scholarly journals Not just disease: Ideology of risk and Indigenous population decline in North America

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-157
Author(s):  
Gerardo Gutiérrez ◽  
Catherine M. Cameron
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 01 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. O. Oliveira

<p>As abelhas são os principais polinizadores na natureza, sendo de fundamental importância na condução de muitas culturas agrícolas ao redor do mundo, promovendo várias melhorias na cadeia produtiva da agricultura. A polinização realizada por abelhas contribui para a melhoria da qualidade e/ou a quantidade de frutos e sementes produzidos. Entretanto, apesar de toda importância, as abelhas encontram-se em processo de desaparecimento em várias partes do mundo, principalmente na Europa e em alguns países da América do Norte. Pesquisas recentes estão mostrando um grande declínio das abelhas nativas e abelhas melíferas (<em>Apis mellifera</em>), principalmente como consequência das alterações ambientais, que provocam severos efeitos negativos na disponibilidade de alimentos disponíveis para as abelhas. Assim essa revisão tem como objetivo, reforçar a importância das abelhas da polinização agrícola e alertar sobre a atual situação e o declínio populacional de diferentes grupos desses importantes polinizadores.</p><p align="center"><strong>Population decline of crop bee pollinators</strong><strong></strong></p><p>Bees are the main pollinators in nature, being of fundamental importance of many agricultural crops around the world, causing improvements in the productivity of these crops. The pollination by bees contributes to improving the quality and / or quantity of produced fruits and seeds. However, despite all importance, the bees are in the process of disappearing in several parts of the world, mainly in Europe and in some countries in North America. Recent surveys are showing a large decline in native bees and honeybees (<em>Apis mellifera</em>), mainly as a result of environmental changes, that cause severe negative effects on the availability of food for the bees. So, this review aims to reinforce the importance of bees in crop pollination, and warn about the current situation and the population decline of different groups of these important pollinators.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (S1) ◽  
pp. 17-24
Author(s):  
Greg Blyton

AbstractThe theory that the rapid depopulation of Indigenous people post-colonisation was largely caused by European introduced or exotic disease to which Indigenous people had no immunity resonates through most narratives of the early years of colonisation. The question of whether this narrative is based on sound medical evidence or is better placed in the realm of myth is the subject of this paper. Here I contend, that introduced disease is little more than a convenient explanation of the rapid depopulation of Indigenous people in south eastern New South Wales during the nineteenth century, and one that allows the illusion of colonial ethnography to perpetuate a widespread belief that introduced diseases and immunity were the unfortunate, but unavoidable cause of most Indigenous population decline. But what is the evidence that these disease theories found in Australian history are anything more than Eurocentric constructions? An Indigenous approach to the topic, as undertaken in this paper, raises questions that are as yet without answers and which challenge conventional theoretical explanations.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åshild J. Vågene ◽  
Michael G. Campana ◽  
Nelly M. Robles García ◽  
Christina Warinner ◽  
Maria A. Spyrou ◽  
...  

AbstractIndigenous populations of the Americas experienced high mortality rates during the early contact period as a result of infectious diseases, many of which were introduced by Europeans. Most of the pathogenic agents that caused these outbreaks remain unknown. Using a metagenomic tool called MALT to search for traces of ancient pathogen DNA, we were able to identifySalmonella entericain individuals buried in an early contact era epidemic cemetery at Teposcolula-Yucundaa, Oaxaca in southern Mexico. This cemetery is linked to the 1545-1550 CE epidemic locally known as “cocoliztli”, the cause of which has been debated for over a century. Here we present two reconstructed ancient genomes forSalmonella entericasubsp.entericaserovar Paratyphi C, a bacterial cause of enteric fever. We propose thatS.Paratyphi C contributed to the population decline during the 1545cocoliztlioutbreak in Mexico.One Sentence SummaryGenomic evidence of enteric fever identified in an indigenous population from early contact period Mexico.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Timothy L Fosbury

Abstract “Bermuda’s Persistent Futures” recovers Bermuda’s significance to the development of the settler colonial imaginations of early America. Following the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture that began its settlement, English settlers insisted that Bermuda’s apparent lack of any previous Indigenous population, Spanish failures to account for its potential, and its proximity to England, North America, and the West Indies all made the 20-square-mile archipelago an anomalous and exceptional plantation in an emerging colonial system. Writers and officials seized upon Bermuda’s perceived uniqueness to position it as an isolated, vacant laboratory perfectly suited for uncovering what they believed had been waiting to be discovered—an America that was natural to England. Bermuda, in this sense, inspired a corpus of colonial fantasies about the hemisphere’s futures under a permanent English presence that was previously unimaginable to colonial writers. This essay focuses on Richard Norwood’s The Description of the Sommer Ilands, Once Called the Bermudas (1622–23) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur amèricain (1784) to reconstruct a Bermuda that persistently appeared to lead the way for the futures of American settlement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (9) ◽  
pp. 170760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne E. Thogmartin ◽  
Ruscena Wiederholt ◽  
Karen Oberhauser ◽  
Ryan G. Drum ◽  
Jay E. Diffendorfer ◽  
...  

The monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus ) population in North America has sharply declined over the last two decades. Despite rising concern over the monarch butterfly's status, no comprehensive study of the factors driving this decline has been conducted. Using partial least-squares regressions and time-series analysis, we investigated climatic and habitat-related factors influencing monarch population size from 1993 to 2014. Potential threats included climatic factors, habitat loss (milkweed and overwinter forest), disease and agricultural insecticide use (neonicotinoids). While climatic factors, principally breeding season temperature, were important determinants of annual variation in abundance, our results indicated strong negative relationships between population size and habitat loss variables, principally glyphosate use, but also weaker negative effects from the loss of overwinter forest and breeding season use of neonicotinoids. Further declines in population size because of glyphosate application are not expected. Thus, if remaining threats to habitat are mitigated we expect climate-induced stochastic variation of the eastern migratory population of monarch butterfly around a relatively stationary population size.


1981 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Cheryl English Martin

Readers of John Womack's monumental Zapata and the Mexican Revolution are familiar with the names of the great Morelos sugar plantations whose drive for modernization in the late nineteenth century eventually pushed desperate peasants to revolt. Many of these haciendas bore names of Indian villages long since destroyed by indigenous population decline and the hacendados' thirst for land: Cuahuixtla, Chinameca, Zacatepec, Atlacomulco, Cocoyoc; others had religious appellations testifying to the piety or ecclesiastical status of their founders: Santa Inés, Santa Clara, San Vicente; an occasional hacienda, such as Casasano, even carried the name of its founder. Yet one hacienda that figures prominently in Womack's account bore the curious designation Hospital. Though considerably smaller than many of its neighbors, Hospital emerges from Womack's narrative as perhaps the most villainous of all Morelos latifundia. To the land-starved villagers of Anenecuilco, its owner scornfully suggested that they “farm in a flowerpot,” and Hospital became a principal target of zapatista revenge.


2008 ◽  
Vol 89 (9) ◽  
pp. 2122-2131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abinash Padhi ◽  
Amy T. Moore ◽  
Mary Bomberger Brown ◽  
Jerome E. Foster ◽  
Martin Pfeffer ◽  
...  

Buggy Creek virus (BCRV) is an unusual arbovirus within the western equine encephalitis complex of alphaviruses. Associated with cimicid swallow bugs (Oeciacus vicarius) as its vector and the cliff swallow (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) and house sparrow (Passer domesticus) as its amplifying hosts, this virus is found primarily in the western Great Plains of North America at spatially discrete swallow nesting colonies. For 342 isolates collected in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and North Dakota, from 1974 to 2007, we sequenced a 2076 bp region of the 26S subgenomic RNA structural glycoprotein coding region, and analysed phylogenetic relationships, rates of evolution, demographical histories and temporal genetic structure of the two BCRV lineages found in the Great Plains. The two lineages showed distinct phylogeographical structure: one lineage was found in the southern Great Plains and the other in the northern Great Plains, and both occurred in Nebraska and Colorado. Within each lineage, there was additional latitudinal division into three distinct sublineages. One lineage is showing a long-term population decline. In comparing sequences taken from the same sites 8–30 years apart, in one case one lineage had been replaced by the other, and in the other cases there was little evidence of the same haplotypes persisting over time. The evolutionary rate of BCRV is in the order of 1.6–3.6×10−4 substitutions per site per year, similar to that estimated for other temperate-latitude alphaviruses. The phylogeography and evolution of BCRV could be better understood once we determine the nature of the ecological differences between the lineages.


2020 ◽  
Vol 376 (1816) ◽  
pp. 20190718 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erick Robinson ◽  
R. Kyle Bocinsky ◽  
Darcy Bird ◽  
Jacob Freeman ◽  
Robert L. Kelly

The northern American Southwest provides one of the most well-documented cases of human population growth and decline in the world. The geographic extent of this decline in North America is unknown owing to the lack of high-resolution palaeodemographic data from regions across and beyond the greater Southwest, where archaeological radiocarbon data are often the only available proxy for investigating these palaeodemographic processes. Radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest suggest widespread population collapses from AD 1300 to 1600. However, radiocarbon data have potential biases caused by variable radiocarbon sample preservation, sample collection and the nonlinearity of the radiocarbon calibration curve. In order to be confident in the wider trends seen in radiocarbon time series across and beyond the greater Southwest, here we focus on regions that have multiple palaeodemographic proxies and compare those proxies to radiocarbon time series. We develop a new method for time series analysis and comparison between dendrochronological data and radiocarbon data. Results confirm a multiple proxy decline in human populations across the Upland US Southwest, Central Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande from AD 1300 to 1600. These results lend confidence to single proxy radiocarbon-based reconstructions of palaeodemography outside the Southwest that suggest post-AD 1300 population declines in many parts of North America. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cross-disciplinary approaches to prehistoric demography’.


<i>Abstract.</i>—This chapter describes management actions implemented after a large-scale population decline of the Walleye <i>Sander vitreus</i> population in Lake Erie, one of the Laurentian Great Lakes in North America. Intensive fishery exploitation during the 1950s combined with declining water quality conditions collapsed the Walleye stock during the early 1960s. The fishery persisted at low levels until 1970 when the fishery was closed (1970–1972) due to elevated mercury concentrations in Walleye tissue. Lake Erie fishery managers at the time recognized the need for a coordinated, multi-agency approach to protect this ecologically, economically, and socially important resource. The harvest ban was lifted in 1973 when mercury levels dropped below advisory levels. In 1976, an interagency management framework was established, which relied on a coordinated, science-based management philosophy consisting of estimating safe harvest levels, performing applied research, and conducting annual population assessments. The population rebounded during the 1980s in response to improving environmental conditions, regulated harvest, and a series of strong recruitment events. Declines in harvest and population size were again observed during the late 1990s and mid-2000s, likely due to variation in natural processes controlling recruitment, and fishery managers enacted harvest practices during this period to promote long-term sustainability. Today, Lake Erie Walleyes support one of the largest self-sustaining freshwater fisheries in North America. Throughout the years, Lake Erie managers have iteratively adopted changes to their population assessment model and altered harvest policies to avoid future fishery and population collapses. More than 40 years later, Lake Erie continues to support commercial and recreational fisheries lake wide. Lessons learned from the stock recovery and subsequent coordinated management for fishery sustainability include the importance of conducting routine population assessments, using science-based research to address key uncertainties, adopting modern stock assessment approaches, incorporating stakeholder input into the quota setting process, and addressing environmental concerns collaboratively at the lake level.


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