Workshop on communityecology and invasion ecology, Stellenbosch, September 19-21

A workshop organised by Guillaume Latombe, Cang Hui & Dave Richardson was held at Dornier Wine Estate, near Stellenbosch, from 19 to 21 September. It was surprisingly chilly inside the main house, but luckily we were allowed out for meals and to warm up in the sun.

We aimed to answer two fundamental questions: 

The workshop was a combination of keynotes and reflexions on these two questions, together with working groups working hard on common hypotheses from the two disciplines. 

Attendees included Jon Chase (iDiv, Germany), Franck Couchamp (CNRS, France), William Bond (SAEON/UCT, South Africa), Res Altwegg (UCT, South Africa), Guy Midgley (Stellenbosch, South Africa) and the usual smattering of CIB groupies. 

A blast from the past

Great to meet up with Patrick Lavelle, formerly of University of Paris VI (Université Pierre et Marie Curie) and Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD). Patrick headed up the UMR137 Laboratoire d'Ecologie des Sols Tropicaux (LEST). IRD/Université de Paris VI.

I spent 3 years in Patrick’s lab at IRD in Bondy, near Paris, and left to go to University of Antwerp in 2004.

Great to see him again after all these years. Patrick now lives in Columbia with his wife, Helena.

Nitya punches hard with his first PhD pub

Out online early in Biological Invasions, Nitya shows how you can use interviews with local people to reconstruct the invasion of a species. 

This is a great paper where Nitya went to 91 villages across the Andaman Islands to interview local people in order to discover when and where Indian Bullfrogs had invaded the islands. A quick look through these time slices below will show not only the sites of initial invasion, but also how they spread. 

Want to read more? Catch the paper now at Biological Invasions:

Mohanty, N.P. & Measey, J. (in press) Reconstructing biological invasions using public surveys: a new approach to retrospectively assess spatio-temporal changes in invasive spread. Biological Invasions   DOI: 10.1007/s10530-018-1839-4

The frozen liver conundrum

You want to go frog trapping tonight, but the shop only sells frozen liver. You're already in the field, so what do you do?

Liver is a really useful bait for frogs in the genus Xenopus.  Attracted by the meaty odours, the frogs will willingly come into a trap placed overnight into a ditch or pond. However, chicken livers are regularly sold frozen, and the frozen block is really hard to sparate and use. 

Here you see Marius Burger finding a solution to this frozen liver problem. Although his first key idea was functional, it wasn't popular. The next solution is, I believe, unbeatable and one that we are ready to share with you. Moreover, this might be the first time that anyone has come up with such a practical and fast solution to the frozen liver conundrum.

Thanks Marius!

Nitya takes centre stage

Nitya presents his work on invasion of the Andaman Islands by Indian bullfrogs (Hoplobatachus tigerinus) at the Neobiota meeting in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland. He wowed the audience with his presentation on how he used a new approach to retrospectively understand spatio-temporal patterns of the bullfrogs’ introduction, establishment, dispersal, and spread.  in biological invasions, using the case study of an ongoing invasion of the Indian bullfrog in the Andaman archipelago, Bay of Bengal.

Dan Simberloff was seen snapping away at Nitya’s presentation, so we expect that there’ll be some heavy citations of this article. And so there should be. Nitya has provided an excellent field-example of how to determine the early steps of an invasion.

To cap it off, Nitya heard last week that his paper on the same subject has been accepted for publication in Biological Invasions. Well done, Nitya!

Mohanty N.P. & Measey, J. Reconstructing biological invasions using public surveys: a new approach to retrospectively assess spatio-temporal changes in invasive spread. Neobiota 2018: 10^th International Conference on Biological Invasions: New Directions in Invasion Biology. 4-7 September 2018. Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland.