What do we mean by ‘extreme ecological events’? What’s more important to a population, more frequent extremes or changes to average conditions? How should we link the performance of individuals to the success or failure of entire populations?
On this episode, we talk with Mark Denny, Stanford University professor of marine science and former director of the Hopkins Marine Station. In his 2019 paper, “Performance in a variable world,” Mark reviewed how organisms perform in highly variable environments -- a problem that has taken on new urgency as climates change. We also talk about extreme ecological events -- what they are, why they occur, and how they affect organisms. Often, extreme conditions arise from unusual combinations of otherwise normal patterns of variation in multiple underlying factors. Predicting the effects of climate extremes therefore requires holistic approaches to monitoring environments coupled with an integrative understanding of animal physiology and behavior.
This episode of Big Biology is sponsored by the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. Founded in 1892, Hopkins Marine Station is the oldest marine laboratory on America’s west coast conducting research that addresses fundamental questions at every level of marine biology, from genes to ecosystems.
Cover art: Keating Shahmehri
--- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bigbiology/supportIntroducing Genetics Unzipped
Replaying the MP3 of Life (Episode 21 Re-release)
Containing Cancer with Squirrel Ecology (Ep 12 Re-release)
Shrimp Fight Clubs and Basic Science (Ep 6 Re-release)
Bioelectric Computation (Ep 39 Re-release)
What the flux? The evolution of oxygen cascades (Ep 86)
Little Biology: Zombie Parasites
The rise of the mammals and fall of the dinosaurs (Ep 85)
Immune System: Make Love not War (Ep 8 Re-release)
Fractals in the Foliage (Ep 84)
The Amazon in us (Ep 83)
Survival of the systems: The power of persistence (Ep 63 Re-release)
Organisms are not machines (Ep 82)
How staying cool blunts evolution (Ep 81)
Human-wildlife conflict in a changing world (Ep 80)
How the genetic lottery affects complex human traits (Ep 79)
The amphibian omnivore’s dilemma: Plasticity-led evolution in spadefoot tadpoles (Ep 78)
A (Very) Short Interview with Henry Gee: 4 Billion Years in 30 Minutes (Ep 77)
Beasty beats: The origins of musicality (Ep 76)
Hidden network: The evolutionary relationship between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and plants (Ep 75)
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