Red-shifts and red herrings in geographical ecology

Red herrings and rotten fish

Geoffrey B. West ∗, Van M. Savage, James Gillooly, Brian J. Enquist, William. H. Woodruff, James H. Brown 1 Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. 2 The Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. 3 Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. 4 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson...

MEFV mutations - therapeutic guides or red herrings?

Background/question Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) is a hereditary inflammatory disorder characterised by self-resolving attacks of fever and serositis common in populations from Mediterranean ancestry [1]. Mutations affecting MEFV gene is believed to be responsible for the disease phenotype[1]. The correlation between the genotype and phenotype is not very strong, indicating the presence o...

Red noise and regime shifts

The analysis of interdecadal physical and biological variability is made challenging by the relative shortness of available time series. It has been suggested that rapid temporal changes of the most energetic empirical orthogonal function of North Pacific sea surface temperature (sometimes called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO) represents a ‘‘regime shift’’ between states with otherwise...

Chasing red herrings: making sense of the colors while mapping.

Ecology of the Invasive Red

The red alga Gracilaria salicornia (c. Agardh) E. Y. Dawson was introduced intentionally to two reefs on O'ahu, Hawai'i, in the 1970s for experimental aquaculture for the agar industry. Some 30 yr later, this species has spread from the initial sites of introduction and is now competing with native marine flora and fauna. The goals of this study were to quantify various aspects of G. salicornia...