Ecology, The Environment and Conservation

Sunlight can convert triclosan, a common disinfectant used in anti-bacterial soaps, into a form of dioxin, and this process may produce some of the dioxin found in the environment, according to research at the University of Minnesota. The researchers said that although the dioxin was a relatively benign form, treating wastewater with chlorine could possibly lead to the production of a much more toxic species of dioxin. The study is in press in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology A: Chemist

Nature has many patterns and ecologists seek to both describe and understand them. Nature also is very complex. One challenge is to find patterns in that complexity and to ask whether simple explanations lie beneath them.

Ecologists have tackled this challenge for decades, erecting various hypotheses and debating their plausibility. In an important paper featured in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), an international team of ecologists describes

“Bellwether” of what’s to come farther south, say Queen’s researchers

Dramatic clues to North American climate change have been discovered by a team of Queen’s University scientists in the bottom of 50 Arctic lakes.

Using innovative techniques that enable them to collect historic evidence from fossilized algae in lake bottom sediment, the researchers have found signs of marked environmental changes in a variety of lakes of different depths and composition, within a 750-km r

Logging, illegal hunting, and Ebola caused nearly 60 percent decline since 1983

Scientists say chimps and gorillas now ’critically endangered’

Scientists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, Princeton University and other organizations have reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature that a dramatic decline of gorillas and chimpanzees is taking place in western equatorial Africa, the last stronghold for great apes on the continent. Ravaged

In a recent study published in Ecology, John Lill and Robert Marquis (University of Missouri – St. Louis) investigated the role shelter-building caterpillars play in herbivorous insect communities living on white oaks. Previous studies have shown how caterpillars create and modify habitats through the construction of leaf shelters, increasing biodiversity around the leaves. In their study, Lill and Marquis wanted to see what effect shelter-building caterpillars had on the entire community living on o

A pulsed electric arc could provide an alternative to chlorination and other chemical methods of disinfecting water, according to researchers from the University of Poitiers, France, speaking to the Institute of Physics’ Congress on March 27 at Heriot-Watt University.

Water treatment is usually carried out using chlorine-containing disinfecting agents but these produce by-products that are coming under increasing scrutiny by the European Community. Chemical agents to destroy pollutants