ECOLOGY: All Washed Up

Evolutionary ecology, antibiosis, and all that rot.

P ity members of the Animal Kingdom. They must compete for prey that hide, defend themselves, or run away. This competition only intensifies when such prey die uneaten. The carcasses and leaves strewn across the landscape are now available to microbial competitors that are everywhere, grow rapidly, and know how to poison. So how can an animal scavenger make a living? In a study in this issue of...

All tanked up

the meatiest bodies. These are the high-producing animals that have the most endemic welfare problems anyway. " In other words, the very real animal welfare concerns aren't specific to cloning at all. Of course, since many people just think cloning sounds gross, one easy way out is to label meat as cloned or not cloned. The FDA said it wouldn't prevent companies from marketing their meat as clo...

Special Topic: Scaling-up in Ecology

Ecologists studying food web interactions routinely conduct their experiments at scales of 1–10 m whereas real-world landscape-level management problems exist on scales of 10 m or larger. It is often asserted that the experimental tradition in ecology has little to offer to environmental management because small scale empirical insights are not easily, if at all, translatable to the large scale...

All HEPped Up about Methylation

Persons All the Way Up

MY first personal encounter with Joseph Vining—personal in the faceto-face sense—occurred some years ago when I spent a semester at the University of Michigan. Joe and I were in some respects from quite different worlds, but we seemed to have converging concerns, interests, and questions, and so we began to meet regularly for lunch and conversation. We talked about law, and life, and faith—for ...