Variation in the Abundance of Bees Across Distinct Montane Meadows

Across different landscapes, plant abundance and richness change. Bee distributions may vary spatially or temporally in accordance with differences in floral diversity. I used a habitat-based approach to investigate the hypothesis that the abundance of bees in assemblages varied among three distinct meadow types: dry meadow, wet meadow-Veratrum, and wet meadow-Salix. Patterns of bee abundance were sampled using bee bowls and netting around Gothic, Colorado. I sampled four triplets of sites (each consisting of the three meadow types) every other week, between June 22 and August 26, 2009. In total, I caught 2,938 bees and identified each of them to family. I found that there was no significant difference in the abundance of bees across the three meadow types. Furthermore, I did not detect a difference in bee abundance within a family across the three meadow types, though there were significantly more bees of the family Apidae than either Colletidae or Megachilidae within wet meadow-Veratrum sites. There was no significant relationship between bee abundance and the mean flower abundance or rarefied richness at sites. Overall, I found no difference in bee abundance at different meadow types once divided into four sampling periods; however, bee abundance for the family Apidae depended on time and meadow type while bee abundance for the family Halictidae depended on time only. Additional experimentation over multiple years may be needed to reveal significant patterns. About 50 percent of the variation in bee abundance was accounted for by site, rarefied plant species richness, and daily rainfall. Bee distribution may also depend on nesting preference, or perhaps there are species level differences that this experiment was no able to detect

Conservation Biology of Bats: Invasive Threats, Research Effort, and Extinction Risk

Global conservation for bats is needed: 15 percent of species are listed as extinct or threatened, signifying that they are at a high risk of extinction. An additional 17 percent are designated data-deficient, denoting that a threat category has not been assigned owing to insufficient knowledge on species abundance or distribution. In this dissertation, I use methods from both ecology and evolution to contribute to the study of bat conservation. Firstly, I review the impacts of biological invasion on bats, and provide examples of threats from each of four broad categories: predation, pathogens, competition, and indirect interactions. Overall, detailed accounts of invasive species threatening bats are lacking, but the most persuasive cases occur on islands. Secondly, I provide a case study of the endangered Pacific sheath-tailed bat (Emballonura semicaudata rotensis) to illustrate the importance of investigating indirect effects of invasion on species of conservation concern. The results imply that the impact of an invasive shrub on the persistence of the bat has been underestimated and that it is unclear how a feral ungulate alters bat habitat aside from reducing understory vegetation. Thirdly, I describe the state of academic literature for most of the bat clade, and provide ranked prioritization of bats for research based upon species vulnerability and evolutionary irreplaceability. Lastly, I use evolutionary comparative methods to identify species of conservation concern. Given simulations using important correlates of bat extinction risk, I predict that 31 data-deficient bats are threatened by endangerment. Overall, my work will benefit bat conservation by highlighting gaps in knowledge and elucidating research priorities that will be useful for directing conservation action

Development and Validation of the Mobile Dating App Gratification Scale: Effects of Sought Gratifications on User Behavior and Outcomes

Mobile dating apps were created to meet the needs of Millennials, who tend to be more interested in casual relationships than serious dating. Despite their popularity, research has found that dating apps are not being used for their intended purpose. Two studies were conducted to develop and validate a scale for mobile dating app gratifications and to determine how individuals’ behavior varies based on their sought gratifications. Results indicate that there are four primary mobile dating app gratifications (Validation, Entertainment, Relationships, and Hookups) and that they vary between genders. Individuals who seek different gratifications also engage in different behaviors while using the app and achieve different relational outcomes. The study highlights implications for future research and additional use of the Mobile Dating App Gratification Scale

Provenance of early Paleogene strata in the Bighorn Basin (Wyoming, U.S.A.): Implications for Laramide tectonism and basin-scale stratigraphic patterns

The Bighorn Basin (Wyoming, U.S.A.) contains some of the best exposed and studied nonmarine early Paleogene strata. Over a century of research has produced a highly resolved record of early Paleogene terrestrial climatic and biotic change as well as extensive documentation of spatiotemporal variability in basin-scale stratigraphy. The basin also offers the opportunity to integrate these data with the uplift and erosional history of the Laramide uplifts that surround the Bighorn Basin. Herein we provide a comprehensive provenance analysis of the early Paleogene Fort Union and Willwood formations in the Bighorn Basin from paleocurrent measurements (n = 510 measurements), detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology (n = 2,258 age determinations), and sandstone compositions (n = 76 thin sections) obtained from fluvial sand bodies distributed widely across the basin. We aim to address the following questions; why there are lithologic changes between the Fort Union and the Willlwood formations, why is there spatial variation of grain size within the Willwood formation, and does the boundary sandstone represent a greater efficiency of sediment transport or a change in provenance. From these new data, and data compiled from previous studies (May et al, 2013) we are able to present a comprehensive paleodrainage and unroofing history for the Bighorn, Owl Creek, and Beartooth Mountains as well as identify hinterland sediment sources in the Sevier fold-and-thrust belt. Broadly, we observe data consistent with (1) erosion of latest Cretaceous shales from the Bighorn Mountains and westward transport into the basin; (2) erosion of Late Cretaceous shales as well as lower Mesozoic and upper Paleozoic siliciclastics from the Owl Creek Mountains and its transport north and northwest into the basin; and (3) erosion of lower Mesozoic sedimentary cover, Paleozoic sedimentary cover, and crystalline basement from the Beartooth Mountains eastward into the northern Bighorn Basin. Similar to previous studies, we find evidence for a system of transverse rivers contributing water and sediment to an axial river system that drained north into southern Montana during both the Paleocene and Eocene. Additionally, the data indicate asymmetric unroofing histories on either side of the Bighorn and Owl Creek mountains, implying a drainage divide that we attribute to the vergence direction of the underlying basement reverse faults and exacerbated by the prevailing paleoclimate. In the southwestern and northern portions of the basin we find evidence for (1) sediment sourced from the diverse Phanerozoic cover and the Neoproterozoic Brigham Group quartzites in the Paris thrust sheet of southeastern Idaho; (2) erosion of sediment from the Idaho Batholith; and (3) sediment likely generated from the crystalline basement of the Tobacco Root Mountains and Madison Range in Montana transported southward and eastward to the Bighorn Basin. We suggest this sediment was funneled through the hypothesized Monida transverse structural zone situated between the Helena and Wyoming salients of the Sevier fold-and-thrust belt, then into the Absaroka Basin, and across the Cody Arch into the Bighorn Basin. This provenance pattern appears to have largely continued until ~50 Ma at which point more proximal source areas were available in the Absaroka volcanic province. Basin-scale patterns in the stratigraphy of the Fort Union and Willwood formations were a product of catchment size and the lithologies eroded from the associated highlands. Mudrock-dominated strata in the eastern and southeastern Bighorn Basin are inferred to be caused by comparably smaller catchment areas and the finer-grained Mesozoic strata eroded. The conglomeratic and sand-dominated strata of the southwestern area of the Bighorn Basin are inferred to be caused by large, braided fluvial systems with catchments that extended for hundreds of kilometers into the Sevier fold-and-thrust belt and erosion of more resistant source lithologies. The northernmost early Paleogene strata represents the coalescing of these fluvial systems as well as rivers whose catchments extended into southwestern Montana that contained more resistant, crystalline lithologies. These factors generated the thick, laterally extensive fluvial sand bodies common in that area of the basin

Individuality, stability, and variability of the plaque microbiome

© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Frontiers in Microbiology 7 (2016): 564, doi:10.3389/fmicb.2016.00564.Dental plaque is a bacterial biofilm composed of a characteristic set of organisms. Relatively little information from cultivation-independent, high-throughput analyses has been published on the temporal dynamics of the dental plaque microbiome. We used Minimum Entropy Decomposition, an information theory-based approach similar to oligotyping that provides single-nucleotide resolution, to analyze a previously published time series data set and investigate the dynamics of the plaque microbiome at various analytic and taxonomic levels. At both the genus and 97% Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) levels of resolution, the range of variation within each individual overlapped that of other individuals in the data set. When analyzed at the oligotype level, however, the overlap largely disappeared, showing that single-nucleotide resolution enables differentiation of individuals from one another without ambiguity. The overwhelming majority of the plaque community in all samples was made up of bacteria from a moderate number of plaque-typical genera, indicating that the overall community framework is shared among individuals. Each of these genera fluctuated in abundance around a stable mean that varied between individuals, with some genera having higher inter-individual variability than others. Thus, at the genus level, differences between individuals lay not in the identity of the major genera but in consistently differing proportions of these genera from mouth to mouth. However, at the oligotype level, we detected oligotype “fingerprints,” a highly individual-specific set of persistently abundant oligotypes fluctuating around a stable mean over time. For example, within the genus Corynebacterium, more than a dozen oligotypes were detectable in each individual, of which a different subset reached high abundance in any given person. This pattern suggests that each mouth contains a subtly different community of organisms. We also compared the Chinese plaque community characterized here to previously characterized Western plaque communities, as represented by analyses of data emerging from the Human Microbiome Project, and found no major differences between Chinese and Western supragingival plaque. In conclusion, we found the plaque microbiome to be highly individualized at the oligotype level and characterized by stability of community membership, with variability in the relative abundance of community members between individuals and over time.Our work was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research Grant DE022586 (to GGB). Additional support was provided by Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology graduate program (to DRU)

Spatial Ecology of the Human Tongue Dorsum Microbiome

A fundamental question in microbial ecology is how microbes are spatially organized with respect to each other and their host. A test bed for examining this question is the tongue dorsum, which harbors a complex and important microbial community. Here, we use multiplexed fluorescence spectral imaging to investigate the organization of the tongue microbiome at micron to hundred-micron scales. We design oligonucleotide probes for taxa both abundant and prevalent, as determined by sequence analysis. Imaging reveals a highly structured spatial organization of microbial consortia, ranging in linear dimension from tens to hundreds of microns. The consortia appear to develop from a core of epithelial cells, with taxa clustering in domains suggestive of clonal expansion. Quantitative proximity analysis provides the basis for a model of tongue dorsum microbiome organization and dynamics. Our work illustrates how high-resolution analysis of micron-scale organization provides insights into physiological functions and microbiome-host interactions

The influence of body size and net diversification rate on molecular evolution during the radiation of animal phyla

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Molecular clock dates, which place the origin of animal phyla deep in the Precambrian, have been used to reject the hypothesis of a rapid evolutionary radiation of animal phyla supported by the fossil record. One possible explanation of the discrepancy is the potential for fast substitution rates early in the metazoan radiation. However, concerted rate variation, occurring simultaneously in multiple lineages, cannot be detected by "clock tests", and so another way to explore such variation is to look for correlated changes between rates and other biological factors. Here we investigate two possible causes of fast early rates: change in average body size or diversification rate of deep metazoan lineages.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For nine genes for phylogenetically independent comparisons between 50 metazoan phyla, orders, and classes, we find a significant correlation between average body size and rate of molecular evolution of mitochondrial genes. The data also indicate that diversification rate may have a positive effect on rates of mitochondrial molecular evolution.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>If average body sizes were significantly smaller in the early history of the Metazoa, and if rates of diversification were much higher, then it is possible that mitochondrial genes have undergone a slow-down in evolutionary rate, which could affect date estimates made from these genes.</p

Homomesies on permutations -- an analysis of maps and statistics in the FindStat database

In this paper, we perform a systematic study of permutation statistics and bijective maps on permutations in which we identify and prove 122 instances of the homomesy phenomenon. Homomesy occurs when the average value of a statistic is the same on each orbit of a given map. The maps we investigate include the Lehmer code rotation, the reverse, the complement, the Foata bijection, and the Kreweras complement. The statistics studied relate to familiar notions such as inversions, descents, and permutation patterns, and also more obscure constructs. Beside the many new homomesy results, we discuss our research method, in which we used SageMath to search the FindStat combinatorial statistics database to identify potential homomesies

Local Elements

The mission of Local Elements is to create an eco-urban park to harbor Boise’s local movement and need for recreational community space. This project is an integrated park that includes a cultural and artistic marketplace, an outdoor amphitheater, greenhouses and multipurpose educational facilities. A key aspect of Local Elements is to create a socio-economic space that enables sustainable development, through both its design and function. This will be accomplished through a collaborative plan including: a new construction method made from completely recycled building materials, geothermal heating, xeriscaping, rainwater recycling and solar power. Local Elements will stimulate the economy and steer Boise toward a connected local community focus. Local Elements is a valuable development project for the City of Boise. People of all ages will enjoy this addition to downtown, as it will remain a prominent place of interaction and use for generations to come