Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Feel Or Perspective?, Mark Rowlands

Animal Sentience

The title of Klein & Barron’s well-argued and thought-provoking target article is, “Insects have the capacity for subjective experience.” However, they also frame their claim using the term “consciousness,” which they seem to take as equivalent to “subjective experience.” This assumed equivalence, I shall argue, is problematic in a way that might vitiate their central argument.

Universal Modes Of Awareness? A “Pre-Reflective” Premise, Uta M. Jürgens

Animal Sentience

Mark Rowlands holds that creatures endowed with pre-reflective awareness may qualify as persons: In pre-reflective awareness, the self and the unity of mental life are implicit in the stream of experience. Rowlands generalizes from an introspective analysis of pre-reflective consciousness in humans to pre-reflective awareness in general. I describe three examples of empirical findings that corroborate the assumption that animal minds have some of the same basic modes of pre-reflective awareness as human minds.

Theory Of Inclusive Fitness, David C. Queller

Biology Faculty Research

A review of Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory: An Introduction. By James A. R. Marshall. Princeton (New Jersey): Princeton University Press. $39.95. xix + 195 p.; ill.; index. ISBN: 978-0-691-16156-3. 2015.

What If Klein & Barron Are Right About Insect Sentience?, Bob Fischer

Animal Sentience

If Klein & Barron are right, then insects may well be able to feel pain. If they can, then the standard approach to animal ethics generates some implausible results. Philosophers need to develop alternatives to this framework to avoid them.

Subjective Experience And Moral Standing, Andy Lamey

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron’s analysis focuses on the capacity for any subjective experience at all. It does not seek to demonstrate that insects can experience pleasure and pain in particular. This would be something of which insects have not traditionally been thought capable. If further research were to demonstrate that one or more insect species turn out to be conscious, yet incapable of experiencing pleasure and pain, it would give rise to a philosophical question that ethicists have yet to answer: Would a creature that is conscious, but lacks the capacity to feel pain, have moral standing?

Phylogenetic Relationships And Evolution Of Snakes, Alex Figueroa

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Snakes represent an impressive evolutionary radiation of over 3,500 widely-distributed species, categorized into 515 genera, encompassing a diverse range of morphologies and ecologies. This diversity is likely attributable to their distinctive morphology, which has allowed them to populate a wide range of habitat types within most major ecosystems. In my first chapter, I provide the largest-yet estimate of the snake tree of life using maximum likelihood on a supermatrix of 1745 taxa (1652 snake species + 7 outgroup taxa) and 9,523 base pairs from 10 loci (5 nuclear, 5 mitochondrial), including previously unsequenced genera (2) and species (61). I then …

Is Cortex Necessary?, Sean Allen-Hermanson

Animal Sentience

A key contention of Klein & Barron (2016) is that consciousness does not depend on cortical structures. A critical appraisal suggests they have overestimated the strength of their evidence.

Who Is A Person? Whoever You Want It To Be, Gwen J. Broude

Animal Sentience

Rowlands provides an expanded definition of personhood that preserves the requirement of unity of mental life from the orthodox definition but argues that implicit unity of mind is sufficient for conferring personhood. This allows more or all animals to be considered persons. Implicit unity of mind may be a bridge too far for those who endorse the orthodox account of personhood, and for good reasons. More fundamentally, who gets to decide what personhood entails or that personhood per se matters to such other issues as who receives legal or moral status and consideration? Perhaps we should worry less about definitions …

Rapid Surface Water Volume Estimations In Beaver Ponds, Daniel J. Karran, Cherie J. Westbrook, Joseph M. Wheaton, Carol A. Johnston, Angela Bedard-Haughn

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Beaver ponds are surface water features that are transient through space and time. Such qualities complicate the inclusion of beaver ponds in local and regional water balances, and in hydrological models, as reliable estimates of surface water storage are difficult to acquire without time and labour intensive topographic surveys. A simpler approach to overcome this challenge is needed, given the abundance of the beaver ponds in North America, Eurasia and southern South America. We investigated whether simple morphometric characteristics derived from readily available aerial imagery or quickly measured field attributes of beaver ponds can be used to approximate surface water …

Are Insects Sentient?, Michael Tye

Animal Sentience

I comment on the methodology used by Klein & Barron for dealing with the question of insect sentience and I briefly make a proposal of my own. Once it is granted that insects are sentient, a further question arises: which insects are subject to which states of sentience? Do insects feel pain, for example? If so, which ones? On the further question, I note, Klein & Barron have nothing to say.

Animal Grieving And Human Mourning, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

King’s How animals grieve beautifully describes several ways in which animals and humans show a similar capacity for grief. Yet this book does not sufficiently emphasise the language-empowered capacity to objectify thinking and sentiments about death, which makes human mourning unique. Here I put this capacity into focus and relate it to the social-normative aspect of human mourning that seems to be missing in other animals.

Insects Join The Consciousness Fray, Bjorn H. Merker

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron's review of recent insect neurobiology helps correct the impression that insect behavior is orchestrated without the benefit of central integrative mechanisms. Given their existence, the authors go on to ask whether these central mechanisms also feature the kind of integrative operations that support sentience, and propose that they do. Along the way they raise a number of conceptual and evidentiary issues of fundamental importance for the neuroscience of consciousness, allowing me to comment favorably on a number of them. I conclude by pointing to ways in which the conception of insect sentience they outline might be tested …

Field Estimates Of Parentage Reveal Sexually Antagonistic Selection On Body Size In A Population Of Anolis Lizards, Mary C. Duryea, Patrick Bergeron, Zachary Clare-Salzler, Ryan Calsbeek

Dartmouth Scholarship

Sexual dimorphism evolves when selection favors different phenotypic optima between the sexes. Such sexually antagonistic selection creates intralocus sexual conflict when traits are genetically correlated between the sexes and have sex‐specific optima. Brown anoles are highly sexually dimorphic: Males are on average 30% longer than females and 150% heavier in our study population. Viability selection on body size is known to be sexually antagonistic, and directional selection favors large male size whereas stabilizing selection constrains females to remain small. We build on previous studies of viability selection by measuring sexually antagonistic selection using reproductive components of fitness over three generations …

The Role Of Habitat Shaping Motion Detection In Two Songbirds, Elena A. Ritschard, Luke P. Tyrrell, Esteban Fernández-Juricic

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Double cones of birds are photoreceptors associated with motion perception, and perceiving motion is highly important to detect predators. Predation risks varies between habitats and may impose selective pressures that could affect organisms’ traits. There is evidence that birds show interspecific variations in visual system properties, such as the photoreceptor densities (single and double cones) and distribution across the retina. However, little is known about the relationship between the distribution of double cones and predator scanning strategies in birds living in different habitats. The goal of this study was to compare double cones distributions of birds that live in open …

Insects Have Agency But Probably Not Sentience Because They Lack Social Bonding, J. H. Van Hateren

Animal Sentience

Klein & Barron (2016) argue that insects have sentience because of functional similarities between the insect brain and vertebrate midbrain. Based on a recent theory of agency and consciousness, I argue that the functional similarities merely point to an advanced form of agency. Insects presumably lack the capacity for social bonding that may be required for subjective experiencing.

Effects Of Soil Erosion Barriers On Percent Cover And Sediment Size, Michael Perez

STAR Program Research Presentations

Ranching began on Santa Rosa Island in the 1840’s, introducing nonnative megafauna that put selective grazing pressures on endemic species. Dense groves of island oak (Q. tomentella) are aid in sediment deposition and retention. A current restoration effort, involved installing soil erosion barriers, known as wattles, to prevent sediment from being lost upslope and recruit plant growth whose root systems could further stabilize the slope. This experiment was designed to compare percent cover of vegetation growth in areas with and without soil erosion barriers. This was done using the line intercept method (n=42) on three meter transects, measuring …

Eucalyptus In Kenya; Impacts On Environment And Society, Brandy M. Garrett Kluthe

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Eucalyptus trees were introduced to Kenya a little over a century ago. European colonization along with the development of a railway system increased the demand for a fast growing wood source. The expansion of the tree across the fertile lands in Kenya raises concerns about the environmental impact on ecosystems where it has been introduced. These concerns include degraded soils, loss of water resources, co-introduction of ectomycorrhizal species, and allelopathy. Economic benefits to local landowners were also explored as well as the potential for large Eucalyptus woodlots to maximize the sequestration of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This was examined through …

Polyandry In The Absence Of Fitness Benefits In A Species With Female-Biased Sexual Size Dimorphism, Marie Claire Chelini, Eileen A. Hebets

Eileen Hebets Publications

Most studies exploring the evolution of female mating systems focus on species in which females are either monandric (mate with a single male) or highly polyandric (mate with multiple males), but less is understood about variation in mating decisions within a species. How and why do females of a single species decide whether or not to copulate with additional mates? In this study we attempt to answer this question in the highly dimorphic crab spider, Mecaphesa celer, whose females may be either monandric or polyandric. We tested three hypotheses: (1) a female’s decision to remate is based on sequential mate …

Effects Of Invasive Shrub Honeysuckle (Lonicera Maackii) And Forest Composition On Bird Communities In Woodland Stands., Katie Rae Lynch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Invasive species pose a threat to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems by decreasing biodiversity (Didham et al. 2005). Amur bush honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) has typically reduced native plant diversity and altered animal communities by influencing animal abundance and activity (Collier and Vankat 2002). This study was intended to determine whether honeysuckle density or other characteristics of forested stands influence avian diversity, whether impacts are seasonally dependent, and whether correlations exist between attributes of forested stands and honeysuckle density. In order to test the hypotheses, thirteen forest stands within the Louisville Metropolitan Area were selected. They had similar tree composition …

Guideline For Stakeholder Engagement On Aquatic Resource Management-Related Processes, Department Of Fisheries

Fisheries Occasional Publications

No abstract provided.

The Interactive Effects Of Pesticide Exposure And Infectious Disease On Amphibian Hosts, Katherine M. Pochini

Open Access Theses

Natural systems are home to a multitude of natural and anthropogenic stressors, which draw an array of effects on ecological communities. While these effects have been investigated individually, it is important, given the routine co-occurrence of these stressors, to understand their interactive effects. Pesticide exposure and infectious disease are two common, co-occurring stressors that each have documented detrimental effects on species and, as evidence suggests, may have interactive effects. Moreover, existing research suggests that these interactive effects are highly context dependent, eliciting different results based on species, disease agent, toxin, and environment. Given the variability with which species may experience …

The Biology And Management Of Waterhemp In Indiana, Joseph M. Heneghan

Open Access Theses

Waterhemp is a dioecious weed species indigenous to the Midwestern United states yet it has only recently become problematic in agronomic crop production in Indiana. Waterhemp is a small-seeded broadleaf which has increased in prevalence in conjunction with an increase in conservation tillage practices. Waterhemp germinates and emerges from the top 3 cm of soil and is known to exhibit extended periods of continual emergence, longer than most other summer annual weed species that are typically present in agronomic production settings. As a C4 species, waterhemp then grows rapidly and is capable of producing thousands of seeds, while effectively competing …

Reflexivity: A First Demonstration, Melissa Jane Swisher

Open Access Dissertations

Currently, the emergent relation of reflexivity after training a set of baseline relations has not been demonstrated with any animal—human or nonhuman. True reflexivity can only be demonstrated if no identity (i.e., physically matching stimulus) relations are trained. In six experiments, the emergence of reflexivity and its opposite, anti-reflexivity, were explored. Pigeons received concurrent successive matching training on two or three arbitrary tasks: AB hue-form and BC form-hue (and AC hue-hue) matching. Once they had acquired these tasks, they were tested for BB (form-form) reflexivity or BB’ (form-form) anti-reflexivity matching. Most (10 of 13) pigeons that received three arbitrary tasks …

Evolutionary Potential Of A Dispersal-Restricted Species In Response To Climate Change, Lorena Torres Martinez

Open Access Dissertations

Habitat replacement and fragmentation associated with projected climate change pose a critical threat to global biodiversity. Edaphically limited plant species with restricted dispersal abilities will be especially handicapped to track their optimal climate spatially. Instead, the persistence of these species will depend on their capacity to adapt in situ to novel climate regimes. Here I evaluated the evolutionary potential of Lasthenia fremontii, an annual plant species restricted to ephemeral wetlands called vernal pools in California to adapt to the projected patterns of climate change. Across L. fremontii distribution there is a latitudinal gradient in precipitation which, combined with reduced …

Behavioral Differences Between Native And Exotic Invertebrate Prey Affect Susceptibility To Predation By A Native Amphibian Predator, Zachary Cava

Biology Theses

Invasive species threaten global biodiversity via mechanisms that include altering the dynamics and structure of native food webs. Whereas much research has focused on how exotic species respond to native predators, less is known about how native predators are affected by invasive prey. Here I investigate the response of a rare and threatened native predator—the Eastern Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis) to a high-profile invasive crayfish species, Orconectes rusticus. Hellbenders have declined throughout much of their range, and although the potential for exotic predators (i.e. sport fish) to negatively impact C. alleganiensis has been addressed, effects of exotic prey …

Do Novel Weapons That Degrade Mycorrhizal Mutualisms Explain Invasive Species Success?, Philip L. Pinzone Mr.

Biology Theses

Invasive plants often dominate novel habitats where they did not co-evolve with local species. Several hypotheses suggest mechanisms that explain increased exotic plant success, including 'novel weapons' and 'degraded mutualisms'. Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) and European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) are widespread plant invaders in North America that can dominate ecosystems. The goal of this study is to test whether these impacts are more consistent with novel weapons or degraded mutualism hypotheses. I examine tree seedling recruitment, (germination and initial survival) growth, (biomass) and mycorrhizal invasion (AMF content) as a function of F. japonica and R. cathartica …

Forest Islands In A Sea Of Urban Habitat, Michael J. Olejniczak

Biology Theses

Urban forests are poorly defined as ecological communities. Substantive links between anthropogenic landscape features and forest ecology are lacking. ‘Urbaness’ is commonly defined by human population density or land use classifications, but their use is inconsistent throughout the literature, and rarely is linked with ecological processes. Furthermore, it is unknown whether urban forests are functioning parts of a patchy urban woodland system or isolated islands amidst an ocean of unsuitable habitat. I first used digital satellite imagery and publicly available U.S. National Park data to link urban land use with forest processes. I then linked those land use classifications with …

A Review On The Invasion Ecology Of Amur Honeysuckle (Lonicera Maackii, Caprifoliaceae), A Case Study Of Ecological Impacts At Multiple Scales, Rachel E. Mcneish, Ryan W. Mcewan

Biology Faculty Publications

Invasive species are of global importance because of their impacts on ecological communities, habitat structure, native community dynamics, and ecosystem processes and function. Scientists and conservation managers are increasingly focusing on the biological impacts of invasive species and on devising management practices that emphasize the health of ecosystems based on measured biological processes. Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii (Rupr.) Herder) is a highly successful invasive shrub in forests of eastern North America. The scientific literature surrounding this species has grown in the past several decades as researchers have investigated L. maackii impacts across multiple ecological scales. In this review we …

Blackbirds, Richard A. Dolbeer, George M. Linz

Wildlife Damage Management Technical Series

The term blackbird loosely refers to a diverse group of about 10 species of North American birds that belong to the avian family Icteridae. The most common species include: Red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) Common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) Great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus) Brown-headed cowbird (Molothrus ater) Yellow-headed blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus) Brewer’s blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus) Rusty blackbird (Euphagus carolinus) In addition to blackbirds, this family includes orioles, meadowlarks, and bobolinks.

Human-Wildlife Conflicts 1 Damage Identification 3 Management Methods 4 Economics 7 Species Overview 8 Legal Status 11 Glossary …

Double-Crested Cormorants, Brian S. Dorr, Kristi L. Sullivan, Paul D. Curtis, Richard Chipman, Russell D. Mccullough

Wildlife Damage Management Technical Series

The history of conflict between double-crested cormorants (Figure 1) and human interest in fisheries is long and convoluted. Following a low point in the 1970s, populations of cormorants expanded in North America, as did concerns about impacts on fisheries. By the late 1990s, natural resource agencies in 27 states reported losses of free-ranging fish stocks to cormorants. Agencies in 10 states, ranging from the Southwest to the Northeast, considered cormorant predation to be of moderate to major concern to fishery management.

Overall, double-crested cormorants are not major consumers of commercial and sportfish species. However, exceptions have been recorded at specific …