concerned by the variety of birds eaten by pythons. “It’s crazy,” she tells me. “These birds didn’t evolve with this kind of predator.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_row][vc_btn title=”Read the full article on Audubon.org” color=”primary” size=”sm” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.audubon.org%2Fnews%2Finvasive-reptiles-are-taking-over-florida-and-devouring-its-birds-along-way||target:%20_blank|”][vc_column][/vc_column][vc_row][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][hr][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][/vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]On a beautiful September morning, a group of IGC members got together on the New River with two bucket boats (provided by the wonderful Virginia Tech Whitewater Club) and a great diversity of inflatable tubes, including watermelon, a pineapple and a dragon. The IGC members took a leisurely 4 hour cruise down the New River with stops for picking up some river trash (Thanks Ryan!), grabbing a quick bite to eat on a small patch of land, and making sure to take full advantage of the rope swing near Eggleston. They floated for 3 miles and discussed science, life, and the recent flooding of the New River that left the water too murky to try to look for signs of life. The River was a little high this year, so many of the rapids were easy and river took them speedily along. Another successful river float with plenty of laughs and learning more about nature and our fellow fellows.
IGC GSO Social Committee Chair, Brenen Wynd, organized the outing and contributed the summary above. Thanks to IGC GSO VP, Nicole Ward, for sharing her photos![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_row][vc_column][vc_media_grid grid_id=”vc_gid:1538165292412-fc630d40-0d51-9″ include=”25496,25499,25498,25495,25493,25497″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Virginia Tech faculty and eight undergraduate students from universities around the country spent the summer monitoring ecological and social impacts of Mountain Valley Pipeline construction, which bisects rivers, streams, wetlands, and national forest.
The interstate pipeline, designed to transport natural gas from West Virginia through five Virginia counties, has been the subject of factious debate for years.
The students participated in a Virginia Tech Research and Extension Experiences for Undergraduates (REEU) program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a summer course designed to train future leaders to solve resource challenges at the confluence of water and society.
The program, headed by four principle investigators in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, brought a multidisciplinary team of more than 20 mentors with diversified research and Extension backgrounds together with students from universities around the country to focus on research questions requiring innovative approaches to scientific collaboration and data visualization. A central theme of the nine-week experience was meaningful engagement with local stakeholders.
“The program is truly interdisciplinary with student fellows with different academic backgrounds working in cohorts mentored by faculty teams from 12 departments across Virginia Tech,” said W. Cully Hession, a professor of biological systems engineering.
The students, who came from eight universities and seven disciplines, participated on one of three REEU teams: environmental science and engineering, which includes hydrology, water quality, and human health-related research; social constructs, which focuses on social science research related to water and society; or quantification and visualization, which involves computational modeling, 3D visualization, and development of other technical tools.
Members of the environmental science and engineering and quantification and visualization teams on a data-gathering expedition.
Together, the team members conducted interdisciplinary research to answer important questions surrounding the region’s most common concern: Is the pipeline harming our region’s environment and communities?
“There has been a big emphasis on how we’re going to serve the community with the data and information we are gathering,” said Jacob Kravits, a civil engineering student at the University of Massachusetts. “The Extension component has been a benefit. We are asked to think about why it’s important to gather this information and how we’re going to make this accessible to people.”
Kravits served on the quantification and visualization team. With a background in hydrology, he was eager to broaden his horizons by learning how to monitor water quality. His team of two was aided by five faculty, two graduate student mentors, and several technicians who provided the duo with guidance during the literature review, field work, and analyses that followed.
“It’s been really helpful to learn the research process and how to do a study,” said Jessica Barthel, a member of the environmental science and engineering team, which was mentored by a team of seven faculty members. “Things like communication, time management, and contacting the right people and getting the right information have been important. That makes this program different. This is not a traditional REU,” she said, referring to NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduate programs. “You come in and get a list of things to look at for each group, but they also asked us what we wanted to look at, what our interests were, and how to tie this into the pipeline issue.”
Barthel is an environmental science and economics student at Roanoke College. Four weeks into the experience, the rising senior had met with community members and representatives of the natural gas company in order to gain a broader cultural understanding and to hear different perspectives on the pipeline project.
Like many of her peers, Barthel hopes her REEU experience will help her hone in on her research interests and learn as much as she can in order to begin to shape her career path.
As a member of the social constructs team, Michael Galeski’s focus was quite different. The Creighton University student is a sustainability major with a passion for the environment. After spending time in South Africa during one of the country’s worst droughts, he was inspired to apply to REEU because of his interest in how people interact with water issues.
“The human aspect of the environment is often overlooked,” said Galeski. “We forget the big picture. This program ties all of that together. We have people in different fields and are looking at the big picture and asking: ‘Why does this matter to me? Why does it matter to my neighbor?’”
Galeski and his teammates reviewed more than 1,000 comments posted online in response to articles published in the Roanoke Times and were mentored by an additional seven faculty. He also hoped to familiarize himself with social media discourse from individuals and groups concerned with pipeline.
“I am looking at the public perception of the pipeline and viewing comments. It’s a lot of work on the front end to wade through so much content,” he said. “I can’t wait to analyze the data to see what issues matter to different people.”
The opportunity to learn about watersheds and stream ecology was exciting and worthwhile, even when nature failed to cooperate with the students’ sampling plans.
For several students, including Amir Barnett and Caleb Ring, who collaborated with Barthel on the environmental science and engineering team, as well as Kravits and Alexa Bracale from the quantitative and visualization team, the opportunity to learn about watersheds and stream ecology was exciting and worthwhile, even when nature failed to cooperate with their sampling plans. The two teams collaborated extensively and focused on the same field research sites.
“The sites have been dry and smaller than we expected,” said Bracale, a geological sciences major from the University of Delaware, referring to a local drought extending through June and much of July that dried up several of the five sampling sites. “I’m hoping to see changes in the visual imaging of fine sediment and turbidity changes as well.”
The students learned that imperfect environmental conditions are part of the research experience. In much the same way, working and living together for just over two months has helped them adapt to a new university, and form close bonds.
“We have strengths in different areas,” said Ring, a geological engineering student at the Colorado School of Mines. “Sometimes we remind each other to slow down and think about the questions. We are integrated. We live and eat together. In the field, we are each other’s research partners. We count on each other to get through.”
Or, as Galeski put it, “We are brothers and sisters by water.”
At the end of the study, the students presented as teams during a poster session at the undergraduate research symposium held at Virginia Tech on July 26, 2018. Each team also developed and shared a website focused on their research, and on outreach to the general public. Their websites are available on the REEU program website.
“We are doing three websites, three posters, and one story map — an interactive website that tells stories by using maps,” said Kravits. “It’s telling stories with a spatial dimension. When you have stories like these, this technology enables you to share them in a unique way.”
After coding more than 1,000 comments posted online in response to news articles, the social constructs team found that the key issues mentioned were land rights and corporate overreach, with additional frequent mentions of the environment and health. Meanwhile, in the field, the environmental science and engineering team found that runoff from pipeline construction negatively impacted water quality, stream morphology, and the abundance and diversity of instream insects.
In parallel, the quantification and visualization team developed a method for utilizing inexpensive time-lapse cameras and image processing to estimate sediment deposition in the impacted streams that local landowners might be able to use to document water quality changes.
“It’s intensely gratifying – and humbling – to see how deeply these students committed to immersing themselves in every aspect of a very complex ecological and sociological issue,” said Krometis. “We could not have accomplished any of this without the incredible generosity of our research faculty mentors, regulatory and industry partners, and Virginia Tech Extension faculty.”
Though the students have now returned to their home universities, the summer program will continue for at least another two years. Visit the program’s website to learn more and apply.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Faculty are invited to participate in the 2018 Rotating Resilience Roundtables that will be held on Virginia Tech’s campus in Blacksburg, VA, on October 11 & 12, 2018 (Thursday afternoon and Friday morning). If you are interested in what is going on in our coastal zone this will be a great opportunity to interact with stakeholders from Hampton Roads area in person and in a small group setting.[/vc_column_text][vc_cta h2=””]
Please RSVP to confirm your attendance using the following link:
[/vc_cta][vc_column_text]The event is co-organized between the Coastal@VT initiative at Virginia Tech and Old Dominion University/Virginia Sea Grant Climate Adaptation and Resilience Program. It is designed to respond to the need for a cohesive and policy-relevant science that will align and coordinate efforts between the diverse range of stakeholders to benefit the Commonwealth’s resilience and adaptation to changing conditions in coastal zone. The roundtable’s aim is to facilitate knowledge exchange and research collaborations to strengthen the statewide capacity to address coastal resilience issues in an integrated and inclusive manner. The roundtables concept is selected to support the active engagement with different coastal themes and challenges, as well as to stimulate problem identification, critical thinking, and alignment between issues and research.
This first event in a planned series of roundtables is envisioned to be semi-structured and allow for active interactions and knowledge exchange via traditional presentations, strategic networking, and small roundtable discussions. The desired outcome will be a development of a position paper that will recognize the need to collaborate and synchronize capacities between different entities working on coastal resilience.
Please see the schedule below and do not hesitate to let Michelle Covi (co-organizer) and Anamaria Bukvic know should you have any questions about this event.[/vc_column_text][vc_separator style=”shadow”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
SCHEDULE:
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11
2:30 pm – Introduction
3-6 pm – Presentations
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12
9-11 am – Roundtables
11am – 1pm – Collaborative position statement
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13 (optional)
9 am – 1pm : Walk and talk meeting, Hike to the Cascades (weather permitting)[/vc_column_text][vc_single_image image=”25389″ img_size=”400×400″ alignment=”center” style=”vc_box_rounded”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
GUESTS INCLUDE:
Old Dominion University
Michelle Covi (co-organizer, Virginia Sea Grant Climate Adaptation and Resilience Program)
Tom Allen (Geography)
Carol Considine (Engineering)
William & Mary
Sarah Stafford (Professor of Economics and Director of W&M Public Policy)
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
Molly Mitchell (Marine Scientist, Center for Coastal Resources Management)
Wetlands Watch NGO
Skip Stiles (Executive Director)
Shereen Hughes (Assistant Director)
Hampton Roads Planning District Commission
Ben McFarlane (Senior Regional Planner)
Ashley Gordon (Coastal Analyst)
Local government
David Imburgia (Environmental & Sustainability Manager, Department of Community Development, the City of Hampton)
Kyle Spencer (Deputy Resilience Officer, the City of Norfolk)
Emergency Management
Robb Braidwood (Deputy Coordinator of Emergency Services, the City of Chesapeake)
The Global Change Center (GCC) offers competitive fellowships to undergraduate students to cover the cost of tuition (in-state, 6 credits), housing and fees to attend the Washington Semester Program during summer semester. This program offers a unique 11-week immersion into work experience within the nation’s capital. Students work on challenging science policy issues that shape communities locally and nationally while obtaining academic credit.
The School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) at Virginia Tech offers the Washington Semester program to all undergraduate students, regardless of major, who have earned a minimum of 60 credits (Junior or Senior status) and are in good academic standing. The GCC Science Policy Fellowship is designed to support a unique track for science and engineering majorswho are specifically interested in the science-policy interface.[/vc_column_text][vc_cta h2=”APPLY BY DECEMBER 1, 2018!” txt_align=”center” style=”flat”]
Application form and more information can be found on our website.
In 1909, John B. Laing purchased a large property on Big Mountain in Giles County. Even at that time, he recognized the area was special. He wrote, “There is not any place that I know of that I would get more pleasure in protecting for the future than I would in Little Stony Creek watershed. Mountain streams like that are very scarce and in the future will be more so.”
His great-grandchildren made Mr. Laing’s hope a reality in August by placing a conservation easement on the property; it permanently protects 2,833 acres of forestland. The family worked with the Virginia Department of Forestry (VDOF), the U.S. Forest Service Forest Legacy Program and the New River Land Trust to conserve the property.
Known as the Little Stony Tract, the property helps protect the natural and recreational resources in the area. It is adjacent to the Appalachian Trail, the Mountain Lake wilderness, and the Jefferson National Forest.
Over 19 miles of pristine streams on the property drain into Little Stony Creek, which flows over the Cascades waterfall and then goes to the New River. The popular Cascades National Recreation Area sees over 35,000 visitors a year. The streams on the property have large buffers of trees, which protect water quality downstream.
The large forest provides habitat for abundant wildlife. There are rare, threatened and endangered species that live on the property, including 12 species identified by Virginia’s Natural Heritage Program. Rare orchids, ferns and butterflies thrive there, as do many species of birds.
The forestland addresses global concerns related to climate, water and air quality. The Land Trust used the InForest model to calculate the benefits of the large area of forest: it retains nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment and sequesters hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide. The land also removes 200,000 lbs. of pollutants from the atmosphere each year.
Conservation of the property took over 5 years. In 2012, the New River Land Trust created a conservation prioritization model for the region. The model identified the Little Stony tract to be one of the most important in Giles from a conservation standpoint.
The Land Trust reached out to the landowners and met with primary owner Charles Dorsey in 2013. John Eustis, Executive Director of the Land Trust, advised Mr. Dorsey that a Forest Legacy grant, a national program funded by the Land and Water Conservation Fund, would be the best program for conserving the property.
The Land Trust served as the applicant for the highly competitive nationwide grant process. It took a lot of preparation and two attempts, and the project received funding in 2017. “Protection of this incredible property is testament to the family’s conservation ethic and love for their land,” John Eustis said.
“This conservation easement not only protects this beautiful landscape and all of the natural resource values that are present but it also preserves the land stewardship ethic that this family has demonstrated through their wise management of the forest and other resources. Judge Dorsey and his family’s generosity will benefit generations of Virginians to come,” said State Forester Rob Farrell.
Think about the fast sprint of a cheetah or the rapid undulation of a swimming fish.
All biological motion is dependent on the rules of mechanics, which is a branch of physics that deals with the motion of material bodies and the forces exerted upon them.
But, how do the static laws of physics impact the dynamic process of evolution? Do stronger relationships between a morphological trait and swimming speed, for example, facilitate or hinder evolution? Virginia Tech and Duke University researchers answer this question with their most recent research.
Using various biomechanical systems in animals, the researchers have demonstrated that mechanical relationships in the structural traits of animals impart distinct, predictable footprints on biological diversity. Specifically, morphological traits that more strongly impact the way an animal moves also evolve faster.
Martha Muñoz, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Science
“Our study demonstrates that evolution is shaped by the general laws of physics. We have long known that there are fundamental laws of motion that shape performance space for organisms. But, the laws of mechanics don’t just define the parameter space that organisms can occupy. Mechanical laws also shape the process of evolution itself by guiding the rate of morphological evolution as well as shaping its pattern throughout evolutionary history,” said Muñoz, an assistant professor of biological sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.
Muñoz did much of this research as a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Sheila Patek, a professor of biology at Duke University. Their findings were recently published in the journal eLife.
“Our findings provide a compelling case for a strong influence of biomechanics on the pace of evolutionary change. We know that physics and biomechanics are central to evolutionary diversification, and our finding of a consistent increase in the rate of evolutionary change in the most tightly correlated parts of the system is surprising and exciting,” said Patek.
Their evolutionary finding opens up numerous possibilities across different organisms and different mechanical systems. The evolutionary footprints that Muñoz and Patek have discovered may be widespread in biological motion.
With the help of researchers from the University of Rhode Island and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Muñoz chose to focus on four-bar linkages, a simple movable closed chain linkage common in nature that is comprised of four levers connected in a loop by four joints. Examples of four-bar linkages in human-engineered systems include the pedaling of a bicycle or the movement of a pair of locking pliers.
Examples of four-bar linkages in the pedaling of a bicycle and locking pliers
Muñoz’s research on these linkages focuses on four biological systems: wrasses, cichlids, sunfish, and mantis shrimp.
“In order to conduct evolutionary analyses, I needed biomechanical and morphological data from numerous species and a good working phylogeny, or evolutionary history, to be available. With these requirements in mind, I was able to study three independent evolutions of four-bar linkage systems: the oral four-bar (wrasses and cichlids), the opercular four-bar (sunfish), and the raptorial four-bar (mantis shrimp),” said Muñoz, an affiliated faculty member of the Global Change Center, an arm of the Fralin Life Science Institute.
A. Four-bar linkage systems have evolved independently multiple times across animals and consist of four rotatable links that transit motion and force. B. The raptorial appendage of a mantis shrimp and four-bar linkage system. Figure courtesy of Martha Muñoz.
Each of these four-bar systems represents an independent evolutionary experiment in a common mechanical system — the same laws of mechanics apply to all of these four-bars, but each one is used in a different ecological context. Mantis shrimp use their raptorial four-bar to rapidly strike at prey, whereas fish use their four-bar linkages to suction food into their mouths. Thus, Muñoz was able to examine whether similar laws of mechanics result in similar evolutionary patterns in various independently evolved mechanical systems.
In multiple groups of fishes and mantis shrimp, the researchers discovered that four-bar linkages evolve in predictable ways: links that impact mechanical output of the system the most evolve the fastest.
This recent study establishes the connection between mechanical sensitivity and evolutionary rate. Muñoz’s next question is how natural selection factors into the equation.
“Are links of high mechanical effect experiencing strong directional selection, or are links of weak mechanical effect experiencing strong stabilizing selection? In other words, I’ve documented an evolutionary pattern, and I’d like to next examine the underlying evolutionary process.” said Muñoz.
[Featured image: An Anolis evermanni lizard, photo courtesy Edmund D. Brodie III.]
A new study from Virginia Tech takes on the decades-old battle of which has more impact on evolution: genetic variation or natural selection.
In a study published in the latest issue of Evolution Letters, Virginia Tech researcher Joel McGlothlin has found that genetic variation can leave a much longer-lasting stamp on evolutionary patterns than was previously thought. Started when McGlothlin was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Virginia, the study focuses on Anolis lizards, which McGlothlin and other scientists say are “icons” of adaptive radiation, an evolutionary pattern involving the origin of group of related species that differ in appearance and ecological role.
“Different anoles species have evolved different traits that allow them to live in different habitats such as in treetops or on tree trunks,” said McGlothlin, an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science. “During the past 40 million years or so, species with body types fitting them into these habitats have evolved several times across different islands in the Caribbean. This suggests that natural selection has had similar effects on evolution under similar conditions.”
However, scientists know that natural selection doesn’t always push a species in the optimal direction, McGlothlin said. Because natural selection works with existing genetic variation, evolution can be “constrained” by genetics. For example, if some traits are not as heritable as others, they may evolve more slowly. Also, when traits are correlated with each other — such as arm length and leg length — it may be more difficult for them to evolve on their own, he added. Although these constraints are important over a few generations, whether they are important over millions of years of evolution is more controversial.
McGlothlin and his team sought to disentangle the roles that natural selection and genetic constraints played in the evolution of body shape among anoles. “What we found was the species become differentiated from each other in ways predicted not only by their habitat, but also by patterns of genetic variation,” McGlothlin said. “Traits that were more genetically variable showed greater evolutionary changes across species. We were really surprised that we still saw this pattern when looking across 40 million years of evolution.”
Joel McGlothlin
In the study, McGlothlin and his team — which included Edmund “Butch” Brodie III, a professor at the University of Virginia and McGlothlin’s former postdoctoral mentor, and Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri — measured patterns of genetic variation for body-shape traits in seven different species of anoles and compared it to how traits evolved across species. The team also included several undergraduate students from several universities.
They collected adult lizards from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Bahamas and bred them in the lab to produce thousands of offspring. Measuring traits, such as head shape and limb length, in these offspring allowed the researchers to measure how much trait variation was due to heritable differences that could be passed down from parent to offspring.
The team found another surprising result: The relationship between genetic variation and evolution was maintained even though the genetic variation they measured also changed across evolutionary time. Their analysis suggests that that genetic variation isn’t just passive material for natural selection. Instead, it seems to co-evolve with the traits themselves, perhaps changing in response to selection.
“When we began this study, we thought we might be able to provide strong evidence favoring either selection or constraint, but instead, we may have demonstrated just how difficult they are to separate,” McGlothlin wrote in a blog post for Evolution Letters. “At least in anoles, constraint shapes the evolutionary response to selection, but also evolves in response to selection in such a way to keep the two entwined. Perhaps it’s this never-ending creative dance that makes evolution so interesting in the first place.”
The study of these lizards can help scientists understand the evolution of other species, said McGlothlin, who is an affiliated member of the Fralin Life Science Institute’s Global Change Center. “Our results are pretty general, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw similar patterns if we looked genetic variation in humans and our closest relatives,” he added.
McGlothlin is continuing to research the role of genetic variation in evolution. “Now, we are asking some similar questions using a single species, the brown anole,” McGlothlin added. “In that species, males and females are really different, and we’re trying to apply what we’ve learned about the evolution of different species to understand how males and females evolve to become different in appearance.”
