Infectious Disease Ecology of Wild Birds

Disease ecology is an interdisciplinary field that recognizes that the host–parasite interaction is shaped by the environment and can affect and be affected by the processes that occur across all levels of ecological organization. This book focuses on the dynamics of infectious diseases for wild avian hosts across different scales of biological organization—from within-host processes to landscape-level patterns. Parasite–bird interactions are both influenced by and have consequences for every level of ecological hierarchy, from the physiology, behavior, and evolution of individual hosts up to the complex biotic and abiotic interactions occurring within biological communities and ecosystems. As the most diverse group of extant vertebrates, birds have evolved to utilize every ecological niche on earth, giving them the capacity to serve as a host of pathogens in every part of the world. The diversity of birds is outmatched only by the diversity of the parasite fauna infecting them. Given the overwhelming diversity of both avian hosts and their parasites, we have only scratched the surface regarding the role that pathogens play in avian biology and the role that birds play in the maintenance and spread of zoonotic pathogens. In addition to this understudied diversity, parasite–bird interactions are increasingly occurring in rapidly changing global environments—thus, their ecology is changing—and this shapes the complex ways by which parasites influence the interconnected health of birds, humans, and shared ecosystems. The chapters in this book illustrate that the understanding of these complex and multiscale interactions requires an inherently integrative approach.

Maupassant’s The Horla is a Portrayal of Human Frailties and a Critique of Anthropocentrism: An Ecocritical/Deep Ecological Perspective

This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassant’s short story The Horla through an ecocritical lens. In its fundamental form, the ecocritical theoretical framework investigates how nature, landscape, and places have been represented in a literary text and explore how human and non-human interrelations have been portrayed. In this story, Maupassant has portrayed nature as a positive, healing force and delved into the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic constructivist attitude to non-human, invisible, emergent being, in this context, the Horla. The narrator’s anthropocentric world view has denied justice toward Horla to exist, fearing he will shake the human-centred ecological hierarchy. According to the Deep Ecological philosophical position or ecosophy, all things, including spiritual being that cannot be seen, are interconnected and have their necessary position in various modalities of Nature. Denial of the existence of a new emerging entity and the inability to schematize and adopt it will destroy the new being and the human race itself. The paper has deployed two major research methods; textual analysis and archival method. Apart from these two methods, discourse analysis method has also been used where deemed relevant and necessary. The paper finds that The Horla is not merely a generic horror story that has portrayed the inner psychological state of the narrator in a fantastique manner but also an expository one of human frailties and human denial of a being that deemed more intelligent and perfect than the human being, fearing to lose the anthropocentric dominance.

A Bird’s Eye View of Avian Disease Ecology

Wild birds are a source of joy and fascination to people worldwide and unmatched in their capacity to connect people to nature. Yet, the fate of wild birds is being threatened by human activities that alter and destroy habitat, increase pollution, and contribute to global climate change. Pathogens and parasites pose another threat to birds—a threat that we are just beginning to uncover. The chapter explores avian disease ecology and the ways in which the avian host–parasite interaction is both influenced by and has consequences for every level of ecological hierarchy, from the physiology, behavior, and evolution of individual hosts to the complex biotic and abiotic interactions occurring within biological communities and ecosystems. In addition, these diverse parasite–bird interactions are increasingly occurring in rapidly changing global environments—their ecology is changing—and this shapes the complex ways by which parasites influence the interconnected health of birds, humans, and shared ecosystems.

Transient disease dynamics across ecological scales

Analyses of transient dynamics are critical to understanding infectious disease transmission and persistence. Identifying and predicting transients across scales, from within-host to community-level patterns, plays an important role in combating ongoing epidemics and mitigating the risk of future outbreaks. Moreover, greater emphases on non-asymptotic processes will enable timely evaluations of wildlife and human diseases and lead to improved surveillance efforts, preventive responses, and intervention strategies. Here, we explore the contributions of transient analyses in recent models spanning the fields of epidemiology, movement ecology, and parasitology. In addition to their roles in predicting epidemic patterns and endemic outbreaks, we explore transients in the contexts of pathogen transmission, resistance, and avoidance at various scales of the ecological hierarchy. Examples illustrate how (i) transient movement dynamics at the individual host level can modify opportunities for transmission events over time; (ii) within-host energetic processes often lead to transient dynamics in immunity, pathogen load, and transmission potential; (iii) transient connectivity between discrete populations in response to environmental factors and outbreak dynamics can affect disease spread across spatial networks; and (iv) increasing species richness in a community can provide transient protection to individuals against infection. Ultimately, we suggest that transient analyses offer deeper insights and raise new, interdisciplinary questions for disease research, consequently broadening the applications of dynamical models for outbreak preparedness and management.

Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body

The polis, the philosophical concept according to which there is one complete human form, is to blame for political and ecological crises. The polis as a philosophical tradition shares the current complex shape of climate change. A certain perfect body figures the denial of matter of the polis. The book presents a philosophy of elemental difference, an affirmation of the singularities of location, movement, living, aging, dying, valuing, in which humans partake. Elemental difference in the polis can be appreciated in the fact that empirical bodily nonidentity can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Empirical bodily nonidentity is a feature of the original articulation of the polis as a philosophical concept in the work of Aristotle. Sylvia Wynter has argued that the very idea of empirical bodily nonidentity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy. She calls this biocentrism. This book argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.

Developing indicators for participatory forest biodiversity monitoring systems in South Sumatra

There is often a striking disconnect between communities that create biodiversity frameworks, set targets, and design monitoring system and those that actually implement them. This study aims to (i) develop an integrated (participatory) approach to contextualize available sets of biodiversity indicators to meet specific stakeholders' needs, and (ii) select high-performance and rewarding indicators for participatory forest biodiversity monitoring systems (PFBMS). We used a hierarchical characterization approach to biodiversity to create a global pool of indicators. Specialists then used a framework consisting of multi-tiered filters to select high performance and rewarding indicators from the pool applicable to PFBMS at province and forest management unit levels in Indonesia. Selected indicators are able to reflect changes taking place at various levels in the ecological hierarchy from landscape, habitat, to species level including complete ecosystem attributes, i.e., structural, functional, and compositional. The integrated approach combines the expert guidance and experience of professionals at province and local levels; ensures global-local connection; and follows the participatory approach.

Information Across the Ecological Hierarchy

The ecosystem is a theatre upon which is presented, in various degrees and at differing scales, a drama of constraint and information vs. disorganization and entropy. Concerning biology, most think immediately of genomic information. It strongly constrains the form and behavior of individual species, but its influence upon community structure is indeterminate. At the community level, information acts as a formal cause behind regular patterns of development. Community structure is an amalgam of information and entropy, and the Gibbs–Boltzmann formula departs from the thermodynamic sense of entropy. It measures only the extreme that entropy might reach if the elements of the system were completely independent. A closer analogy to physical entropy in systems with interactions is the conditional entropy—the amount by which the Shannon measure is reduced after the information in the constraints among elements has been subtracted. Finally, at the whole ecosystem level, in communities that inhabit mostly fixed physical environments (e.g., landscapes or seabeds), the distributions of plants and animals appear to be independent both of causal mechanisms and trophic controls, and assume instead forms that maximize the overall entropy of dispersal.

Ecology

Philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to ecology (compared to other areas of biology like evolution and genetics), but ecology poses many interesting foundational and methodological problems. For example, the problems of clarifying the differences and causal connections between the various levels of the ecological hierarchy (organism, population, community, ecosystem…); the issue of how central evolutionary biology is to ecology; long-standing issues concerning the extent to which the domain of ecology is more law-governed or more a matter of historical contingency, and the related question of whether ecologists should rely more on laboratory/manipulative versus field/comparative methods of investigation.

A residence time theory for biodiversity

From microorganisms to the largest macroorganisms, much of Earth’s biodiversity is subject to forces of physical turnover. Residence time is the ratio of an ecosystem’s size to its rate of flow and provides a means for understanding the influence of physical turnover on biological systems. Despite its use across scientific disciplines, residence time has not been integrated into the broader understanding of biodiversity, life history, and the assembly of ecological communities. Here, we propose a residence time theory for the growth, activity, abundance, and diversity of traits and taxa in complex ecological systems. Using thousands of stochastic individual-based models to simulate energetically constrained life history processes, we show that our predictions are conceptually sound, mutually compatible, and support ecological relationships that underpin much of biodiversity theory. We discuss the importance of residence time across the ecological hierarchy and propose how residence time can be integrated into theories ranging from population genetics to macroecology.