Drawing on my work in evolutionary ecology, wilderness ethics, and machine learning, I reflected on the tension between our desire to intervene and our limited ability to forecast long-term ecological outcomes. Using examples like the Chernobyl exclusion zone—where many species are thriving in the absence of people despite nuclear contamination—I argued that ecological recovery is often less about precision intervention and more about restraint. We discussed how machine learning can help us simulate alternative futures and understand potential tradeoffs, but that ultimately, the most powerful conservation tool may be humility. More wilderness, not more control, might be the best way to meet the uncertainties ahead.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.

I am deep in the Alaskan Arctic,  300 miles from the nearest road system, attempting to conduct the kind of science that usually requires a specialized laboratory. We rowed 30 miles of meandering flatwater today, bringing our total to 200 river miles in 12 days since we landed at a lonely gravel bar on the headwaters of Ambler River in Gates of the Arctic National Park.

Mosquitoes spangle the tent canopy arching over me. Backlit by summer solstice sun, the silhouettes of the insects make an inverted night sky of shifting constellations. The sun never sets on the banks of the Kobuk River this time of year. It hangs high above the horizon even now at 11 p.m., transforming my tent into a solar oven as I, ironically, work to uncover the secrets of a frog that can turn into ice.

… Read the rest of the article here.

Take me to the photos!

Step 1: Come up with a hair-brained scheme.

My labmate Yara and I had been dreaming up the idea studying wood frog genomes from across the species’ range since she started her PhD. Wood frogs have the largest range of any North American amphibian. They also happen to be the only North American amphibian that can survive North of the Arctic circle.

Dr. Julie Lee-Yaw had done a similar study back in 2008. She embarked on a road trip from Quebec all the way up to Alaska to collect wood frog tissue. So, out first step was to ask Dr. Lee-Yaw if she would collaborate and share her samples.

Those samples gave us a solid backbone across the wood frog range, but we were missing population in expansive regions north and west of the road systems. We worked with the Peabody Museum to search for tissue samples that were already housed in natural history collections around the world. We filled a few gaps, but huge portions of the range were still missing.

We knew that there must be samples out there sitting in freezers and labrooms that were not catalogued in museum databases. So, our next step was to begin sleuthing. We looked up author lists from papers and cold-called leads. I even reached out to friends on Facebook (…which actually turned out to be a big success. The aunt of a friend from undergrad happens to do herpetology research in Galena, Alaska and was able to collect fresh samples for us this year!). This effort greatly expanded our sample coverage with new connections (and friends) from Inuvik and Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories, Churchill on the Hudson Bay, and the Stikine River Delta in Southeast Alaska.

But as the points accumulated on the map, we noticed some glaring holes in our coverage. Most importantly, we had no samples from Northwestern Alaska. Populations in this region are the most distant from the ancestral origin of all wood frogs in the southern Great Lakes. If we wanted a truly “range-wide” representation of wood frog samples, we needed tissue from that blank spot on the map!

Step 2: Convince your advisor and funders it’s a good idea.

This might be the hardest step. In our case, Yara and I were lucky that our advisor, Dave, was immediately supportive of the project. After we made the case for the importance of these samples, funders came around to the idea as well.

Step 3: Make a plan …then remake it …then make a new plan yet again.

Once we knew where we required samples from, we needed to figure out how to get there. Alaska in general is remote, but northwestern Alaska is REALLY remote. The road system doesn’t stretch farther than the middle of the state. All of the communities–mainly small villages–are only accessible by plane, and most of them only have runways for tiny prop planes. Travelling out from the villages into the bush is another layer of difficulty. Most people here either travel by boat on the river or by snowmachine during the winter. Traveling on land, over the soggy and brush-choked permafrost, is brutal and most locals only do it when necessary, if at all.

Prior to academia, I made a career of organizing expeditions to the most remote places in the rugged southeastern archipelago of Alaska. Despite my background, the logistic in the Arctic were even inscrutable to me. Fortunately, I had a couple of friends, Nick Jans and Seth Kantner, who know the area well. In fact, Seth grew up in a cabin out on the Kobuk. (Seth and Nick are both talented authors. I suggest checking out Ordinary Wolves by Seth and The Last Light Breaking by Nick). With their help, I was able to piece together the skeleton of a trip.

After many logistic iterations, Yara and I decided to follow in the footsteps of local hunters who, for generations, have used the rivers as conduits into the heart of the wilderness. Our plan was to travel down one of the major arterial rivers and hike inland to search for frog as we went.

Our original itinerary was to raft the 100 mile section of the Kobuk River from just north of Ambler village to the village of Kiana. But at the last minute (literally), our plans changed. As we were loading up the plane, the pilot told us that he couldn’t fly into our planned starting point. Instead, he suggested that we fly into a gravel bar 30 miles up river in Gate of the Arctic. Those “30 miles” turn out to be AIR MILES. Following the river, it ended up adding over 60 miles to our trip.

We packed two inflatable oar rafts, almost 150 pounds of food, and another 300 pounds of camping, rescue, and science gear, into the balloon-wheeled plane. For the next two weeks, we rowed down the swift Ambler River from the headwaters to the confluence of the Kobuk. Then, we rowed down the massively wide and meandering Kobuk River, eventually extending our trip by an additional 30 miles, by-passing Kiana, and continuing to Noorvik, the last village on the river.

Step 4: Recruit a crew.

Despite being the worlds first and only Saudi Arabian Arctic Ecologist with limited camping experience, I knew Yara would be a stellar field partner. But I never like traveling in brown bear country with fewer than four people. Plus, expedition research involves too many daily chores for the two of us to manage alone. So, we recruited a team.

Sam Jordan is a dry land ecologist, but he had been willing to help me with my dissertation fieldwork in wetlands before, so I knew he would be willing to defect for a good adventure. Sam is also an exceptional whitewater paddler and all-around outdoor guru. Plus, he’s just a great guy (when he leaves his banjo at home). He and I spend two weeks floating the Grand Canyon in the dead of winter and there are few people I would want along on a remote river trip.

Kaylyn Messer and I guided sea kayak expeditions in Southeast Alaska back in our youth. I am a bit particular about how I manage my camp system (read: “extremely picky and fastidious to a fault”) on big trips. Kaylyn is one of the few people as scrupulous as me, but she’s also a super amenable Midwesterner at heart. I knew she’d be a huge help out in the field.

We fell into an effective rhythm on the trip.  Each morning we woke, made breakfast, broke camp, packed the boats, and launched early in the day. While one person on each boat rowed, the other person checked the maps for frog surveying spots, fished, or photographed. We stopped along the way to bushwhack back into wetlands we’d identified from satellite images. We typically arrived at camp late. Yara and I would set up one tent to process the specimens from the day while Same and Kay made camp and cooked dinner. One of the hidden disadvantages of 24-hour Arctic sunlight is that it is easy to overwork. Most nights we only managed to get sampled finished, dinner cleaned up, and camp bearproofed with enough time to crawl into tents with just eight hours till beginning again the next day.

Step 5: Do the science.

Doing science in the field is difficult. Tedious dissections seem impossible while baking in the omnipresent sun and being alternately hounded by hundreds of mosquitoes or blasted by windblown sand. Trading lab coats for rain jackets and benchtops for sleeping pads covered in trashbags compounds the trouble. Not to mention, keeping tissues safe and cool. Organization and adaptability go a long way.

On remote, self-supported trips, it is inevitable that equipment fails or is lost. On one of the first days, we discovered that our formalin jar was leaking—and formalin is not something you want sloshing around! We cleaned the boats and found a creative solution to replace the offending container: a 750ml Jack Daniel’s bottle!

Planning ahead and engineering backup plans also helps. One of our main struggles was figuring out how to preserve specimens and get them home. It is illegal to ship alcohol by mail and you can’t fly with the high-proof alcohol needed for genetic samples. You can ship formalin, but it is difficult to fly with. To make matters worse, we were flying in and out of “dry” or “damp” villages where alcohol is strictly regulated or forbidden. Also, we happened to be flying out on a Sunday, making it impossible to mail samples home. The solution we arrived at was to ship RNAlater and formaldehyde to our hotel room ahead of time. Tissue would remain stable in RNAlater for a couple of weeks and we could make formalin to fix the specimens. After fixing, we cycled the specimens through water to leach out the formalin. This made it possible for me to fly with all of the tissue tubes and damp specimens in my carry on. Other than a few concerned looks from the TSA folks, all of the samples made it back without issue!

Step 6: Enjoy the adventure.

Despite the hard work, there was a lot to appreciate about the Arctic. We witnessed major changes in ecology as we travelled from the steep headwater streams in the mountains to the gigantic Kobuk. Every day was an entirely new scene.

Here’s an illustrated thread on our collecting trip to the Alaskan Arctic for the @Yale @yalepeabody this past summer. 1/22 pic.twitter.com/Jh3VCqVEgx

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) August 24, 2021

Step 7: Forget the hardships

Looking back, it is really easy to forget the sweltering heat, swarms of mosquitoes, inescapable sun, and freak lightning storms. And, it’s probably better to forget those anyway!

Arctic CircleSam illustrates that we are, in fact, above the Arctic Circle.

GearGear (minus food and rafts) ready for weigh-in before loading the plane.

Upper Ambler RiverOur drop-off point on the braided upper reach of the Ambler River in Gate of the Arctic National Park.

Gates of the ArcticGetting dropped off on a gravel bar in Gates of the Arctic National Park.

The first dayUnloading the plane on the first day of the trip.

Camp, night 1Campsite along the Kobuk River.

Rigging the raftsPacking up the two-person rafts on the first day.

Kaylyn Messer at the helm.In the upper rivers, near the headwaters, the current was pleasantly swift.

Upper riverSam and Yara rowing down the Kobuk River.

Early morning rowingRowing the swiftwater on the headwaters of the Ambler River in Gates of the Arctic National Park.

Searching for frogs

First frogs!Yara and I after finding the first frogs of the trip!

Science in the fieldYara preparing to do the sciencing with a garbage back as a makeshift lab bench.

Dinner. night 6Dinner and a view on the banks of the Kobuk River.

Midnight sunTrying to avoid getting a sunburn while sleeping in the Arctic.

Midnight sunThe sun baking our tent at 1130pm.

Rainy rowingSam and Yara floating downstream.

Arctic frogYara proudly presents her first wood frog collection.

Kobuk viewsSmoke and clouds mute the midnight sun.

Sam JordanSam Jordan in his happy place.

Chocolate con culicidae.With hundreds of bugs circling your head at all times, it is impossible not to end up with a few in every meal.

CutbanksMassive cutbanks made much of the shore inaccessible for sampling.

StormA freak lightning storm.

SunsetBeautiful light from the midnight sun.

Field dissection Taking tissue samples for sequencing.

TadpolesTadpoles from "Seth's Pond".

Prepping collectionsYara and I taking tissue samples and prepping specimens.

Arctic Wood FrogBeautiful arctic wood frog.

Fixing specimensHere, I am fixing specimens with formalin to preserve them for the Peabody Museum.

Bushwhacking The view while bushwhacking in to search for frogs.

BugsA random sample of friendly mosquitoes.

BearGrizzly bear prints on the beach.

FishingSam with his first of many greyling.

The Kobuk River valleyThe Kobuk Valley watershed is just an endless expanse of wetlands.

The end of the tripFlying back to Kotzebue in a packed plane at the end of the trip.

Heading homeCatching a ride out to the airstrip with our truckload of gear on the last day of the trip.

The study:

One of the most consistent findings arising from 20 years of study in our lab is that wood frogs seem to adapt to life in cold, dark ponds. In general, cold-blooded animals like reptiles and amphibians are not suited for the cold and function much better in warmer conditions. So, wood frogs that live in colder ponds should have a harder time competing against their neighbors in warmer ponds.

In response, cold-pond wood frogs seem to have developed adaptations that level the playing field. In separate experiments, we’ve found that wood frog tadpoles in cold-ponds tend to seek out warmer water (like in sunflecks) and have lower tolerance to extremely warm temperatures. Most importantly, they can mature faster as eggs and larvae.

But I’ve always struggled with a lingering question: if cold pond frogs have adapted these beneficial adaptation to compete with warm-pond frogs, what is keeping those genes out of the warm-ponds? Shouldn’t cold-pond genes in a warm pond mean double the benefits? One would expect the extrinsic environmental influence and the intrinsically elevated growth rates to produce super tadpoles that metamorphose and leave the ponds long before all the others.

Kaija, who was an undergrad in the lab at the time, decide to tackle that question for her senior thesis.

We hypothesized that there might be a cost to developing too quickly. Studies in fish suggested that the trade-off could be between development and performance. The idea is that, like building Ikea furniture, if you build the tissue of a tadpole too quickly, the price is loss of performance.

So we collected eggs from 10 frog ponds that spanned the gradient from sunny and warm to dark and cold. We split clutches across two incubators that we set to bracket the warmest and coldest of the ponds.

Then we played parents to 400 tadpoles, feeding and changing water in 400 jars two to three times a week.

We reared the tadpoles to an appropriate age (Gosner stage 35ish). Those in the warm incubator developed about 68% faster than those in the cold incubator. In addition to our lab-reared tadpoles, we also captured tadpoles from the same ponds in the wild as a comparison. Development rates in the lab perfectly bounded those in the wild.

Once they reached an appropriate size, we put them to the test. We simulated a predator attack by a dragon fly naiad by poking them in the tale. Dragonfly naiads are fast, fierce, tadpole-eating machines and a tadpole’s fast-twitch flight response is a good indicator of their chance of evading their insect hunters. It’s a measure of performance that directly relates to a tadpole’s fitness.

Above the test arenas, we positioned highspeed cameras to capture the tadpoles’ burst responses. We recorded 1245 trials, to be exact—way more than we ever wanted to track by hand. Fortunately, Kaija is a wiz at coding; and with a bit of help, she was able to write a Matlab script that could identify the centroid of a tadpole and record its position 60 times per second.

We measured the tadpoles’ speed during the first half second of their burst response and looked for an association with their developmental rates. One complicating factor is that a tadpole’s fin and body shape can influence burst speeds. So, a weak tadpole with a giant fin might have a similar burst speed to a super fit tadpole with a small fin. To account for this, we took photos of each tadpole and ran a separate analysis mapping their morphometry and included body shape into our models.

As we had hypothesized, tadpoles reared at warmer temperatures show much slower burst speed than their genetic half-sibling reared in the cold incubator. We even saw a similar, but weaker effect for the tadpoles that were allowed to develop in their natal ponds. It seems that developing too fast reduces performance.

Thus, it certainly seems that the counter-gradient pattern we see of faster development in cold-pond populations, but not in warm-pond populations, is at least partially driven by the trade-off between development rate and performance.

In fact, it may even be the case that we’ve been viewing the pattern backwards all along. Perhaps instead we should consider if warm-pond populations have developed adaptively slower development rates to avoid the performance cost. This especially makes sense given the range of wood frogs. Our populations are at the warm, southern end of the range. Maybe this tradeoff is also a factor constraining wood frogs to the cold north of the continent?

If warm weather and faster development are a real liability for wood frogs, it is only going to get worse in the future. We know from another recent study that our ponds have been warming quickly, especially during the late spring and early summer months. But climate change is also causing snow to fall later in the winter forcing frogs to breed later. The net result is that wood frogs may be forced to develop fast intrinsic developmental rates in response to a contracting developmental window, while at the same time, extrinsic forces drive development even faster. That’s a double whammy in the trade-off with performance. And might lead to too many “Ikea furniture mistakes” at the cellular level.

As a separate part of this study, we also measured metabolic rates in out tadpoles in hopes of understanding the relationship between developmental rates, performance, and cellular respiration. I’m in the process of analyzing those data, so stay tuned for more!

Our chapter tells the story of green frogs and the feral condition of their life with suburban human neighbors. We especially highlight the way that the human built-environment of lawns, pavement, sewers, and septic systems is infused into the biology of green frogs (a topic that Max and Dave have studied in depth). As a counter example, I told the story of the wood frog, a species that has escaped a feral fate by clinging to the remnants of wild space away from humans (a topic I study in depth).

I rarely get to write about wood frogs outside of academic articles, so it was a pleasure to contribute to this piece. I think it is some of my best natural history writing. I’ve excerpted my section below (or, read the chapter):

“To better understand why our housing patterns influence frogs, it is worth taking a frog’s-eye-view of suburbanization. Most frogs exhibit distinct life-stages. Like humans, frogs begin development as shell-less and fragile eggs, but while human embryos float within the protection of a womb, frog embryos are buoyed among the vegetation and flotsam of ponds. The embryos have an umbilical relationship to the water that surrounds them. Nutrients and oxygen easily pass through the transparent jelly and are consumed through delicately branching gills. Any contaminants in the water also suffuse the embryos.
Even before their eyes or mouths have formed, the developed embryos hatch as free-swimming larvae not much larger than a grain of rice. Hatchlings are vulnerable. Thus, frogs hedge their bets by producing hundreds of eggs per clutch, hoping that at least a few will win the lottery of life. Some species, like wood frogs, additionally safeguard their offspring by choosing impermanent pools that are devoid of fish as relatively safe nurseries.

Those hatchlings that survive develop into recognizable tadpoles with bulbous bodies and slender tails. A pond’s version of cows, tadpoles graze along the bottom with scraper-like teeth. They consume algae and detritus along with any solid matter that washes into the pond basin. A long digestive tract allows the tadpoles to incorporate nutrients into a growing body. Where ponds neighbor septic systems, this means that human waste makes up a prodigious portion of a tadpole’s body.

The transition from a tadpole to a frog is a remarkable change. It makes the squeaking voice and acne of human puberty seem like a blessing. Every system in the tadpole’s body transforms. The tail gives way to bony limbs. The narrow, disc-shaped mouth morphs into a wide, insect-capturing, gape. The goggle eyes, so fine-tuned to underwater vision, mutate into something much like our own. Even the long and coiled digestive tract shortens and distends. At the end of this metamorphosis, the aquatic vegetarian leaves the water’s edge and becomes a terrestrial carnivore.

Green frogs are parochial and prefer a pond-side life. For a short time as juveniles they might range far and occupy any standing water from lakes and ponds to swimming pools and tire ruts. Upon adulthood though, they settle along freshwater shores where they patiently wait for dragonflies and other insects to approach within range of a lunging gulp. Since green frogs inhabit permanent ponds, they can breed throughout the summer, and without the threat of the pond drying out from beneath them, their tadpoles can be leisurely in development. When snow falls and the pond freezes, both adults and overwintering tadpoles take refuge deep in the insulating layer of pond muck. Because a green frog’s life is so reliant on a pond, they can survive in just about any permanent water with at least a narrow perimeter of vegetation. As long as a homeowner neglects the tufts of grass along the bank, green frogs are more than happy to remain neighbors.

Unlike green frogs, wood frogs become sylvan nomads after metamorphosis. As their home ponds dry up in the summer and fall, they wander the forest floor hunting among the leaves, only briefly returning to recently filled pools in early spring to breed. During the winter months, wood frogs burrow just under the blanket of leaves dropped in fall. This enables them to be the first out of hibernation as the forest thaws in spring. For these reasons, wood frogs rely on leaf-littered landscapes. Manicured lawns where leaves are regularly raked and bagged make inhospitable places for them. Where the balance of forest gives way to lawns, wood frogs disappear…”

Overall, this was a really fun project to work on that gave me a chance to switch up my writing style. It was also a lot of fun to be able to collaborate with my partner, Bayla, who painted the featured image for the chapter.

The online version of the book is a little counter-intuitive to navigate (I think this was intentionally designed as a rhetorical device), but if you can figure it out, it is worth checking out some of the other cool stories of our feral world!

Update (Nov. 2020): And, I’m especially thrilled that our piece will be the cover article for the journal, featuring a pair of breeding wood frogs from our population! My hands nearly froze trying to get this underwater shot, so I’m glad it was worth the effort!

Over the past 20+ years, our lab has been monitoring over 50 populations of wood frogs at Yale Myers Forest. Each year in early spring, we listen for the duck-like clucks of the male frogs which means that they have emerged from under the snow and moved into the breeding ponds. Shortly afterward, we head out into the freezing ponds to count the egg masses as a way to monitor population density over time.

In this study, we looked at how the oviposition date (the day on which frogs deposited eggs) has changed over time. As climates warm, we usually expect for the timing life-history events (like oviposition, emergence from hibernation, flowering time, etc.) called ‘phenology’ to advance in the year as winters get shorter. That’s just what most species do. And the trend of advancing phenology is strongest for amphibians.

Given that annual temperatures at our field site have increased by almost 0.6 C in the past two decades, we expected frogs to breed and lay eggs earlier. If our frogs were like other amphibians, we might expect oviposition to come around 6 days earlier.

Surprisingly, we found the opposite. Our frogs seem to be breeding 3 days LATER.

To figure out what might be going on with our frogs, we decided to look more closely at climate across the season, not just annual averages. It turns out that most of the increase in annual temperatures are felt later in the summer, but relatively less when frogs are breeding. Snowpack, on the other hand, is actually accumulating later and lasting longer. In the figure (Fig. 3 from the paper) below, you can see these trends. On the left are the comparisons between temperature, precipitation, and snowpack between 1980 and 2018. On the right, we plot only the difference in trends over time. At the top-right, we plot the oviposition dates to show how seasonal changes in climate line up with frog breeding.

We also looked at how the timing of oviposition correlated with climate across the season. We found that breeding occurs later when there is more snow at the beginning of the breeding window. Also colder temperatures just before breeding correlate with delayed oviposition (which makes sense if colder temps mean more snow and less melting).

So, we think that frogs may be kind of stuck. Persistent snowpack might be keeping them from breeding earlier. But at the same time, warmer summer temperatures might be drying up their ponds faster. If so, this could be a big problem for tadpoles that need to maximize their time for development. The figure below shows that frogs tend to breed earlier when winter and early spring air temperature are high. As we’d expect, more snowpack correlates with later breeding. High precipitation during the spring delays breeding (probably because it is falling as snow).

Twenty years is a long time to be collecting ecological data, but it is a pretty short window into the evolutionary history of wood frogs. And, we don’t know how long snow and temperatures may have been working against these frogs. So, as a final piece of our analysis, we used a machine learning technique called a random forest to predict oviposition dates backwards in time an additional 20 years. It doesn’t seem like much has changed over the past half-century or so. In one way, that could be good news in that at least things don’t seem to be getting any worse.

The big question is, how will frogs cope with these climate changes? If tadpoles are faced with an ever-shrinking window of time to develop into frogs, will they be able to keep up? Or, will they lose the race and end up as tadpole-shaped raisins in our ponds?

I won’t give away any spoilers, but I’m looking at our long-term larval datasets to ask that question next.

I recently wrote a paper looking at how frog breeding timing is impacted by climate change. So, I’ve been reading lots of ecological studies of phenology (more on phenology later). One thing that struck me is how almost everyone in ecology misuses the term “Julian Day” when they mean Day-of-Year.

Day-of-Year (DOY), as the name suggests, is the count number of a given day in the year. So, Jan 25 is DOY 25 and March 1 is either DOY 60 or DOY 61 depending if it is a leap year. And we can express the time of day as a decimal, so that 3pm on January 1 is DOY 1.625.

Julian day is a completely different way to measure time. It was defined by an astronomer named Joseph Scalinger back in 1583 (and so, takes serious precedent over contemporary ecologists trying to hijack the term).

The point is, DOY and Julian day/date are wildly different things designed to measure wildly different phenomena.

Unlike DOY that starts counting on January 1^st in any given year, the Julian day count starts on January 1, 4713 BC. There is a complicated historical reason that Scalinger chose 4713 as the starting date that had to do with wedding the Julian and Gregorian dates during the calendar reform (read all about that here), but the point is, DOY and Julian day/date are wildly different things designed to measure wildly different phenomena.

For instance, I’m writing this blog on the 25^th of January 2020.

The DOY today is: 25

The Julian day today is: 2458873

But, it gets even crazier because unlike the DOY count that starts at midnight, Julian days start counting at Noon. So, right now, at 1030am the Julian day is 2458873, but after lunch it will be 2458874.

The Julian day metric is essentially worthless for comparing seasons. There is no ecologist who uses true Julian days; so, please, ecologist, don’t say Julian Day when you mean Day-of-Year.

As Gernot Winkler, former USNO Timer Service director notes:

“[Mixing Julian Day and DOY] is a grossly misleading practice that was introduced by some who were simply ignorant and too careless to learn the proper terminology. It creates a confusion which should not be taken lightly. Moreover, a continuation of the use of expressions “Julian” or “J” day in the sense of a Gregorian Date will make matters even worse. It will inevitably lead to dangerous mistakes, increased confusion, and it will eventually destroy whatever standard practices exist.”

So why does everyone misuse Julian Day? My hunch is that Julian Day sounds more technical than DOY, so folks gravitate toward it and others follow suit without ever questioning what it means.

Why do we care about studying seasonal change across years?

Phenology is the study of seasonal cycles of lifehistory like when bears go into hibernation, when flowers open, or when geese migrate. Phenology is a hot topic these days because climate change is causing wild populations to change their seasonal timing (Thackeray et al. 2016). For instance, frogs increasingly start calling and breeding earlier (Li et al. 2013) and forests green-up earlier (Cleland et al. 2007).

On one hand, shifts in lifehistory timing might be a good way to cope with climate change, but it can be bad news if shifts in one species causes a misalignment in an ecological relationship (Miller-Rushing et al. 2010; Visser & Gienapp 2019). For example, European flycatcher migration generally coincides with a boom in caterpillars that feed on oaks. However, climate change drives oaks to bud earlier, which means that all the juicy caterpillars turn chrysalises before the birds show up (Both & Visser 2001; Both et al. 2006). Similarly, snowshoe hares evolved to change coat color from white to brown in winter, but as snow melts earlier and earlier each year, rabbits are stuck with white coats for too long and become easy targets for predators (Mills et al. 2018).

Needless to say, it is important for use to be able to compare when in the season these critical phenomena take place and compare their change across years. When we do so, we are using DOY to align datasets across year, not Julian day; so, ecologists, let’s stop using the wrong term.

References:

Both, C., Bouwhuis, S., Lessells, C. M., and Visser, M. E. (2006). Climate change and population declines in a long-distance migratory bird. Nature 441, 81–83. 

Both, C., and Visser, M. E. (2001). Adjustment to climate change is constrained by arrival date in a long-distance migrant bird. Nature 411, 296–298. 

Cleland, E. E., Chuine, I., Menzel, A., Mooney, H. A., and Schwartz, M. D. (2007). Shifting plant phenology in response to global change. Trends Ecol. Evol. 22, 357–365. 

Li, Y., Cohen, J. M., and Rohr, J. R. (2013). Review and synthesis of the effects of climate change on amphibians. Integr. Zool. 8, 145–161. 

Miller-Rushing, A. J., Høye, T. T., Inouye, D. W., and Post, E. (2010). The effects of phenological mismatches on demography. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 365, 3177–3186. 

Mills, L. S., Bragina, E. V., Kumar, A. V., Zimova, M., Lafferty, D. J. R., Feltner, J., et al. (2018). Winter color polymorphisms identify global hot spots for evolutionary rescue from climate change. Science 359, 1033–1036. 

Thackeray, S. J., Henrys, P. A., Hemming, D., Bell, J. R., Botham, M. S., Burthe, S., et al. (2016). Phenological sensitivity to climate across taxa and trophic levels. Nature 535, 241–245. 

Visser, M. E., and Gienapp, P. (2019). Evolutionary and demographic consequences of phenological mismatches. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 879–885. 

The featured image of this post is from joiseyshowaa under creative commons usage.

At the beginning of my PhD, I had TOO MUCH time to read, but TOO LITTLE focus to know what I needed to read. Now that I have a few experiments behind me and multiple, ongoing analyses and manuscripts in front of me, I have TONS of papers I want to read, but NO time to read them.

To make matters worse, I chase references like a dog chases squirrels. I can sit down with the best intentions of reading through a paper and find myself an hour later down five other rabbit holes with 50 new tabs on my browser all with new papers I certainly won’t ever read.

In an effort to make a consistent practice of winnowing away my ever-growing pile of “really important papers that I definitely want to cite in my dissertation,” I’m starting the #APaperADay challenge. My goal is to read a new paper each workday and write a quick synopsis. I have no roadmap or themes, so reader beware–these paper will be all over the place!

Be sure to check out the whole comment thread for the entire synopsis:

Attention: Dragons are what they eat… kinda.

Here’s my #APaperADay synopsis of @BethanColquhoun @lsweyrich N. Kent & @c_frere ‘s recent paper in @molecology about potentially adaptive shifts in the microbiomes of urban water dragons. 1/7

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) November 12, 2019

I love #wilderness, so my #APaperADay summarises @m_dimarco et al.'s assessment in @nature of the impact of human land-use and habitat protection on #extinction risks, in the thread below. 1/6https://t.co/xVM2FjlzAy

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) October 21, 2019

Today's #APaperADay is a newly accepted @molecology metropolitan meta-anlysis by @lindsay_s_miles @urbanevol @evoecolab et al that wrangles the explosion of studies to test the effect of urbanization on wildlife. They ask: how do cities help or hinder gene flow (and drift). 1/5

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) September 15, 2019

Can bees dance their way to a healthier diet when stuck in a sea of junk food? Nürnberger et al.'s new paper in @molecology suggests so.
Check out my #APaperADay thread below for details. 1/8 #HoneyBee #WaggleDance #Ecology #bees https://t.co/QqvFrzS36z

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) August 15, 2019

Has citylife caused adaptive evolution in wood frogs?

To test this, @Jared_Homola et al. (2019) found 4 pairs of frog ponds where one was situated in a rural setting and the other next to a town and then looked for signatures of parallel genetic differentiation. 1/6#APaperADay https://t.co/Rg2b0ICTGk

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) July 16, 2019

Pond temps matter a lot to ectotherms like frogs. Mueller et al. (2019)
found that temps experienced at different lifestages impacts frogs’ development and physiology, but the carry-over effect across stages is inconsistent. #APaperADay https://t.co/02AKgI4os7

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) July 8, 2019

Pašukonis et al. (2019), found that dart frog dads travel farther than needed when dispersing tadpoles by strapping tiny GPS-transmitters to their backs. #APaperADay https://t.co/G7SGSzbBHR

— A. Z. Andis Arietta (@azandisarietta) July 7, 2019

Here’s my talk from the conference, “Evolution of Intrinsic Rates: Can adaptation counteract environmental change?“:

Speciation starts small. The path of divergence starts with minute change in just a handful of basepairs among the billions of bases in a genome. Overtime, these small differences create feedbacks that propagate further divergence.

That’s the idea of sympatric speciation, the emergence of two species out of one. I’m most interested in the very first steps of this process, but catching this kind of small-scale divergence is hard, because the difference are small and easy to overlook. We call noticeable differences within a species polymorphisms. In most cases, we notice polymorphisms that we can see. For instance, it is hard to miss difference in color morphs of chimpmunks. Many of the classic examples of polymorphisms are visually detectable: industrial melanism in moths, beak size in Galapagos finches, stripe and color pattern in Timema stick insects, etc.

 

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It’s been way too long since I celebrated #TaxidermyTuesday All of these specimens are the same species of Eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus), but two of them have genetic quirks that make their coats either all black (melanistic) or all white (leucistic). #biology #naturalhistorymuseum #naturalhistory #specimen #taxidermy #chipmunk #zoology

A post shared by Andis A. (@azandis) on Mar 6, 2018 at 3:54am PST

But many polymorphisms cannot be detected visually. For instance, polymorphism in dart frogs is often detected by the chemical composition of their skin toxins. Divergence in birds is often diagnosed by the sound of their calls. I’m in the middle of a collaboration to detect possible divergence in clover populations within and outside of cities via cyanogenesis.
The reliance on our human sight to detect polymorphisms is a problem because human sight, while impressive, is very narrowly limited. There is no reason for us to expect that the most relevant variation (from an ecological or evolutionary perspective) in a population would fall within the range of our senses. For instance, there is a whole vision of the world in the ultra-violet frequency that we cannot see. Flowers that all appear a uniform color to you and me can exhibit huge variation in ultra-violet light. Since birds and bees see ultraviolet, it stands to reason that the strongest selection for divergence would occur in this frequency, completely unknown to us.

All of this led me to think about how we, as eco-evo scientists, can start to shift our paradigm to think about the world through the senses of the organisms we study, which would give us a much better ecological picture of the selection pressures maintaining polymorphisms. The first step, is to take one small step outside of our anthropocentric sense and see the world through the eyes of animals. Thanks to the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning, I was able to design an interactive digital project that helps take those first few steps along a Proustian walk.