WTF, Biology?

In this bonus episode, I discuss some of my favorite co-evolved plant-pollinator relationships. I also include a portion of my conversation with Dr. Lindsie McCabe that ended up on the cutting room floor for last week's full episode.  You can learn more about Lindsie and her research by visiting her website https://twitter.com/Lindsie_McCabe. You can also find her on Twitter @Lindsie_McCabe If you're interested in participating in citizen science, you can check out iNaturalist, and/or bumblebeewatch.org As always, music for the show is by Dr. Ron Deckert. Find his music at soundcloud.com/ron-deckert. 

In celebration of #NationalPollinatorsMonth, my guest and I talk about the lesser known and under-appreciated pollinators--native bees and flies. I am joined by Dr. Lindsie McCabe, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pollinating Insect-Biology, Management, Systematics Research lab, otherwise known as the bee lab. Check out more on how to make your garden bee friendly here: https://nationaldaycalendar.com/national-pollinators-month-june/#:~:text=National%20Pollinators%20Month%20in%20June,bats%2C%20and%20other%20natural%20pollinators. You can learn more about Lindsie and her research on her website lindsiemccabe.wordpress.com. You can follow her on Twitter @lindsie_mccabe for awesome bee and other pollinator related science.  The citizen science resources we mentioned are here: https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/ https://www.inaturalist.org/ https://beespotter.org/ Follow WTF Biology on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and/or TikTok @wtf_biology. Music for the show is by Dr. Ron Deckert. Find him at soundcloud.com/ron-deckert

Deserts are extreme places bouncing between too hot and too cold; too dry and too wet. But moss have found a way to buffer those extremes. Join Dr. Jenna Ekwealor and I as we discuss the strange lifestyle of hypolithic moss, namely moss that live underneath rocks. You can learn more about desert mosses at https://3dmoss.berkeley.edu/ Check out Jenna's hero scientists here: https://www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/ https://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/kirsten-fisher Listen to Dr. Ron Deckert's music on soundcloud.com/ron-deckert. This week's song is Green Rain.  Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @wtf_biology in all the places.

In the United States, May is #NationalWildfireAwarenessMonth. To kick off this month, I welcome Dr. Mike Remke back to the show to discuss wildfire's past, present, and future.  Check out this article of the Yurok tribe's use of wildfire: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans Find the wildfire information for your location here: https://www.ready.gov/wildfires  Wildfire Adaptive Partnership information is here: https://www.wildfireadapted.org/  Check out Mike's personal website here: https://www.mycoremke.com/  Music is by Dr. Ron Deckert and you can find this song (Pondo Funk) and all his other songs at www.soundcloud.com/ron-deckert You can support WTF Biology at https://www.patreon.com/wtfbiology. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. I'm @wtf_biolgoy in all of those places.

Western North American landscapes are driven by ecological disturbances. That might mean wildfire, insect outbreaks, or gophers. In the Colorado River and other western North American streams, that means droughts and floods. The trouble happens when humans come along and build dams that prevent those disturbances from happening. My guest today is Dr. Dave Lytle, a Professor of Evolution and Ecology at Oregon State University who uses western North American rivers as a laboratory to understand how disturbances drive the ecology and evolution of aquatic invertebrates.     Learn more about Dr. Dave Lytle by going to his website here: https://lytlelab.science.oregonstate.edu/ You can follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @wtf_biology Music is by Dr. Ron Deckert. This song is called 'Red Rock, Blue Skies'. Listen to this song and all Ron's other songs at soundcloud.com/ron-deckert

Regent's Professor at Northern Arizona University, Dr. Nancy Johnson is a world-famous mycorrhizal researcher. She has roughly 163 publication with over 13,000 citations (according to Google Scholar). So with a track record like that, she deserves an enormous ego, but to her credit, she is the kindest, most down-to-earth, sweetest person who will intellectually bitch-slap you (but only if you deserve it).  In this mini-episode, I revive some of Nancy and my conversation we recorded for the Rachel Carson episode that ended up on the cutting room floor. A blub about Nancy from her lab website: "Nutritional symbioses among soil organisms fascinate me. I study arbuscular mycorrhizas in natural and agricultural systems. A better understanding of the factors controlling the balance of trade between plants and mycorrhizal fungi could lead to their management so that fertilizer inputs can be reduced. Also, since mycorrhizal fungi are enormous (yet invisible), understanding how to manage them may help generate an important belowground carbon sink in our increasingly carbon dioxide enriched world."

Mycorrhizas are the dual organs created by plant roots and their associated fungi that form typically beneficial partnerships. These (usually) mutualistic symbiotic relationships are super important for many ecological processes, especially in the drylands of the southwestern United States. Dr. Mike Remke and I discuss his research in how understanding the mycorrhizal relationships can be used in restoring dryland ecosystems.  Dr. Mike Remke earned a PhD in the School of Forestry at Northern Arizona University. He is now a Forest Health Research Associate with Mountain Studies Institute (check out his profile). He is also a faculty member at his undergraduate Alma Mater, Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Mike is also an awesome photographer and you can follow him on Instagram at myco_remke.

There is more to Richard Dawkins' books, the Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, than I was able to cover in Episode 6, so I am revisiting this topic. If you haven't heard Episode 6, WTF Biologist, Richard Dawkins with Tom Whitham, please go back and check it out. There are also some never-been-heard portions of my conversation with Dr. Tom Whitham, including the origin story of the Cottonwood Ecology Group's motto: "Sacrifice Your Body!" Please follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and/or TikTok. I'm @wtf_biology in all of those places. Ron Deckert writes the music for the show. This week's song is Crystal Clear. Check him out at soundcloud.com/ron-deckert.  Check out https://www.patreon.com/lazybiologyproductions for all the science communication projects I'm working on and decide which one(s) you would like to support. More information is on my website www.lazybiology.com.

That crunchy black moss ball probably isn't dead...at least maybe not if you are in the desert. Just give it a splash with your water bottle and watch this cool little plant resurrect right before your very eyes! Join Dr. Matt Bowker and I as we discuss the super powers of the resurrection moss. Syntricia contains about 79 species and occur all of the world in drylands in a large variety of habitats, ranging from high-elevation mountain meadows to a major component of desert biological soil crusts. Learn more about all things resurrection moss, Syntricia, at https://3dmoss.berkeley.edu/ Learn more about Dr. Matt Bower at his blog. Here's a bit of his bio from that blog site: "I am a soil ecologist largely focused on ecosystem and community ecology of sub-humid and dryer ecosystems (inclusive of forests, woodlands, grasslands, steppes and deserts). My research topics vary from empirical work focused on the advancement of theory in the areas of biodiversity effects on ecosystem function, and species interactions, to applied work focused on modeling the distribution of biological crusts, restoration of biological crusts, understanding erosion processes, and putting soil organisms to work in assisted migration of plants. I am a qualified plant ecologist and mycorrhizal ecologist, but I am best known for my work on biological crusts having authored about 30 papers on this topic, including several specifically on restoration. I maintain an international network of collaborators in Spain, Australia, and the United Kingdom and I am a participant in a truly global scientific network studying global drylands."

Richard Dawkins' contributions to evolutionary biology (and pop culture) revolutionized the field of study. He is an emeritus fellow of New College Oxford and was the first University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science. He is also my science crush. Dawkins has authored several books, but this episode focuses on his first two, The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (1982). While Dawkins is known for voicing his strong opinion about religion, this episode focuses only on the science of this important evolutionary biologist.  I am joined by Dr. Tom Whitham, who provided some of the earliest hard data to support the extended phenotype. Tom Whitham is Regents’ Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011, Whitham received the prestigious Eminent Ecologist Award by the Ecological Society of America—the group’s highest honor—for his outstanding body of work and his training of a new generation of scientists. Whitham served as the primary scientific advisor of an award-winning PBS documentary, A Thousand Invisible Cords: Connecting Genes to Ecosystems, which I highly recommend. This video is what convinced me to apply to graduate school. Whitham has authored or co-authored more than 220 papers in scientific journals, including Science and Nature. Music this week is "Crystal Clear" by Ron Deckert. Find him on SoundCloud. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @wtf_biology in all those places.   Topics covered: group selection, common gardens, foundation species, beavers, cottonwoods, aphids, Ogden Nature Center