Kind of a killer week....

...but stuff continues to happen.

Gotta rise at 4:30 in the morning to pick up a van-load of doughnuts that my honor society students sold to help fund their travel to meetings. It's a glamorous life I lead.

Wanna buy some doughnuts?

A couple of interesting stories at ScientificAmerican.com. First, the biogeographic phenomenon of bipolar species. No, not the guy down the street who locks himself in the house with the lights out one day and chases neighborhood kids down the street with a broom the next. These bipolars are the almost 300 species of invertebrates that are found in the polar waters of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans - and apparently nowhere else. The intrigue surrounding their surprising distribution pattern dates back to their 1840s discovery by James Ross on voyages attempting to reach the North and South Poles. Many biologists in the intervening 160 years, including Charles Darwin, have attempted to explain the phenomenon.

Today, the best guess calls into a play a hypothesized deep-ocean current that moves water slowly from pole to pole. However, there's still a lot of conjecture. Among the questions - just how similar are they? DNA analysis should allow us to determine whether animals in similar habitats, but separated by almost 10,000 miles, are really as much alike as they look.

Check out the slideshow here.

The same online issue includes a discussion about the potential impact on island biotas of oceans swelling as the result of warming climates. As my biogeographers are finding out this week, a fundamental prediction from island biogeography theory is that small islands = fewer species. Will rising sea levels over the next century, projected to be anywhere from a few centimeters to almost a meter, unleash a double whammy on already stressed island communities?

While on the subject of island biogeography.... I was doing some YouTube-surfing today and ran across some great E.O. Wilson stuff. It was Wilson, along with Robert MacArthur, who published The Equilibrium Theory of Island Biogeography in 1967 and turned biogeography, and the rest of ecology, on its head. The theory remains one of the most powerful explanatory tools we have - and Wilson remains one of biology's most powerful spokesmen. I've seen him speak a few times, and had the pleasure of meeting him at last year's meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists.

Here, Wilson discusses the "Eureka moment"...



I know a lot of you are educators, or will be. I think that we should all aspire to help some young scientist have their own Eureka moment.

Nova produced a great documentary on Wilson in 2008. You can watch it online here. I particularly recommend "Chapter 4", where Wilson describes the experiment that he performed with Dan Simberloff in the Florida Keys that still represents the most ambitious effort to experimentally validate the equilibrium hypothesis. Very good stuff.