BIO120: Adaptation &

Biodiversity
Part II
Prof. Megan Frederickson

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Lecture 13: Outline
• What ecology is and why it matters
• A brief intro to me, and some logistics for 2nd
half of BIO120
• How many species are there?
• What determines a species’ range?
• What determines a species’ abundance?

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Ecology, the science of:
• How organisms interact with each other and
with their environment

• The distribution and abundance of species

• The structure and function of ecosystems

• In a nutshell, the science of biodiversity

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Why teach ecology in intro bio?

Photo credit: American Philosophical Society

Theodosius Dobzhansky

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Why teach ecology in intro bio?

“Nothing in biology
makes sense except
in the light of

Photo credit: American Philosophical Society

evolution"

Theodosius Dobzhansky

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Why teach ecology in intro bio?

“Nothing in biology
makes sense except
in the light of

Photo credit: American Philosophical Society

evolution"

Theodosius Dobzhansky
True, but nothing in evolution makes
sense except in the light of ecology!
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

From Krebs (2009, Ecology):
“You are living in the Age of Ecology, and as a citizen you ought to
learn something about this subject which forms the cutting edge of the
major problem of climate change. There has been a revolution of
human thinking in the last 60 years that has centered on the
relationship between humans and their environment. The broader
policy problems this revolution has brought forward are the focus of
the “green” movement, the applied scientific problems of ecological
pest management, conservation, and fishing, and the heart of
environmental science and ecosystem health. The basic science
behind it all is the science of ecology. Sustainability is the mantra of all
our politicians, and environmental problems including conservation
and climate change are now common subjects in the daily media.

Just as it is useful to know something about physics if you wish to be an

engineer, it is useful to know something about ecology if you wish to
understand the problems humans face with sustaining their
environment... If you understand how the natural world works, you will
be better poised to understand the Age of Ecology as it unfolds, and to
think and vote with an ecological conscience.” 7

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Many intro bio courses start with
cell or molecular biology
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ever wonder why eukaryotic

cells have mitochondria? 8

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

“Why?” versus “How?” questions
• CSB tends to ask “How” questions:
• How do mitochondria work?
• How do cells respire (i.e., make energy from food)?
• What proteins do mitochondrial genomes encode?
• EEB tends to ask “Why” questions:
• Why do eukaryotic cells have mitochondria? (Why
don’t prokaryotic cells have mitochondria?)
• Why do mitochondria have their own genomes?
• Both critically important, and complementary!

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Endosymbiotic
theory for the origin
of mitochondria

http://hummingbirdfilms.com/symbioticearth/
Lynn Margulis

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Endosymbiotic
theory for the origin
of mitochondria

http://hummingbirdfilms.com/symbioticearth/
“Life did not take
Lynn Margulis
over the globe by
combat, but by
networking"

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

My research

Photo credits: A. Wild, C. Dutton, J. Sanders

• How do mutualism and
symbiosis evolve?
• Does mutualism affect
ecological or evolutionary
success?
• Plant-animal and host-
microbe interactions
• Field and lab experiments
• Mostly non-model
organisms

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Ants take over the Amazon
by networking (with plants)

Nest site in host stem

Duroia hirsuta trees in a ‘devil’s garden’

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Ants take over the Amazon
by networking (with plants)

Ants attacking sapling 14

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson
My teaching
• BIO120: Adaptation & Biodiversity
• EEB440: Plant-animal Interactions
• EEB403: Tropical Field Biology (field course)
• Undergrad and graduate research projects

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Readings for 2nd half of BIO120
• No single text covers the right topics in the right
depth
• Some readings are from Struggle for Existence,
written for BIO120 by my predecessor, Prof. James
Thomson (now retired)
• You do not have to read all of Struggle for Existence;
only specific chapters or page ranges are required
(check Quercus)
• Other readings are book chapters from Why Ecology
Matters (Charles Krebs) and I Contain Multitudes (Ed
Yong) and a recent paper in Science (Rosenberg et al.
2019)
• Two interactive learning tools: SimUText and a new
BIO120 Interactive Web App
• All readings, or instructions for how to access them,
will be available on Quercus
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

New BIO120 Interactive App
• Developed specifically for BIO120 by me and
EEB Ph.D. student Viviana Astudillo in the R
programming language

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Relationship between lectures
and readings
• Lectures highlight core concepts and
examples
• Readings provide more background, depth,
and context
• Lectures and readings are complementary,
NOT substitutable: you need to master both
• Test questions come from both, and some
require synthesis
• Please come to the Wed. morning tutorials

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Other Tools: Team Up!
• Pilot project in BIO120
• Not for grades
• Access it through Quercus—works better
using a web browser than the Quercus app
• Allows students to answer questions
individually or in small groups
• Let’s give it a try! Form a small group
(introduce yourself to anyone in your group
who you don’t know!)

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Under “Modules,” scroll down to the very end …

Step 1

Decide who will be the leader (driver) for today’s

Step 2 session. Someone with good internet

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Leader creates a New Group and
Step 3 gives group ID to group members

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Here is the Group ID

Help, we need to change our

leader/driver!!

Driver (leader) advances quiz for all team

members. Don’t drive off without your team!

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

After you are done, Driver MUST click
submit for answers to go to Quercus
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

How many species are there?
• Globally:
• Too many to count
• Many (>85%) still unknown to science
• A recent estimate, extrapolated from rates at
which new taxa are described:

8.7 million
(Give or take about a million)
(Just eukaryotes …)

Mora et al. (2011, PLoS Biology)

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Model versus non-model organisms
Lab mice,
Mus musculus
Photo credits: anyaivanova / Fotolia, E. Belfield

vs. basically all

other living things
Fruit fly,
Arabidopsis
Drosophila
thaliana
melanogaster

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Biodiversity
is not equally
distributed
across the
tree of life

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Top, L-R: © Katja Schultz, ron_and_beths pics, Frupus
– Flickr.com

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

-J.B.S. Haldane
“An inordinate fondness for beetles”

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Bottom, L-R: © Ryszard, Troup Dresser – Flickr.com

How many species interactions
are there?
• In a tropical dry
forest in Costa Rica:
• 509 species of wasps
parasitize:
• 735 species of
caterpillars that eat:
• 647 species of
plants:
• totaling 1480 species
interactions

https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~rodriguez/Food_webs.html
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Biodiversity and adaptation are:
• Products of evolution, as you heard from Prof.
Stinchcombe

• AND also the products of ecology

• “Evolution is simply the conjunction of

ecology and genetics” -R. Lenski (2017)

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Populations, communities, and
ecosystems

• A population is all the individuals of the same species in

one place at one time (all the zebras in a savanna)
• An ecological community is all the species living together
in one place at one time (all the zebras, giraffes, elephants,
plants, insects, etc., in a savanna)
• An ecosystem is all the species plus the non-living
environment (the entire savanna)
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Some species live almost everywhere
© Outward_bound, Flickr.com

Mountain Lion,
Puma concolor,
range map

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Author: Laurascudder
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Some species live almost nowhere
American Pika,
© Donald Hobern, Flickr.com

Ochotona princeps,
range map
© Justin Johnsen, Flickr.com

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 How do we
know where
species live?
We survey
or collect
them
Photo: M. Peck

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

eBird and citizen science

• eBird is the largest biodiversity-related citizen

science project in the world
• Birders submit bird observations and locations
• Over 100 million bird sightings a year
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 A species’ geographic range

Scarlet Macaw,
Ara macao

Location data from eBird

Bird call from xeno-canto.org
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 A very narrow geographic range

Photo credit: Dubi Shapiro, hbw.com/ibc/989342

Great Inca Finch,
Incaspiza pulchra

Location data from eBird

Bird call from xeno-canto.org
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Infectious
disease agents
are also
species with
patterns of
distribution we
want to
understand

Borrelia bacteria
Source: Public Health Ontario 39

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

What
determines Dispersal
where
species
live? Abiotic conditions
• Climate
• Nutrients

Species interactions
• Competition
• Predation
• Mutualism
Species
in a community 40

© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

What limits a species’ range?
• Dispersal
• Climatic or other inexhaustible conditions,
e.g., temperature, salinity, etc.
• Food or other exhaustible resources, e.g.,
nutrients, space, etc.
• Species interactions, e.g., competition,
predation, or mutualism
• These factors vary across space and time; we
envision gradients of conditions
• Organisms perform best at certain portions of
a gradient
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Species tolerate different
temperature ranges

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Location data from eBird, climate data from worldclim.org
© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson
Species have ranges of tolerance
along environmental gradients
Aspects of
“performance”:

lethal zones
= gradient
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Extreme example: The Death Zone on Mt. Everest,
O2 concentration 1/3 that of sea level

Outside the range of tolerance:

At least 297 deaths on Everest

Beloved
wife Ruth
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Some species are abundant

@ Gerald Deboer/dreamstime.com
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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

Some species are rare

“Lonesome George,”
died in 2012

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

What
determines
abundance?

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

The sixth extinction
• Ongoing mass extinction, mainly as a result of
human activities
• 32% of known vertebrates species (8,851 out
of 27,600 species) are decreasing in
population size or range (Ceballos et al. 2015,
PNAS)
• You will be reading a recent paper on bird
declines in North America later in the course
(Rosenberg et al. 2019, Science)

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson

 Lecture 13– Key things to know

People – Margulis, Malthus

Topics & concepts – definition of ecology,

distribution and abundance as phenomena we
want to understand, what is a
population/community/ecosystem, limiting
factors, environmental gradients, the sixth
extinction

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© 2019 Prof. Megan Frederickson