Implications of Atmospheric Change for Biodiversity of Aquatic Ecosystems in Canada

Overall, the greatest threats to Canadian and global biodiversity are associated with conversions of natural ecosystems to anthropogenic ones, and over-exploitation of biological resources. This circumstance does not, however, trivialize the importance of atmospheric influences. Although scientific understanding of the risks is incomplete, it is nevertheless clear that anthropogenic changes in atmospheric stressors are potentially damaging to biodiversity and other ecological values over medium- and longer-term scales. It is important that greater investments be made in support of longer-term monitoring and research designed to understand the effects of atmospheric and other environmental stressors on the biodiversity and structure and function of Canadian ecosystems.     

Should vigilance always decrease with group size?

Levels of anti-predator vigilance often decrease with group size in birds and mammals. Vigilance may also serve other purposes such as scrounging. While scrounging, individual adopt the vigilant posture to locate and eventually exploit the food discoveries of their companions. Models that combine anti-predator alertness and scrounging were developed to examine how changes in scrounger use with group size could alter the shape of the function relating vigilance to group size and whether the additional investment in vigilance while searching could be used to reduce the allocation of time to vigilance while in the food patch. Results indicate that increased allocation of time to scrounging during search can add to the overall level of vigilance and even counteract the expected decrease in vigilance with group size. However, the addition of scrounging was found to have little impact on vigilance while in the food patch. Behavioral effects that are dependent on group size, such as scrounging, may lead to changes in the shape of the vigilance function and may mitigate against any gain garnered from a reduction in individual levels of vigilance in larger groups.     

Impingement of threadfin shad: Effects of temperature and hydrography

A model is presented that allows testing of hypotheses concerning the effects of temperature and change in temperature on impingement. The model is evaluated using data from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Steam Plant, Watts Bar Reservoir, Tennessee, USA for two fish species impinged in large numbers in the United States: threadfin and gizzard shad,Dorosoma petenense andD. cepedianum. Hydrographic characteristics near the intake screens were mapped to help explain the possible role of hydrography in distributing fish across the screens. Understanding the role of temperature and hydrography in impingement of fish provides a basis for new intake designs that may reduce impingement and helps in the development of methods to reduce impingement at existing facilities. The temperature modeling approach and conclusions about hydrographic effects might be applied to other systems in which cold-stressed schooling fish are impinged.Research sponsored by the Office of Health and Environmental Research, US Department of Energy, under contract W-7405-eng-26 with Union Carbide Corporation.Publication No. 1872, Environmental Sciences Division, ORNL.     

Species,population and individual specific odors in urine of mole rats (Spalax ehrenbergi) detected by laboratory rats

Summary Urine odors from 4 species of blind subterranean mole rats belonging to theSpalax ehrenbergi superspecies in Israel were evaluated to determine whether there were discriminable differences in the odors that were specific to different individuals, populations, and species of mole rats. Trained laboratory rats assessed these differences in an automated olfactometer using an operant conditioning paradigm. They demonstrated the discriminability of the urine odors in the 3 categories by their correct responses in generalization trials. These characteristic species, population and individual odors may provide these solitary, territorial and blind rodents a means for diverse chemical communication in spacing behavior, reproduction, species isolation and speciation.     

A field investigation of scrounging in semipalmated sandpipers

Animals that forage in groups can produce their own food patches or scrounge the food discoveries of their companions. Mean tactic payoffs are expected to be the same at equilibrium for phenotypically equal foragers. Scrounging is also typically viewed as a risk-averse foraging strategy that provides a more even food intake rate over time. The occurrence of scrounging and the payoffs from different foraging modes have rarely been investigated in the field. Over two field seasons, I examined patch sharing in semipalmated sandpipers (Calidris pusilla) foraging on minute food items at the surface of the substrate. Birds could find patches on their own, a producing event, or join the food patches discovered by others, a scrounging event. I found that the average search time per patch did not differ between producing and scrounging but that the average time spent exploiting a patch was reduced nearly by half when scrounging. As a result, the proportion of time spent exploiting a patch, a measure of foraging payoffs, was significantly lower when scrounging. The variance in payoffs was similar for producing and scrounging. When producing their own patches, individuals that scrounged spent the same proportion of time exploiting a patch as those that only produced. However, within the same individuals, the search time for a scrounged patch was longer than the search time for a produced patch. The results show unequal payoffs for producing and scrounging in this system and suggest that low success in finding patches elicited scrounging.     

Reproductive ecology of the brooding,hermaphroditic clam Lasaea subviridis

The reproductive ecology of a small intertidal clam was studied for two years (September 1980-November 1982) at two mid-intertidal sites on the northern shore of Monterey Bay, California. Lasaea subviridis is hermaphroditic and incubatory; the young are released as juveniles. Brooding adults are found throughout the year. All embryos in a clam are at the same stage of development, but the number and stage of embryos varies among clams at any one time. Individuals are iteroparous and produce small numbers of oocytes and sperms simultaneously. All stages of gonad development are found in different individuals at any one time. There was no evidence of seasonality. Young reared in the laboratory after being dissected from the parent reached brooding size (shell length of 1.7 mm) within 6 mo. Laboratory experiments indicated that juveniles crawl away soon after release from the parent. These reproductive characteristics may contribute to this taxon's ability to colonize new environments rapidly.     

Subsampling program for the estimation of fish impingement

Federal regulations require operators of nuclear and coal-fired power-generating stations to estimate the number of fish impinged on intake screens. During winter months, impingement may range into the hundreds of thousands for certain species, making it impossible to count all intake screens completely. We present graphs for determinig the appropriateoptimal subsample that must be obtained to estimate the total number impinged. Since the number of fish impinged tends to change drastically within a short time period, the subsample size is determined based on the most recent data. This allows for the changing nature of the species-age composition of the impinged fish. These graphs can also be used for subsampling fish catches in an aquatic system when the size of the catch is too large to sample completely.     

A necessary distinction between spatial representativeness of an air quality monitoring station and the delimitation of exceedance areas

The European legislation on ambient air quality introduces the concepts of spatial representativeness of a monitoring station and spatial extent of an exceedance zone. Spatial representativeness is an essential macro-scale siting criterion which should be evaluated before the setting-up and during the life of a monitoring point. As for the exceedance area, it has to be defined each time an environmental objective is exceeded in an assessment zone. No specific approach is prescribed to delimit such areas. A probabilistic methodology is presented, based on a preliminary kriging estimation of atmospheric concentrations at each point of the domain. It is applied to NO₂ pollution on the urban scale. In the proposed approach, a point belongs to the area of representativeness of a station if its concentration differs from the station measurement by less than a given threshold. To take the estimation uncertainty into account, the standard deviation of the kriging error is used in a probabilistic framework. The choice of the criteria used to deal with overlapping areas is first tested on NO₂ annual mean concentration maps of France, built by combining surface monitoring observations and outputs from the CHIMERE chemistry transport model. At the local scale, data from passive sampling surveys and high -resolution auxiliary variables are used to provide a more precise estimation of the background pollution in different French cities. The traffic-related pollution can also be accounted for in the map by additional predictors such as distance to the road, and traffic-related NO_x emissions. Similarly, the proposed approach is implemented to identify the points, at a given statistical risk, where the NO₂ concentration is above the annual limit value.