Mussel Evolution in the Great Lakes

by izik
Zebra mussels hang on while quagga mussels take over:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

The zebra mussels that have wreaked ecological havoc on the Great Lakes are harder to find these days — not because they are dying off, but because they are being replaced by a cousin, the quagga mussel. But zebra mussels still dominate in fast-moving streams and rivers.
[More]

You have to really enjoy something that comes out of the Center of Rapid Evolution. Much more interesting than the Center of Slow Evolution.

Some very nice work revealed that the ability to generate the threads that hold the mussels to a surface is a major indication of what sort of habitat these cousin species can occupy.

The zebra can generate a lot of threads when water flow is great, meaning it can occupy fast moving rivers where the quagga can not. Both of the mussels have tremendous impacts on the Great Lakes environment, removing the major food sources required by fish. So the fish are disappearing or failing to grow.

In addition, the filtering of the water by the mussels produces much clearer water. It may look nicer but the increased penetration of the water by sunlight results in larger algal blooms which can deplete oxygen from the water and again, harm fish.

It seems to me that studying the environments in the Great Lakes is very similar to studying on an island. The environment is generally closed to outside encroachment and so has developed a well defined, stable ecosystem. Thus, when something is introduced that the ecosystems have no defense against, we can observe the perturbations that result quite easily.

Now if we can just figure out what to do about it without causing greater problems. BUt one can certainly see why evolution might be rapid. The selective pressures on the ecosystem must also be rapidly changing.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Idea Club Topics

[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable]
There have been some requests for more information on the topics in the new Idea Club Topic Poll. So here are some thumbnail explanations:

• New Drugs – New Models – the current approachs for drug development cost a lot of money. Most companies are only interested in producing drugs that will be billion dollar sellers. How can we change the current process to permit important but less profitable drugs to be marketed?
• Getting Away From CAFOs – these are concentrated animal feeding operations – factory farms. There are many benefits from this approach but also many detrimental prospects. What are the alternatives?
• Trucking of Tomorrow – a substantial amount of fuel is used by the trucking industry but little has really been done to make the vehicles more fuel efficient. What are some possibilities?
• Algae for Fuel – photosynthesis is a great way to convert solar power into sources of energy. How can algae be adapted to provide the energy we need?
• Fixing the FDA – the FDA was created to deal with problems of the early 20th Century. How can it be changed to meet the problems of the 21st Century?
• Green Nanotech? - Is there such a thing? What is it and what can it do?
• Resilient Cultures - What was the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island thinking? How can a culture deal with huge social shocks and survive? What are some of the tools?
• Energy Wedges – the energy/climate problems can not be solved with a single solution. But modeling indicates that substantial effects can be achieved by a variety of approaches, each occupying a wedge of the pie. What are these approaches and what can we do to make them happen?
• Changing Higher Education - Post Secondary education is still based on a model originally developed in the middle of the 19th Century where finding information was difficult and required years of training by experts. Now finding information is easy. How can colleges be altered to take advantage of what we have learned over the last 150 years or so?
• Open Science – How does scientific research change when all aspects, including daily lab notes, are placed on the Web for all to see? Is this a viable model? How does Open access to published results alter scientific exploits?
• Pandemics and People – Can we prepare effectively for a pandemic? What will it look like? How can we prepare?
• What is a Green Job? - Is this just marketing or is there something fundamentally different about a green job than any other? Should it have different incentives or can a purely free market approach work?
• A Culture of Innovation – How does innovation happen? Is it simply random or can a formal process to support creativity be constructed? What would such a culture look like?
• Sustainable Urban Farms – Growing food in the city on privately owned land is becoming a much more viable possibility. What are some of the options and creative solutions that separate urban farming from traditional methods?
• Citizen Science – At the same time many research efforts are requiring multi-millions of dollars to pursue, with large research operations to support, the cost of many procedures has dropped to much that individual people can become involved in research projects. What are some of these projects and how can a distributed approach to research yield successful results?

Feel free to vote here or at the website. Voting ends July 1.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Sustainability, Web 2.0

Open Access papers from CalTech

Joint strategy fictitious play with inertia for potential games:
[Via CaltechAUTHORS: No conditions]

Marden, J. R. and Arslan, G. and Shamma, J. S. (2009) Joint strategy fictitious play with inertia for potential games. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 54 (2). pp. 208-220. ISSN 0018-9286
http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20090527-154250949

[More]

Hey, what can you say about a paper with this for an abstract:

We consider multi-player repeated games involving a large number of players with large strategy spaces and enmeshed utility structures. In these “large-scale” games, players are inherently faced with limitations in both their observational and computational capabilities. Accordingly, players in large-scale games need to make their decisions using algorithms that accommodate limitations in information gathering and processing. This disqualifies some of the well known decision making models such as “Fictitious Play” (FP), in which each player must monitor the individual actions of every other player and must optimize over a high dimensional probability space. We will show that Joint Strategy Fictitious Play (JSFP), a close variant of FP, alleviates both the informational and computational burden of FP. Furthermore, we introduce JSFP with inertia, i.e., a probabilistic reluctance to change strategies, and establish the convergence to a pure Nash equilibrium in all generalized ordinal potential games in both cases of averaged or exponentially discounted historical data. We illustrate JSFP with inertia on the specific class of congestion games, a subset of generalized ordinal potential games. In particular, we illustrate the main results on a distributed traffic routing problem and derive tolling procedures that can lead to optimized total traffic congestion.

Sounds like a lot of fun. Until you see this on the second page, when describing how to set up the game.:

CalTech now puts up many of the papers published by its scientists with free access. They even have a newsfeed so I can stay up to date. There is one biology paper that sounds kind of interesting: Decoding face information in time, frequency and space from direct intracranial recordings of the human brain

Here is what is in the RSS feed:

Facile oxy-functionalization of a nucleophilic metal alkyl with a cis-dioxo metal species via a (2+3) transition state

Cache-oblivious selection in sorted X+Y matrices

Adaptive spacetime meshing for discontinuous Galerkin methods

UV excess measures of accretion onto young very low mass stars and brown dwarfs

Submillimeter galaxies at z ~ 2: evidence for major mergers and constraints on lifetimes, IMP and CO-H_2 conversion factor

A shrinking compact symmetric object: J11584+2450?

The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) 2005: calibration and targeted sources

Spitzer mid-infrared spectroscopy of infrared luminous galaxies at z ~ 2. III. far-IR to radio properties and optical spectral diagnostics

Life is so much easier with having to sit with Index Medicus in the stacks of the library.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science