Science + Nature ONTap - Recognizing & loving Eastern Ontario's largest Invertebrates скачать в хорошем качестве

Science + Nature ONTap - Recognizing & loving Eastern Ontario's largest Invertebrates

Native Unionoid Bivalves – mussels, clams, or naiads – are an ancient freshwater lineage with some 300 species in North America, of which a couple of dozen species colonized eastern Ontario after deglaciation. We have 3 abundant genera, which hybridize between stocks from Mississippian and Atlantic refugia, and a wide range of other species. Despite the abundance with which they lined the beds of our streams and lakes, and their constant filtering of the water, they are generally ignored. Unionids were already threatened by sedimentation and pollution before invasive Zebra Mussels arrived in the 1980s, but Zebras clustered on Unionids, and whole faunas became extinct. As we gathered the lovely shells which documented these lost populations, some of us predicted that natural selection would produce adaptations, and there are situations where this is happening. We now need to get out into the St Lawrence and other Zebraed waterbodies to see where Unionids have recovered, after whatever adaptations they've evolved, and whatever has happened to Zebra numbers. ------------------------------ Having learned, as an undergraduate, that “ecology is the science of where organisms are found,” Fred Schueler has spent half a century in the museum mission of finding and documenting where species occur. He and his wife Aleta Karstad have promoted, illustrated, and studied a series of conspicuous groups that weren't popularly recognized as species: reptiles and amphibians, crayfish, slugs and land snails, invasive plants, and aquatic molluscs, especially the native Unionid mussels. From their home base in Bishops Mills, in Grenville County, they survey the occurrence of their species of interest east and west across Canada. Fred's academic tradition emphasises the collection of specimens and data that can be used to document ecological and evolutionary change, and since the incursion of Dreissenid Zebra and Quagga Mussels has been the biggest challenge faced by aquatic ecosystems in Ontario, they've been working on it since the early 1990s. ------------------------------ River Institute Science + Nature UNTapped Site https://riverinstitute.ca/untapped/