Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Economies Of Extinction: Animals, Labour, And Inheritance In The Longleaf Pine Forests Of The Us South, Nathaniel Otjen

Animal Studies Journal

Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct …

Rhetorics Of Species Revivalism And Biotechnology – A Roundtable Dialogue, Eva Kasprzycka, Charlotte Wrigley, Adam Searle, Richard Twine

Animal Studies Journal

This informal dialogue contextualises and explores contemporary practices of nonhuman animal gene-modification in de-extinction projects. Looking at recent developments in biotechnology’s role in de-extinction sciences and industries, these interdisciplinary scholars scrutinise the neoliberal impetus driving ‘species revivalism’ in the wake of the Capitalocene. Critical examinations of species integrity, cryo-preservation, techno-optimism, rewilding initiatives and projects aimed at restoring extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth and bucardo are used to map some of the necessary restructuring of conservation policies and enterprises that could secure viably sustainable – and just – futures for nonhuman animals at risk of extinction. The authors question …

The Effects Of Floral Attributes And Conspecifics On Bumble Bee Forager Memory, Lucas Lauter, Tiffany Dinh

Undergraduate Research Symposium

What do bees remember about flowers? These memories are important for both bees and flowers. The bees have better foraging success and gain more nectar and pollen from flowers when they remember the most rewarding flower types. More memorable flowers will be visited more frequently, resulting in more successful pollination for the plant. At the same time, bees can also learn about flowers from other bees and may remember this information differently. We are training and testing three floral cues and a single social cue to see how the different types of cues affect their learning and memory of rewarding …

Reconstructing Bison And Mammoth Migration During The Late Pleistocene And Early Holocene Of Central Texas Using Strontium Isotopes, Joshua John Porter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

During the Late Pleistocene (LP; past 130,000 years), over two-thirds of large mammal (>45kg) species went extinct globally. While the role of humans is hotly debated, the effect of these extinctions is growing clearer; the extinctions resulted in widespread and lasting faunal community reorganization. However, the impact of these extinctions on dietary and migratory behavior within faunal communities is unknown. Our study examines the impact of the megafaunal extinctions on the dietary and migratory behavior of surviving Bison individuals in Texas using carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotopes. Strontium isotopes are incorporated into mammalian enamel during their tooth development and …

Neural Substrates Of Active Avoidance And Its Impact On Fear Extinction, Elizabeth Parisi

Theses and Dissertations

Models of anxiety suggest that avoidance of a conditioned fear stimulus prevents new safety learning, thereby serving to maintain fear. However, there is little empirical data in humans on the impact of avoidance of conditioned fear stimuli on subsequent fear extinction. In the present study I investigated the effect of avoidance of threat on neural activity during avoidance/control and a subsequent extinction phase using ultra high-resolution (7T) fMRI. Results indicated that active avoidance was associated with increased activity in regions involved in reward prediction, but this did not differentiate active avoidance from an active control condition. Neural activation during the …

Contextually Modulated Avoidance Behavior In Rats Post-Pavlovian Extinction, Lauren Branigan

Theses and Dissertations

The following study sought to examine the psychological substrates of renewal (e.g.., context dependent extinction processes) for conditioned avoidance behaviors in rats. Using signaled active avoidance conditioning, rats acquired two-way shuttle responding, to two different auditory stimuli. These behaviors were then extinguished through exposure to the auditory stimuli where shuttling behavior was now without consequence. Subjects were then tested for renewal of avoidance in three distinct renewal sequences (e.g., ABA vs ABB, AAB vs AAA, and ABC vs ABB) in three separate groups of rats. It was found that subjects showed more responding to a stimulus presented outside of its …

Devonian Stromatoporoid Interactions At The Falls Of The Ohio State Park, Clarksville, Indiana, Morgan Sierra Hall

Undergraduate Theses

Stromatoporoids are calcitic sponges that occurred in the fossil record from the Early Ordovician to Late Devonian period. These sponges interacted with other organisms, especially rugose and tabulate corals. Some corals appear to benefit from the rigidity of stromatoporoids in response to turbulent waters. Stromatoporoids and many corals went extinct during the Frasnian-Famennian crisis when paleoenvironmental parameters were shifting. Studying the relationships between these taxa may provide insight to their vulnerability during the extinction.

This research was performed at the Falls of the Ohio in Clarksville, Indiana. Organisms in the Coral Zone were studied using transect sampling. Each fossil along …

Collapse Of An Ecological Network In Ancient Egypt, Justin Yeakel, Mathias Pires, Lars Rudolf, Nathaniel Dominy

Dartmouth Scholarship

The dynamics of ecosystem collapse are fundamental to determining how and why biological communities change through time, as well as the potential effects of extinctions on ecosystems. Here, we integrate depictions of mammals from Egyptian antiquity with direct lines of paleontological and archeological evidence to infer local extinctions and community dynamics over a 6,000-y span. The unprecedented temporal resolution of this dataset enables examination of how the tandem effects of human population growth and climate change can disrupt mammalian communities. We show that the extinctions of mammals in Egypt were nonrandom and that destabilizing changes in community composition coincided with …

The Complementary Niches Of Anthropocentric And Biocentric Conservationists, Malcolm L. Hunter Jr., Kent H. Redford, David Lindenmayer

Publications

A divergence of values has become apparent in recent debates between conservationists who focus on ecosystem services that can improve human well-being and those who focus on avoiding the extinction of species. These divergent points of view fall along a continuum from anthropocentric to biocentric values, but most conservationists are relatively closer to each other than to the ends of the spectrum. We have some concerns with both positions but emphasize that conservation for both people and all other species will be most effective if conservationists focus on articulating the values they all share, being respectful of divergent values, and …

Averting Lemur Extinctions Amid Madagascar's Political Crisis, Christoph Schwitzer, Russell Mittermeier, Steig Johnson, Giuseppe Donati, Mitchell Irwin, Heather Peacock, Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Josia Razafindramanana, Edward E. Louis, Lounes Chikhi, Ian C. Colquhoun, Jennifer Tinsman, Ranier Dolch, Marni Lafleur, Stephen Nash, Erik Patel, Blanchard Randrianambinina, Tove Rasolofoharivelo, Patricia C. Wright

Anthropology Publications

The most threatened mammal group on Earth, Madagascar’s five endemic lemur families (lemurs are found nowhere else), represent more than 20% of the world’s primate species and 30% of family-level diversity. This combination of diversity and uniqueness is unmatched by any other country—remarkable considering that Madagascar is only 1.3 to 2.9% the size of the Neotropics, Africa, or Asia, the other three landmasses where nonhuman primates occur. But lemurs face extinction risks driven by human disturbance of forest habitats. We discuss these challenges and reasons for hope in light of site-specific, local actions proposed in an emergency conservation action plan.

The Role Of The Amygdala, Retrosplenial Cortex, And Medial Prefrontal Cortex In Trace Fear Extinction And Reconsolidation, Janine Lynn Kwapis

Theses and Dissertations

A wealth of research has outlined the neural circuits responsible for the consolidation, reconsolidation, and extinction of standard "delay" fear conditioning, in which awareness is not required for learning. Far less is understood about the neural circuit supporting more complex, explicit associations. "Trace" fear conditioning is considered to be a rodent model of explicit fear because it relies on the cortex and hippocampus and requires explicit contingency awareness in humans for successful acquisition. In the current set of studies, we aimed to better characterize the neural circuit supporting the consolidation, reconsolidation, and extinction of trace fear in order to better …

The Role Of Nmda Receptors In Extinction Of Cocaine Self-Administration, Madalyn Hafenbreidel

Theses and Dissertations

Relapse is highly prevalent among recovering addicts, and can be triggered by associations made between the rewarding effects of the drug and cues, such as drug paraphernalia or contexts. Inhibiting these associations, through new extinction learning, could help reduce relapse rates. Extinction is formed in phases, like other types of memory. The memory first is acquired in short-term memory, then is consolidated into long-term storage from which it can be retrieved at a later time (Quirk & Mueller, 2008). NMDA receptors are necessary for extinction in other paradigms (Santini, Muller, & Quirk, 2001), and we previously found that blocking NMDA …

Late-Surviving Megafauna In Tasmania Australia, Implicate Human Involvement In Their Extinction, Christian Turney, T Flannery, Richard Roberts, Craig Reid, Keith Fifield, T Higham, Zenobia Jacobs, Noel Kemp, Eric Colhoun, R.M. Kalin

Richard G Roberts

Establishing the cause of past extinctions is critical if we are to understand better what might trigger future occurrences and how to prevent them. The mechanisms of continental late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, however, are still fiercely contested. Potential factors contributing to their demise include climatic change, human impact, or some combination. On the Australian mainland, 90% of the megafauna became extinct by ≈46 thousand years (ka) ago, soon after the first archaeological evidence for human colonization of the continent. Yet, on the neighboring island of Tasmania (which was connected to the mainland when sea levels were lower), megafaunal extinction appears …

Initial Speleothem Results From Western Flores And Eastern Java, Indonesia: Were Climate Changes From 47 To 5ka Responsible For The Extinction Of Homo Floresiensis?, Richard Roberts, Allan Chivas, T. Sutikna, Michael Morwood, J Zhao, Kira Westaway

Richard G Roberts

No abstract provided.

Dragon's Paradise Lost: Palaeobiogeography, Evolution And Extinction Of The Largest-Ever Terrestrial Lizards (Varanidae), Scott A. Hocknull, Michael J. Morwood, Rokus Awe, Gerrit D. Van Den Bergh, P Piper, I Kurniawan

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Background The largest living lizard species, Varanus komodoensis Ouwens 1912, is vulnerable to extinction, being restricted to a few isolated islands in eastern Indonesia, between Java and Australia, where it is the dominant terrestrial carnivore. Understanding how large-bodied varanids responded to past environmental change underpins long-term management of V. komodoensis populations. Methodology/Principal Findings We reconstruct the palaeobiogeography of Neogene giant varanids and identify a new (unnamed) species from the island of Timor. Our data reject the long-held perception that V. komodoensis became a giant because of insular evolution or as a specialist hunter of pygmy Stegodon. Phyletic giantism, coupled with …

Dramatic Decline Of Wild South China Tigers Panthera Tigris Amoyensis: Field Survey Of Priority Tiger Reserves, Ronald Tilson, Hu Defu, Jeff Muntifering, Philip J. Nyhus

Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes results of a Sino- American field survey seeking evidence of South China tigers Panthera tigris amoyensis in the wild. In 2001 and 2002 field surveys were conducted in eight reserves in five provinces identified by government authorities as habitat most likely to contain tigers. The surveys evaluated and documented evidence for the presence of tigers, tiger prey and habitat disturbance. Approximately 290 km of mountain trails were evaluated. Infrared remote cameras set up in two reserves captured 400 trap days of data. Thirty formal and numerous informal interviews were conducted with villagers to document wildlife knowledge, livestock …

Dramatic Decline Of Wild South China Tigers Panthera Tigris Amoyensis: Field Survey Of Priority Tiger Reserves, Ronald Tilson, Hu Defu, Jeff Muntifering, Philip J. Nyhus

Philip J. Nyhus

This paper describes results of a Sino- American field survey seeking evidence of South China tigers Panthera tigris amoyensis in the wild. In 2001 and 2002 field surveys were conducted in eight reserves in five provinces identified by government authorities as habitat most likely to contain tigers. The surveys evaluated and documented evidence for the presence of tigers, tiger prey and habitat disturbance. Approximately 290 km of mountain trails were evaluated. Infrared remote cameras set up in two reserves captured 400 trap days of data. Thirty formal and numerous informal interviews were conducted with villagers to document wildlife knowledge, livestock …