Ecology: mechanisms for consumer diversity

A variety of mechanisms can theoretically produce competitive coexistence in nature, making it hard to identify a single explanation for the maintenance of diversity in any particular system. Based on laboratory experiments with a consumer-resource system of crustacean Daphnia eating algae, Nelson et al. suggest that maintenance of genetic diversity in the consumer populations they studied depends only on the dynamics of the population structure of the consumer. We suggest that the differences in Daphnia genetic diversity that they find for different experimental treatments could equally be explained by a simple, well known mechanism: the number of coexisting competitors cannot exceed the number of shared resources. Here we confirm this possibility by using a simple mathematical model and suggest that more than one mechanism may account for the maintenance of genetic diversity observed by Nelson et al. in their system.     

Ecology: diversity and stability in plant communities

The relationship between species diversity and ecosystem stability is controversial. Tilman et al. analyse biomass patterns over a decade in a grassland experiment with artificial plant communities, and provide evidence for a positive relationship between the number of plant species and the temporal stability of the ecosystem. Here we use data from a long-term biodiversity experiment with plant communities that were not controlled by weeding in order to show that diverse systems can be both stable and unstable.     

Ploughing the deep sea floor

Bottom trawling is a non-selective commercial fishing technique whereby heavy nets and gear are pulled along the sea floor. The direct impact of this technique on fish populations and benthic communities has received much attention, but trawling can also modify the physical properties of seafloor sediments, water–sediment chemical exchanges and sediment fluxes. Most of the studies addressing the physical disturbances of trawl gear on the seabed have been undertaken in coastal and shelf environments, however, where the capacity of trawling to modify the seafloor morphology coexists with high-energy natural processes driving sediment erosion, transport and deposition. Here we show that on upper continental slopes, the reworking of the deep sea floor by trawling gradually modifies the shape of the submarine landscape over large spatial scales. We found that trawling-induced sediment displacement and removal from fishing grounds causes the morphology of the deep sea floor to become smoother over time, reducing its original complexity as shown by high-resolution seafloor relief maps. Our results suggest that in recent decades, following the industrialization of fishing fleets, bottom trawling has become an important driver of deep seascape evolution. Given the global dimension of this type of fishery, we anticipate that the morphology of the upper continental slope in many parts of the world’s oceans could be altered by intensive bottom trawling, producing comparable effects on the deep sea floor to those generated by agricultural ploughing on land.     

High diversity of unknown picorna-like viruses in the sea

Picorna-like viruses are a loosely defined group of positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses that are major pathogens of animals, plants and insects. They include viruses that are of enormous economic and public-health concern and are responsible for animal diseases (such as poliomyelitis), plant diseases (such as sharka) and insect diseases (such as sacbrood). Viruses from the six divergent families (the Picornaviridae, Caliciviridae, Comoviridae, Sequiviridae, Dicistroviridae and Potyviridae) that comprise the picorna-like virus superfamily have the following features in common: a genome with a protein attached to the 5' end and no overlapping open reading frames, all the RNAs are translated into a polyprotein before processing, and a conserved RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) protein. Analyses of RdRp sequences from these viruses produce phylogenies that are congruent with established picorna-like virus family assignments; hence, this gene is an excellent molecular marker for examining the diversity of picorna-like viruses in nature. Here we report, on the basis of analysis of RdRp sequences amplified from marine virus communities, that a diverse array of picorna-like viruses exists in the ocean. All of the sequences amplified were divergent from known picorna-like viruses, and fell within four monophyletic groups that probably belong to at least two new families. Moreover, we show that an isolate belonging to one of these groups is a lytic pathogen of Heterosigma akashiwo, a toxic-bloom-forming alga responsible for severe economic losses to the finfish aquaculture industry, suggesting that picorna-like viruses are important pathogens of marine phytoplankton.     

南海深部过程的探索

2011—2018年,国家自然科学基金委员会设立"南海深部过程演变"重大研究计划,同时推动实施了三次半的大洋钻探航次,使南海进入国际深海研究的前列,在深海盆洋陆相互作用、边缘海盆地的板缘张裂和气候演变的低纬驱动等3方面取得了突破性进展,挑战了源自西欧、北大西洋的传统观念。深海探索的进展,确立了中国在南海科学上的引导地位,下一轮的深入研究可望将南海建成世界海洋科学的天然实验室,进一步提升中国在海洋基础研究中的国际地位。     

Thirty million year deep-sea records in the South China Sea

In the spring of 1999 the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 184 Shipboard Party cored 17 holes at 6 deep water sites in the northern and southern parts of the South China Sea (SCS). Chinese scientists actively participated in the entire process of this first deep-sea drilling leg off China, from proposal to post-cruise studies. More than 30 categories of analyses have been conducted post-cruise in various Chinese laboratories on a large number of core samples, and the total number of analyses exceeded 60 thousand.The major scientific achievements of the Leg 184 studies are briefly reported in three successive papers, with the first one presented here dealing with deep-sea stratigraphy and evolution of climate cycles. This ODP leg has established the best deep-sea stratigraphic sequences in the Western Pacific: the 23-Ma isotope sequence from the Dong-Sha area is unique worldwide because of its continuity; the last 5-Ma sequence from the Nansha area represents one of the best 4 ODP sites worldwide with the highest time-resolution for that time interval, and the sequences of physical properties enable a decadal-scale time resolution. All these together have provided for the first time high-quality marine records for paleoenvi-ronmental studies in the Asian-Pacific region. This new set of stratigraphic records has revealed changes in climate cyclicity over the last 20 Ma with the fluctuating power of the 100 ka, 400 ka, 2000 ka eccentricity cycles, indicating the evolving response of the climate system to orbital forcing along with the growth of the Antarctic and Northern Hemisphere ice sheets.     

西南大学景观生态多样性调查研究

以西南大学校园为研究对象,运用文献调查法、实地调查法和访谈法,调查了校园的地形地貌特点、植被类型的组成、土地利用类型与建设用地类型组成特点,从生物、生态、文化的角度探讨了校园景观的多样性.结果表明:生境异质性、植被类型多样性、土地利用类型的多样性指数分别为1.316(30.87%),1.229(30.47%)和1.647(38.64%),综合多样性指数为4.192,说明生物、生态、文化对校园景观多样性都具有较大的作用.     

Application of the ancient trace fossil group in deep sea to the sedimentology

Extremely abundant trace fossils are associated with the deep-sea deposits, especially in turbidite measure and flysch fades. And these trace groups then become the effective indicators to reconstruct the ancient depositional environment and the palaeogeography. This paper focuses on ( i ) the formational features of deep-sea fossil and its assemblage feature, and further recongnizes that the coexistence of the shallow and deep water trace group in a depositional sequences is the identification mark of turbidite sequence; ( ii ) thought and methods using the trace fossil to restore their environmental parameters such as the ancient sea depth, oxygen-bearing condition and sedimentation rate, etc.; (Ⅲ) the application and significance of deep-sea ichnofacies in environment interpretation.     

模拟深海采矿混响环境实验装置研究

针对真实深海采矿环境下实时微地形超声探测声信号获取难的问题,设计并建立了一套能模拟真实深海采矿混响环境的超声探测实验系统.在对螺旋采掘头结构简化的基础上,利用Fluent模拟了螺旋采掘头与多组叶轮模型对水下流场的影响,对二者所得的水下流场进行比较后,确定所选叶轮模型能较好地反映真实采矿环境.随后针对叶轮模型,实验测量了泥沙垂向浓度分布,验证了设计模型的正确性.最后进行超声探测实验,结果表明,悬浮泥沙不仅对声波产生黏滞和吸收,而且会产生严重的混响干扰,通过该超声探测系统的时间增益补偿,可有效抑制混响干扰,增加目标检测概率.本项研究为深海采矿混响环境下的超声微地形探测提供了研究基础.