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EEB Faculty Awarded

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Three of EEB’s own faculty members, Nina Fefferman, Orou Gaoue, and Xingli Giam, were honored with awards at the recent College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Awards Night. 

Nina Fefferman was recognized with the Academic Outreach Award for Service – she was not able to attend the ceremony, as she was doing more of the pandemic preparedness / response work for which she was honored.

Orou Gaoue was recognized with the Academic Outreach Award for Research and Creative Activity. 

Xingli Giam was recognized with the Early Career Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement  award. 

Congratulations to these faculty members! 

Graduate Student Wieteke Holthuijzen awarded at 50th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group

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EEB Graduate Student Wieteke Holthuijzen received the best PhD poster award at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group and also received the Chairs Choice Award for assistance in organizing the conference. Per their website, “The Pacific Seabird Group (PSG) is a society of professional seabird researchers and managers dedicated to the study and conservation of seabirds…PSG members include biologists, wildlife managers, post-docs, students and conservation biologists from 16 countries including the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan. PSG annual meetings and publications provide forums where members can share their findings on all research topics related to Pacific seabirds, and discuss local and large scale conservation issues.”

 

Title: Determining arthropod consumption by Laysan Ducks to inform non-target mitigation efforts during rodent eradication

Authors: Wieteke Holthuijzen, Carmen Antaky, Beth Flint, Jonathan Plissner, Coral Wolf, Holly Jones

 

Abstract: The critically endangered koloa pōhaka (Laysan Duck, Anas laysanensis) in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands has wild populations on Kamole (Laysan Island), Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll NWR), and Hōlanikū (Kure Atoll). Although its population and distribution have increased since its listing in 1967, the koloa pōhaka faces a new risk on Kuaihelani: non-target poisoning via a pending House Mouse (Mus musculus) eradication. After mice were observed attacking and depredating mōlī (Laysan Albatross, Phoebastria immutabilis) on Sand Island of Kuaihelani in 2015, plans to eradicate mice with rodenticide were quickly developed. To reduce exposure to rodenticide, ducks will be captured and translocated to Eastern Island (mouse-free) during eradication activities. Even so, ducks may risk secondary poisoning by ingesting arthropods that feed on brodifacoum bait. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor rodenticide residue in arthropods to determine when koloa pōhaka can be safely released post-eradication. Because duck diet is unknown on Kuaihelani, we used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to identify which arthropods ducks consume. We found that Sand Island’s ducks most frequently consume cockroaches (Blattodea), freshwater ostracods (Cyprididae), midges (Chironomidae), and isopods (Porcellionidae). Notably, Sand Island’s ducks consume entirely different arthropods from ducks on Kamole, which mainly eat flies (Diptera) and brine shrimp (Anostraca, Artemia sp.). Our study adds to the literature on the biology and ecology of translocated koloa pōhaka populations by using advanced techniques to uncover their diet with a high degree of taxonomic precision. In addition, our study serves as a model for risk mitigation during invasive rodent eradications.

Investigating New Digital Authorities

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In the years since social media became part of our daily lives, an increased number of individuals are self-organizing online around identity, social topics, and various other interests. This transition leads to a new type of cultural authority and one that researchers are investigating to understand how the online human world interacts with the offline human world at both the individual and collective level. 

Sergey Gavrilets, Distinguished Professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to research the emergence of these new digital authorities on social media. The $1.2 million grant is the largest Templeton Foundation award in UT history.

“I’ve always been puzzled by how presumably reasonable people can come up with completely different strong beliefs or understandings about the same events or processes that happened or are happening in different situations affecting their personal life or our society,” Gavrilets said. “Over the last couple of years, with the 2020 elections and COVID, these differences have become particularly striking and their real and potential consequences particularly dangerous.”

The big question he wants to answer? “How are contemporary social media changing human social and cultural evolution?”

Understanding How New Authorities Develop

Gavrilets and colleague Neil Johnson from the George Washington University will leverage recent work on online behaviors to build a new understanding of how these new authorities develop and function. They will look at how these new authorities contribute to cultural polarizations and how their efforts and impacts are influenced. 

“We will study the emergence of self-organized groups spouting extremism, hate, and vaccine hesitancy within and across social media platforms,” Gavrilets said. “We will look at their structure and try to understand how its composition defines who listens and how these new identity groups emerge.”

Gavrilets, a mathematical biologist whose work focuses on human social behavior, will borrow ideas and theoretical tools from ecology and evolutionary biology and apply them to human social behaviors online. 

“This work will not only help us to understand online human social behaviors better, but also how our attitudes and beliefs are shaped,” said Gavrilets, who also is the director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity at UT.

“Misinformation about science, climate change, vaccination, COVID, and political processes and events has a potential to affect the life, prosperity, and wellbeing of everyone in a negative way,” Gavrilets said. “By understanding how new social and cultural authorities are formed online, we can develop better policies for governments and businesses to counter misinformation and simultaneously promote public understanding of science-based policies aiming to improve our life and prosperity.”

To learn more, read the full project summary online. 

About the John Templeton Foundation

Founded in 1987, the John Templeton Foundation supports research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. They fund work on subjects ranging from black holes and evolution to creativity, forgiveness, and free will. They also encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large. Their aspiration is to help people create lives of meaning and purpose and to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.

With an endowment of $3.8 billion and annual giving of approximately $140 million, the Foundation ranks among the 25 largest grantmaking foundations in the United States. Headquartered outside Philadelphia, their philanthropic activities have engaged all major faith traditions and extended to more than 57 countries around the world.

Ecology Professor Receives NSF Grant to Research Global Change Affecting Ecosystems

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Stephanie KivlinStephanie Kivlin, assistant professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), and co-principal investigators, Susan Kalisz and Nick Smith, received a $3.58 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to fund collaborative research for their project “Defining the mechanisms and consequences of mutualism reorganization in the Anthropocene.”

Kivlin and her colleague Kalisz, EEB professor, received $2.33 million of the grant, while Smith, assistant professor in Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University, received the remaining funding.

The five-year study will allow Kivlin and her colleagues to research the symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi and how global changes, including invasive species, affect them.

“Our current collaborative NSF integrative biology grant will investigate how invasive plants disrupt native plant and mycorrhizal fungal associations from small-scale nutrient fluxes to native plant health, composition, and ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycles,” Kivlin said.

The project builds off decades of Kalisz’s NSF-funded long-term research in environmental biology studies at the Trillium Trail in Pittsburgh that focused on the effects of the presence of garlic mustard, a highly invasive plant species, on native plant species.

“Plant invasions are one of the largest impacts of human land-use across Earth, but the effects of invasions on belowground processes have largely been unexplored. Our project will unearth these hidden effects so society can be better prepared to mitigate detrimental effects on native plants in the future,” Kivlin said.

There is not currently enough information about how interactions between plants and fungi respond to climate and land-use change because these interactions tend to be hidden and widely dispersed.

“Fundamental knowledge from our work will determine how global change will disrupt interactions among organisms in natural ecosystems. Many plants and animals, like humans, rely on their microbiome to survive and thus, it is crucial that we understand how these interactions will perform under future conditions,” Kivlin said.

Undergraduate students in underrepresented groups from rural Appalachia who otherwise would not have the opportunity to engage in research will be given the chance to do so. Students will conduct laboratory experiments at UT and will partake in field experiments in Pittsburgh.

–Story by Jessica Foshee