Innovation Anthology #22: Master’s Student
Red squirrels live off the seeds they collect from the cones of spruce trees. In some years, spruce trees produce much larger cone crops than others.
This “masting” is an evolutionary boom-bust strategy on the part of plants to outsmart predators that feed on their seed.
Generally, it works because the predators lag a season behind before they can produce more babies to eat the seed.
Except for red squirrels. University of Alberta ecologist Dr. Stan Boutin and his colleagues in the United States and Europe have made a stunning discovery.
SB: These characters have outsmarted the trees to some extent and now we’re finding they show anticipatory reproduction. They actually crank up their reproduction and increase population size before the cones are available for them to feed on in the autumn. So they’re using some sort of environmental cue to say hey, it’s going to be a big year with lots of food in the system, so I’m going to have bigger litters and I’m going to produce a second litter in the summer, get as many babies out there as possible so they can take advantage of that seed when it becomes mature.
Dr. Boutin suggests, for now at least, it’s red squirrels that have the evolutionary upper hand in the battle over seeds.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER.
Guest
David McAllindon,
Departments of Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering, Univerisity of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Integrated Landscape Management
The Integrated Landscape Management Chair is developing a toolkit for ecologically informed land use planning. At the heart of this toolkit is a suite of models capable of integrating multiple land use activities over large areas and long time scales to explore the future impacts of todays land use decisions. The models do this by linking human actions to indicators of ecological, economic, and social condition. They are constrained by their ability to adequately represent the dynamics of complex systems, and our current research emphasis aims to reduce the uncertainties over the impacts of invasive organisms on species at risk in Canadas boreal forest.
The ILM Chair is an initiative of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, with sponsors and collaborators in academia, government, and the private sector.
Program Date: 2007-03-29