Monthly Archives: March 2019

Another Simple Problem in Ecology

In 1951 Bill Ricker and his colleagues at the Pacific Biological Station became interested in the size of the salmon caught in the West Coast fishery (Ricker 1995). By 1975 they had observed that pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), coho (O. kisutch) and chinook (O. tshawytscha) had all declined in size, pink salmon by 40%, coho dropped 20-30%, and chinook from 9kg to 6kg. Since 1975 changes have become more complicated in different parts of the fishery (Ricker 1995). Why these changes? Ricker concluded:

“From the data available up to 1975, I suggested that a change in the genetic constitution of salmon stocks was mainly responsible for the observed decreases in size. After all, if you are raising beef cattle, for example, you select breeding stock with a proven history of fast growth. Our fisheries have been doing exactly the opposite.” (Ricker 1995 page 600).

Everyone had read Charles Darwin and knew about natural selection and here was more clear evidence in the natural world.

            About this time wildlife managers became interested in the same possibility that by hunters selecting the largest mammals in order to obtain a trophy catch, there might be changes in the genetics of large mammal populations that could be detrimental. Festa-Bianchet and Mysterud (2018) have now reviewed the literature on the evolutionary pressures from size-selective harvests of large mammals and have shown that a series of strong conditions must be present to determine if hunting is exerting evolutionary pressure within a harvested population. They point out that the problem is far from simple. For a start one must determine if the trait that hunters select for is heritable. Since often this is antler or horn size or other dominance traits, we need to know how heritable such a trait is. For those large mammals for which we have data, heritability is low to moderate (20-40%). Then we need data on the strength of hunting selection in relation to sexual selection for large antlers or horns or body size. In general, the detection of evolutionary changes in natural populations is difficult.

Festa-Bianchet and Mysterud (2018) review the strength of inference from the available data and point out that the gold standard of ‘experimental manipulation with identified genes that affect horn/antler size, and evidence of changes in both gene frequency and trait size after manipulation’ has not been achieved for any species at the present time. Weaker evidence is available from long-term monitoring studies of several populations of the same species that are subject to different hunting pressures, and even these weaker studies are available for only a handful of ungulate species. The bottom line is that we need much more research on this ‘simple problem’ to make sure that hunting is sustainable from both an ecological and an evolutionary viewpoint.

Back to the fisheries. There has been an explosion of interest in the potential effects of fishing methods on changes in fish stocks. Kuparinen and Festa-Bianchet (2017) provide a good overview while Tillotson and Quinn (2018) dig into the details of potential selection by fisheries on the timing of migration and breeding. Morita (2019) leads us back to the Pacific salmon and how we could be selecting for earlier migrations from ocean to fresh water breeding grounds. Clearly there is much left to do on this important ‘simple’ topic.

Festa-Bianchet, M. & Mysterud, A. (2018) Hunting and evolution: theory, evidence, and unknowns. Journal of Mammalogy, 99, 1281-1292. doi: 10.1093/jmammal/gyy138

Kuparinen, A. & Festa-Bianchet, M. (2017) Harvest-induced evolution: insights from aquatic and terrestrial systems. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B, 372, 20160036. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0036

Morita, K. (2019) Earlier migration timing of salmonids: an adaptation to climate change or maladaptation to the fishery? Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 76, 475-479. doi: 10.1139/cjfas-2018-0078

Ricker, W.E. (1995) Trends in the average size of Pacific salmon in Canadian catches. Climate Change and Northern Fish Populations (ed. R.J. Beamish), pp. 593-602.Canadian Special Publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Ottawa, Ontario.

Tillotson, M.D. & Quinn, T.P. (2018) Selection on the timing of migration and breeding: A neglected aspect of fishing-induced evolution and trait change. Fish and Fisheries, 19, 170-181. doi: 10.1111/faf.12248

Economics from a naïve non-economist

If you spend time in the world of social media, you may already know about the University of California vs. Elsevier Publishers on the economics of publishing scientific journal papers. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/uc-elsevier-publisher/583909/ and the background information in https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science for a sample discussion. Now I know nothing in particular about economics but I can perhaps add a footnote to this discussion from the point of view of having published ecology textbooks and investigated their cost.

Perhaps 20 years ago I had a good conversation with an honest person in the know of a book company I have sometimes published with, regarding the costs of publishing textbooks. At that point in the Stone Age, biology texts were about $100 or slightly less, and often some publishers would put out a paperback version of the same text at a much cheaper price, perhaps $35 or $40 for sale outside of North America. I thought that perhaps they ought to allow students in North America to buy the cheaper paper version, so I enquired about costs. The bottom line is that it cost perhaps $0.25 more for publishing a copy of the hardback versus the cheaper soft paperback version. The quality of the paper was no different in the two versions, and thus the costs of production were very close while the prices to the buyer were greatly different. This could be explained by putting all the heavy costs on the hardback copy because it takes a lot of editing and printing to set up the book for a printing run. So, one could argue that the cost difference should not rest on the costs of the paper alone. This led into an interesting conversation that is now only a memory for me since the CIA did not yet at that time record all phone calls of suspicious academics like ecologists. I was told that the publisher who must remain nameless wished to achieve a profit of 35-40% per year of costs for any book. Not all books sell well, and after a few years sales drop off and the whole process begins again. But my naïve question was where can I invest my savings to get a return of even 25% per year? At the present time I can perhaps get 1% per year in the bank. The author of your textbook gets perhaps 2% to 3% of the money you pay for your text, so I do not think this problem rests with the author’s excess profits.

I found it insane that anyone could simply assume that such profits are reasonable in a world that is sustainable. Yet I think now that this is a typical economic viewpoint that underlies the problems of inequality in our world, and the general rule that the rich get richer and the poor get little. So Elsevier publishes research papers that rest in large part on research work paid for by the government, with the researchers being paid for by universities or public agencies, and virtually all the preparation of the published results being done by the researchers, and then as the final blow the publisher wishes to charge the research worker (or their university) for the actual published article. So, for the moment the University of California has set a halt to this profit charade. I am sure we will soon see a set of tearful articles from publishers that they are themselves in the poorhouse and do not make enough profit as, for example, comparable corporations such as Shell Oil or Facebook. So be it.

A cheer for those scientific journals that do not ride this profit bandwagon, and the editors that are not paid for all their work, and the scientists who review submitted papers to improve them and are paid nothing for their extra effort. Perhaps someday we can be finished with the modern economic theory that seems to treat the world as a large Ponzi Scheme, and return to a saner sustainable economic world.

Is Conservation Ecology Destroying Ecology?

Ecology became a serious science some 100 years ago when the problems that it sought to understand were clear and simple: the reasons for the distribution and abundance of organisms on Earth. It subdivided fairly early into three parts, population, community, and ecosystem ecology. It was widely understood that to understand population ecology you needed to know a great deal about physiology and behaviour in relation to the environment, and to understand community ecology you had to know a great deal about population dynamics. Ecosystem ecology then moved into community ecology plus all the physical and chemical interactions with the whole environment. But the sciences are not static, and ecology in the past 60 years has come to include nearly everything from chemistry and geography to meteorological sciences, so if you tell someone you are an ‘ecologist’ now, they have only a vague idea of what you do.

The latest invader into the ecology sphere has been conservation biology so that in the last 20 years it has become a dominant driver of ecological concerns. This has brought ecology into the forefront of publicity and the resulting political areas of controversy, not necessarily bad but with some scientific consequences. ‘Bandwagons’ are for the most part good in science because it attracts good students and professors and brings public support on side. Bandwagons are detrimental when they draw too much of the available scientific funding away from critical basic research and champion scientific fads.

The question I wish to raise is whether conservation ecology has become the latest fad in the broad science of ecology and whether this has derailed important background research. Conservation science begins with the broad and desirable goal of preserving all life on Earth and thus thwarting extinctions. This is an impossible goal and the question then becomes how can we trim it down to an achievable scientific aim? We could argue that the most important goal is to describe all the species on Earth, so that we would then know what “money” we have in the “bank”. But if we look at the insects alone, we see that this is not an achievable goal in the short term. And the key to many of these issues is what we mean by “the short term”. If we are talking10 years, we may have very specific goals, if 100 years we may redesign the goal posts, and if 1000 years again our views might change.

This is a key point. As humans we design our goals in the time frames of months and a few years, not in general in geological time. Because of climate change we are now being forced to view many things in a shorter and shorter time frame. If you live in Miami, you should do something about sea level rise now. If you grow wheat in Australia, you should worry about decreasing annual rainfall. But science in general does not have a time frame. Technology does, and we need a new phone every year, but the understanding of cancer or the ecology of tropical rain forests does not have a deadline.

But conservation biology has a ticking clock called extinction. Now we can compound our concerns about climate change and conservation to capture more of the funding for biological research in order to prevent extinctions of rare and endangered species. 

Ecological science over the past 40 years has been progressing slowly through population ecology into community and ecosystem ecology while learning that the details of populations are critical to the understanding of community function and learning how communities operate is necessary for understanding ecosystem change. None of this has been linear progress but rather a halting progression with many deviations and false leads. In order to push this agenda forward more funding has clearly been needed because teams of researchers are needed to understand a community and even more people to study an ecosystem. At the same time the value of long-term studies has become evident and equipment has become more expensive.

We have now moved into the Anthropocene in which in my opinion the focus has shifted completely from trying to answer the primary problems of ecological science to the conservation of organisms. In practice this has too often resulted in research that could only be called poor population ecology. Poor in the sense of the need for immediate short-term answers for declining species populations with no proper understanding of the underlying problem. We are faced with calls for funding that are ‘crying wolf’ with inadequate data but heartfelt opinions. Recovery plans for single species or closely related groups focus on a set of unstudied opinions that may well be correct, but to test these ideas in a reliable scientific manner would take years. Triage on a large scale is practiced without discussing the issue, and money is thrown at problems based on the publicity generated. Populations of threatened species continue to decline in what can only be described as failed management. Blame is spread in all directions to developers or farmers or foresters or chemical companies. I do not think these are the signs of a good science which above all ought to work from the strength of evidence and prepare recovery plans based on empirical science.

Part of the problem I think lies in the modern need to ‘do something’, ‘do anything’ to show that you care about a particular problem. ‘We have now no time for slow-moving conventional science, we need immediate results now’. Fortunately, many ecologists are critical of these undesirable trends in our science and carry on (e.g. Amos et al. 2013). You will not likely read tweets about these people or read about them in your daily newspapers. Evidence-based science is rarely quick, and complaints like those that I give here are not new (Sutherland et al. 2004, Likens 2010, Nichols 2012).  

Amos, J.N., Balasubramaniam, S., Grootendorst, L. et al. (2013). Little evidence that condition, stress indicators, sex ratio, or homozygosity are related to landscape or habitat attributes in declining woodland birds. Journal of Avian Biology 44, 45-54. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-048X.2012.05746.x

Likens, G.E. (2010). The role of science in decision making: does evidence-based science drive environmental policy? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 8, e1-e9. doi: 10.1890/090132

Nichols, J.D. (2012). Evidence, models, conservation programs and limits to management. Animal Conservation 15, 331-333. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-1795.2012.00574.x

Sutherland, W.J., Pullin, A.S., Dolman, P.M., Knight, T.M. (2004). The need for evidence-based conservation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19, 305-308. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2004.03.018