From Checkers to Chess: Using Social Science Lessons to Advance Wildfire Adaptation Processes

This synthesis uses an overarching analogy to outline key wildfire social science lessons and present human adaptation to wildfire as an ongoing process of negotiated trade-offs dictated by the site-specific context of particular places. Use of an overarching analogy allows presentation of cross-cutting concepts or considerations for: (1) documenting local social diversity and determining how it might influence future efforts for wildfire adaptation; (2) understanding how landscape-scale patterns of social diversity or land management influence efforts to ‘coexist’ with wildfire; and (3) determining how alignments between local, regional, and federal influences necessitate diverse experimental adaptation approaches. The synthesis closes with specific recommendations for fostering wildfire adaptation coordinators and systematic processes that help facilitate diverse, tailored efforts from which generalizable best-practices could be derived. This article also outlines key considerations for research or monitoring of emergent organizations and efforts that bridge scales of collective action surrounding wildfire management. Study implications: Synthesis of existing science indicates that efforts to promote wildfire adaptation should be tailored to the unique social circumstances that affect broader landscapes. Approaching tailored adaptation to wildfire requires a series of considerations that help assess social diversity, better conceive of opportunities for community development that span landscapes, and evaluate how efforts at various scales (e.g., local, regional, state) enable or constrain the development of best practices. The overarching analogy provided in this article helps cut across divergent concepts to articulate existing approaches and concepts that can help achieve the above goals.

Mutation bias shapes the spectrum of adaptive substitutions

Evolutionary adaptation often occurs via the fixation of beneficial point mutations, but different types of mutation may differ in their relative frequencies within the collection of substitutions contributing to adaptation in any given species. Recent studies have established that this spectrum of adaptive substitutions is enriched for classes of mutations that occur at higher rates. Yet, little is known at a quantitative level about the precise extent of this enrichment, or its dependence on other factors such as the beneficial mutation supply or demographic conditions. Here we address the extent to which the mutation spectrum shapes the spectrum of adaptive amino acid substitutions by applying a codon-based negative binomial regression model to three large data sets that include thousands of amino acid changes identified in natural and experimental adaptation in S. cerevisiae, E. coli, and M. tuberculosis. We find that the mutation spectrum has a strong and roughly proportional influence on the spectrum of adaptive substitutions in all three species. In fact, we find that by inferring the mutation rates that best explain the spectrum of adaptive substitutions, we can accurately recover species-specific mutational spectra obtained via mutation accumulation experiments. We complement this empirical analysis with simulations to determine the factors that influence how closely the spectrum of adaptive substitutions mirrors the spectrum of amino acid variants introduced by mutation, and find that the predictive power of mutation depends on multiple factors including population size and the breadth of the mutational target for adaptation.

Adapting a Phage to Combat Phage Resistance

Phage therapy is becoming a widely recognized alternative for fighting pathogenic bacteria due to increasing antibiotic resistance problems. However, one of the common concerns related to the use of phages is the evolution of bacterial resistance against the phages, putatively disabling the treatment. Experimental adaptation of the phage (phage training) to infect a resistant host has been used to combat this problem. Yet, there is very little information on the trade-offs of phage infectivity and host range. Here we co-cultured a myophage FCV-1 with its host, the fish pathogen Flavobacterium columnare, in lake water and monitored the interaction for a one-month period. Phage resistance was detected within one day of co-culture in the majority of the bacterial isolates (16 out of the 18 co-evolved clones). The primary phage resistance mechanism suggests defense via surface modifications, as the phage numbers rose in the first two days of the experiment and remained stable thereafter. However, one bacterial isolate had acquired a spacer in its CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat)-Cas locus, indicating that also CRISPR-Cas defense was employed in the phage-host interactions. After a week of co-culture, a phage isolate was obtained that was able to infect 18 out of the 32 otherwise resistant clones isolated during the experiment. Phage genome sequencing revealed several mutations in two open reading frames (ORFs) likely to be involved in the regained infectivity of the evolved phage. Their location in the genome suggests that they encode tail genes. Characterization of this evolved phage, however, showed a direct cost for the ability to infect several otherwise resistant clones—adsorption was significantly lower than in the ancestral phage. This work describes a method for adapting the phage to overcome phage resistance in a fish pathogenic system.

Melodrama

Melodrama is a mixed or transmedial artform that, having migrated from stage to film, television and digital screens, typically combines plastic arts (tableau, mise en scène, filmic close-up, sculptural poses) with performative arts (stage and screen acting, declamation, singing, orchestral or other music). It emerged first in the 18th century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote and composed his “scène lyrique” Pygmalion, a formally innovative and experimental adaptation of the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the context of the speculative and neoAristotelian ideas that Rousseau contributed to public debate about the significance of imitation or mimesis in the development of language, Rousseau’s foundational melodrama represented the coming-to-life of Pygmalion’s beloved statue, Galatea, as a mimetic scene in which metamorphosis takes place through the statue’s responsiveness to the artist and vice versa. More than simply a theme, imitation is intrinsic to the musical-dramatic and, thus, transmedial structure of the ur-melodrama, through which the alternation of spoken lyric with musical phrasing was intended to draw attention to the mimetic role of vocal accent within the arrangement. This aesthetic structure opened the possibility of representing a diversity of voices on the metropolitan stage and beyond. Since its Enlightenment-era beginnings, the mixed form of melodrama has persisted even as it has been transformed in its itinerary from the 18th century to the early 21st century, transmedially adapting to new modalities and formats as it has moved from stage to print formats and then to film, television, and digital platforms. The transmedial form and reach of melodrama is discernible in latter-day performance and film, in which the mixed form—particularly vocal accent, melody, and gesture—continue to disrupt normative identities and hegemonic systems.

Body size after-effects are adult-like from 11 years onwards

There is considerable evidence that adults’ perception of body weight can be manipulated through adaptation paradigms in which participants are visually exposed to multiple bodies at one weight extreme or the other. No study has yet examined how early such effects can be clearly documented. In the current study we ran an identical experimental adaptation test with adults, 11-12 year olds and 14-15 year olds. Participants viewed bodies ranging from a BMI of 11 to 31 kg/m2 before and after being adapted to bodies with BMIs below 16 or about 30. Results showed that participants adapted to larger bodies showed a significant change in their weight estimates, such that they were less likely to rate larger bodies as overweight, but showed less change in their ratings of slim bodies. This effect was equally evident in all three age groups, suggesting that this aspect of body perception is functionally mature by 11 years of age.