Category: Uncategorized

MASSIVE LOSSES. “Common birds such as sparrows, starlings and skylarks are suffering "alarming" declines in their numbers, a new study has warned. Figures from bird monitoring schemes suggest that populations of the most widespread species have dropped by around 421 million across Europe since 1980.” https://lnkd.in/eCjmgmA View in LinkedIn

INTERDEPENDENCE. “The house sparrow, Passer domesticus is unique among wild birds in its close association with virtual dependence on man, not only in the agricultural environment, where presumably this association first evolved, but also in built-up areas. It would be expected that, with man’s dominance of the world, the future would be a bright for house sparrows, but it is now becoming an evident that this is not the case, particularly in the urban and sub-urban areas.” https://lnkd.in/e6evZ-H View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE concerns that sweetest of birds, the common house sparrow. As a boy, I was forever in barn roofs surveying their nests, stealing the odd egg, and deeply engaged by these common and perky creatures. More recently, I have built up a decent colony in my home in Catalonia, starting with just a few individuals. Their global story is heart-wrenching. View in LinkedIn

MALADAPTED BYPRODUCT. “Under Williams' hypothesis, the evolution of aging can be seen as a maladaptive byproduct of selection for survival and reproduction during youth. A fundamental corollary of Williams’ AP hypothesis is that early fitness components such as reproduction should genetically trade-off with late fitness components such as survival at old age, so that, for example, genotypes with high early fecundity should be shorter lived than those with low reproduction.” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

ANTAGONISTIC PLEIOTROPY. "George C. Williams took Medawar's ideas a step further. If it is true that selection cannot counteract deleterious effects at old age, he argued, then mutations or alleles might exist that have opposite, pleiotropic effects at different ages: genetic variants that on the one hand exhibit beneficial effects on fitness early in life, when selection is strong, but that on the other hand have deleterious effects late in life, when selection is already weak.” http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 View in LinkedIn

THE ALLEE EFFECT, popularized in the memorable book, The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy describes how social bird colonies like sparrows will collapse when the population falls below a certain threshold, and has contributed to the drastic loss of sparrow populations. https://lnkd.in/dp2SYmj View in LinkedIn

Jurors give $289 million to a man they say got cancer from Monsanto's Roundup https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/10/health/monsanto-johnson-trial-verdict/index.html View in LinkedIn

IMPACT OF COLONY COLLAPSE. “It has been observed widely that the local abundance and regional distribution of species tend to be correlated positively, such that species with low abundance within sites (i.e. average numbers or densities of individuals) also tend to occupy few sites (i.e. the area or range of a species at a national or continental scale), while species with high abundance also tend to occupy a large number of sites.” https://lnkd.in/dZAJ-iq View in LinkedIn

SURVIVAL ISSUES. “Studies have suggested that a major impact has been a reduction in the survival rate, specifically of first-year birds, rather than a decrease in productivity.” https://www.britishbirds.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/article_files/V96/V96_N09/V96_N09_P439_446_A004.pdf View in LinkedIn

INDIAN SPARROW COLLAPSE. “In recent years India also has seen a dramatic decline of sparrow populations. In recent years, ornithologists have observed sharp decline in house sparrow populations across Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and other cities in India.” https://lnkd.in/e6evZ-H View in LinkedIn