Yellowstone swarms

Posted by Marcia:

Here is the news from Yellowstone this week!

“As of January 22, 2010 9:00 AM MST there have been 1033 located earthquakes in the recent Yellowstone National Park swarm. The swarm began January 17, 2010 around 1:00 PM MST about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of the Old Faithful area on the northwestern edge of Yellowstone Caldera. Swarms have occurred in this area several times over the past two decades.

There have been 10 events with a magnitude larger than 3, 77 events of magnitude 2 to 3, and 946 events of magnitude less than 2. The largest events so far have been a pair of earthquakes of magnitude 3.7 and 3.8 that occurred after 11 PM MST on January 20, 2010.”

to read more here is a good link

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/yvo/publications/2010/10swarm.php

Resource stoichiometry elucidates the structure and function of arbuscular mycorrhizas across scales. Nancy Collins Johnson. 2009; New Phytologist

Posted by Jim

Resource stoichiometry elucidates the structure and function of arbuscular mycorrhizas across scales. Nancy Collins Johnson. 2009; New Phytologist – Wiley InterScience.

Here’s another very cool one, from Nancy Johnson.  I met Nancy for the first time last year or so when I visited NAU and gave a talk.

This is a very nice paper that updates the application of resource trade theory (from economics) to the dynamics of mycorhizzal associations in plants.  It is a very astute analysis and well worth a read.

Brian Enquist and I just joked (since we have just finished our own accepted Tansley Review on scaling and stoichiometry in plants to New Phytol) that New Phytologist should really be named “New Phytostoichiometrist” for all the papers on plant stoichiometry they have published recently.

Leaf nitrogen to phosphorus ratios of tropical trees: experimental assessment of physiological and environmental controls. Lucas A. Cernusak. 2009; New Phytologist

Posted by Jim

Leaf nitrogen to phosphorus ratios of tropical trees: experimental assessment of physiological and environmental controls. Lucas A. Cernusak. 2009; New Phytologist – Wiley InterScience.

This one is of great interest because of several aspects.

1.  It directly relates to the Growth Rate Hypothesis (GRH) and provides strong support for its validity in plants, at least at high growth rates.  Specifically their data are very consistent with Goren Agren’s new model that predicts a unimodal relationship between plant N:P and growth rate.  So, very fast growing plants tend to have low N:P.  But so do very slow growing ones!  So, be careful!

2.  It relates growth, N:P, and water use efficiency and so it is very relevant to a paper Niu Decao is writing right now.

3.  ASU & SOLS are now developing a formal research and education relationship with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), where these authors work.  So, this should make for firm grounds for collaboration!

Cuatro Cienegas children’s book released

Posted by Jim:

. Carlos Slim Helú .

Here’s a news release related to the production of the wonderful book “Cuatro Ciénegas: La mirada de sus niños” that was produced over the past couple of years by a wonderful group of artist/teachers working with Valeria Souza.  With the support of the Carlos Slim Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, apparently the book will be distributed to classrooms all across Mexico.  It’s a fabulous example of “place-based” learning and conveys a lot of fundamental geological, chemical, and biological concepts in the context of art, dance, theater, and play.  A truly amazing accomplishment for our friend Valeria and her colleagues.

The Future of Phosphorous: Think Tank : The New Yorker

Posted by Jim:

The Future of Phosphorous: Think Tank : The New Yorker.

Yesterday I met with Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize winning author from the New Yorker and Executive Director of the New America Foundation.  We talked about, you guessed it, phosphorus!  Bruce Rittman was there as well and one thing both he and I agreed on is that there is no way that crop-based bioenergy (corn ethanol, switchgrass) can possibly be a viable bioenergy solution.  Bruce estimates that if crop-based bioenergy was scaled up to make a real dent in liquid fuel demand, we would probably DOUBLE the current unsustainable P fertilizer demand.  Algae/cyanobacteria/microbial systems do not have this problem, because the P (and other nutrient elements) can be readily trapped and re-used.  No chance of that in an Illinois farm field, which already loses 50% of its P inputs to erosion and runoff.

High Dietary Inorganic Phosphate Increases Lung Tumorigenesis and Alters Akt Signaling

Posted by Jim:

High Dietary Inorganic Phosphate Increases Lung Tumorigenesis and Alters Akt Signaling — Jin et al. 179 1: 59 — American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Here’s a very exciting paper reporting a study I have been thinking of doing myself for a long time.  I wish I had been the one to do it, but it’s great to see it with my own eyes.

They grew up cancer-susceptible mice with two diets (regular, nutrient sufficient with 0.5% Pi vs. high P in which dietary P was 2x higher, 1%Pi).  Then they measured number and size of lung tumors, serum Pi levels, as well as various cellular responses, including changes in Pi transporters and indicators of cellular proliferation rate.

Animals on the high P diet had:

-higher serum Pi concentrations

- 2x (!) higher number of tumors

-larger tumors

-2x higher expression of Pi membrane transporters

-2x higher levels for expression of cell-cycle indicators

-5x higher levels of expression of cap-dependent protein translation (e.g. ribosome production?), a strong indicator of cell proliferation

All in all, this is extremely consistent with our ideas of r/K selection in human cancer, as lung tumors (in our PLOS ONE paper link) have 2-3 times higher P content than normal tissue and seem to have evolved into tumors via pathways of mutations that result in more rapid cell proliferation (rather than ones that lead to decreased apoptosis or senescence).

And the winner is a Daphnia

The 2009 winner of the Olympus Microscopic photo contest is a crazy looking Daphnia that seems very prehistoric and reptilian.
Here is the web site: http://www.olympusbioscapes.com/gallery/2009/

Woodstoich papers officially accepted!

Posted by Jim:

The  acceptances of the four papers from the August Woodstoich conference are now official for publication in Oikos.  Congratulations to all the authors. Also, hearty thanks to the reviewers who provided such timely (<24 h!) and insightful reviews.  You know who you are!

0. Intro piece:  The evolution of biological stoichiometry under global change.  J. Urabe, S. Naeem, D. Raubenheimer, and J.J. Elser.
1. Persson, J. , Fink, P., Goto, A., Hood, J. M., Jonas, J., and Kato, S.  “To be or not to be what you eat: regulation of stoichometric homeostasis among autotrophs and heterotrophs”.
2.Doi, H., Cherif, M., Iwabuchi, T., Katano, I., Stegen, J. C. and Striebel, M. “Evaluating the allometry of gross growth efficiency and the threshold elemental ratio: towards an integrated understanding of elements and energy dynamics”.
3.  Morehouse, N. I., Nakazawa, T., Booher, C. M., Jeyasingh, P. D., and Hall. M. D. “Sex in a material world: why the study of sexual reproduction and sex-specific traits should become more nutritionally-explicit”.
4. González, A., Kominoski, J. S., Danger, M., Ishida, S., Iwai, N.,and Rubach, A. “Can ecological stoichiometry help explain patterns of biological invasions?”

Hard to believe that such a group as this could write such nice papers!

Stoichiometrically Explicit Food Webs: Feedbacks between Resource Supply, Elemental Constraints, and Species Diversity – Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 40(1):503 – Abstract

Stoichiometrically Explicit Food Webs: Feedbacks between Resource Supply, Elemental Constraints, and Species Diversity – Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 40(1):503 – Abstract.

Posted by Jim:

Here’s a very nice review article just out from Spencer Hall.  Check it out!

Sodium shortage as a constraint on the carbon cycle in an inland tropical rainforest — PNAS

Sodium shortage as a constraint on the carbon cycle in an inland tropical rainforest — PNAS.

Posted by Jim:

Here’s another neat one, this time from Mike Kaspari’s group.  They show that fertilization of tropical detritus and such with sodium (Na) greatly stimulates its break-down.  It also stimulated the abundance of termites and ants.  Importantly, the stimulation effects was observed when Na was added as NaCl and as NaPO4, a cautionary tale to be careful with experimental controls when testing for P-limitation!  It would be easy to misinterpret a response to a NaPO4 enrichment as a response to P if you didn’t have an appropriate sodium control.  This is a very neat story, as the authors point out that plants have little use for Na (they generally use K for similar purposes in intracellular buffering and signalling) but heterotrophs do, including bacteria and animals.  Thus, fundamental stoichiometric imbalance at the plant-”consumer” interface arises in various ways, not just because of the generally high C:nutrient ratios of plant biomass compared to animal biomass.