Evolution and Climate Change in the Oceans
Assignments and Grading
Students will be evaluated based on their contribution to class discussion and the wiki resource. In the latter case, this means that regular contributions will be counted, the quality and care of your contributions will be evaluated, and students will be graded accordingly. Please note that not only is academic content wanted, but the presentation of a useful overall resource - so taking the time to edit, and add informative graphics or videos or links, is encouraged and part of your grade! This is an experimental approach for a course, so adjustments will be made along the way. Please note that your efforts are not in the vacuum of this single class; Dr. Wares will be documenting the progress of this course at SeaMonster, a website dedicated to reporting new discoveries in ocean science. People are watching and interested!!
Course Schedule
Week One: Discuss class goals, the background (ECCO meetings, current models for climate change, what the students know of evolution), and explore wikis in general (assignment: read the ECCO white paper). Read this story in Rolling Stone by Bill McKibben, start reading Hosler book (n.b.: I don't care if you get Sandwalk Adventures or Evolution, the first is probably more fun and focused, the latter is more general and perhaps more useful overall, still fun), read white paper. We will be on these things for more than one week, but try to get them read by next meeting. done.
Week Two: We will break into groups to discuss the McKibben paper and the ECCO white paper and the topics that are being brought into this course, how they pertain to evolutionary biology (continue reading the Hosler books to get up to speed, we'll only discuss if there are particular questions). Decide on individual 'beats' for the remainder of class, these will be listed on wiki so you can see how to add/edit. For next week, read this paper in Nature (linked in below) and find an article for your beat, which you can add information from to the website as well as to the discussion next week. To keep things organized for now, please write a one-page synopsis each week on the main reading as well as your 'beat' paper, and make note of what you added to the wiki (which pages, what you did).
Week Three: Discuss wiki editing and strategy, more formal introduction to class wiki (assignment: practice editing wiki, your one-page write-up must now include some documentation of what you added or modified or organized on the wiki), the "everybody read" paper is by Morgan Kelly (you'll remember this example from GENE 3000 lecture), and of course you'll read another paper following your particular interest related to the class overall.
Week Four: The wiki should start branching out some more this week, as our topics start to touch on different parts of the papers we read. There is now enough contribution from everybody to the wiki that I know you know how to login and start editing, so one component of your grade (as discussed) will be your contribution to the content and organization of the wiki. This week's reading is fairly technical, but the introduction sets things up well - then plow through methods and results as best as you can - and the discussion should help you identify what key points are of greatest interest for the questions our class is asking. Keep searching the literature for an additional paper for your beat assignment.
Week Five: You've done a lot of reading now (and I know you also just survived the first exam in GENE 3000!), so the reading this week is short but important: it recaps the goal of the class in essence, and also starts moving us toward thinking about different pressures associated with human impacts. What happens as carbon dioxide increases in our atmosphere, how does this alter the ocean and the organisms living in it? This paper by Sinéad Collins is just a summary of a larger paper but gets the point (you can always read the main paper if you choose!, or here is another summary); read it, think about it, and take some time to synthesize and organize what you've learned and discussed in the past few weeks on the wiki. Remember to pretty up the wiki with links to helpful explanations of terms or more complicated ideas, or to branch it out in terms of organization.
Week Six: Let's continue looking at ocean acidification, but you'll see that this weeks paper (in PLoS ONE, so I haven't posted the PDF) returns to study metazoans to ask how fast they can adapt to changing environments. The answer, of course, comes back to diversity, but in this case the comparison between species is particularly helpful. Continue expanding and organizing the wiki, and think about what this means overall for predictions about what species will be able to adapt to changing conditions. What information would you need to make a prediction about which species will do best over the next 50, 100, 500 years?
Week Seven (October 3) we will not have class as Dr. Wares has a conflict. I'm sure you won't mind since the exam for GENE 3000 is the next day.
Week Eight (October 10) First of all, I encourage you to attend the Genetics department seminar by Dr. Mike Hickerson, who will be talking about using gene tree methods to identify how communities interacted in the past (Pleistocene and Holocene). Our common reading this week will be by Mike and his colleague Eric Waltari, and it is more of an ecology paper - how do we interpret past distributions, and think about what that can tell us about future distributions?
Week Nine (October 17). As we now deal with our understanding of past distributions, here is a paper on using migration and evolution and ecology to predict how distributions will change.
Also, though it doesn't explicitly deal with the adaptation question that our class is focused on, this is an intriguing paper on how we may have to change how we approach marine conservation:
Week Ten (October 24) I was going to have us read the paper by Kaustuv Roy linked below so we could think back to our original premise: are species more likely to Move, Adapt, Acclimate, or Die when the climate changes? However, I think the Willis & MacDonald paper is a more thorough review, so read it first and just go to the Roy paper if you want more information.
Week Eleven (October 31) Another synthesis paper from Nature on the overall topic of the semester. If we'd read this at the beginning you wouldn't be able to consider it as thoroughly as you can now!!
Week Twelve (November 7) So much left we could cover, we could go deeper on statistical models predicting change (and how), how to get more data such as reaction norms that seem useful, why there continues to be debate (as always I'll point to SeaMonster and in particular entries written by John Bruno), and so on. But you asked me to find something a little more hopeful, and a little more on charismatic mega-fauna. So:
The good news is that whales seem to survive extreme climate change through a variety of coping skills and acclimation:
The bad news is that turtles are far more sensitive for a variety of reasons:
And overall, (another review) the bulk of evidence suggests that adaptation itself may be the least-common form of response to such massive change:
THIS WEEK DO NOT WORRY ABOUT YOUR "OUTSIDE" READING, LETS ALL READ THESE 3 PAPERS TOGETHER.
image at left grabbed fromWeeks of November 14 and November 21: – CLASS DOES NOT MEET (Wares at NSF Panel meeting). Please take the week to re-organize your thoughts on the wiki. Please note that the following Wednesday, November 21, is Thanksgiving holiday break. And then...
Week Thirteen (November 28): As classes end December 4, this is the last class meeting. We will use this as our opportunity to overview what we have done. So, your assigned reading is the website that you have made. Read all of it. Make edits and additions in places that you think need more information or greater clarity. Try to have your thoughts and ideas as organized as possible on the class website!
also, don't forget to evaluate this class! https://www.franklin.uga.edu/evaluation/login.php
These evaluations will close at 11:59 on Dec 5 2012 (reading day).
UGA Honesty Code (and what it means for development of this wiki)
All participants in this class must adhere to the guidelines of the UGA academic honesty policy. That certainly means that any and all material that is deposited on this website (images, figures, quotes, papers, etc.) must be appropriately cited or linked to the original source with sufficient information to ensure that the origins of such materials are clearly accessible. We aren't writing a paper - this website won't necessarily have a bibliography (though it can!) - but we are generating a resource that others will be using. This is important. If you have any doubts, contact Dr. Wares or examine the guidelines available at honesty.uga.edu.
[The banner photograph at the top of the page, by the way, was taken by Paul Nicklen and was made available by the National Geographic Society as a wallpaper image. The formatting of this wiki doesn't provide for an easy way to put a subtitle under that image, and as soon as I remember how to edit that image I'll update things :) -JPW ]
/groups/evolution3000/search/index.rss?sort=modifiedDate&sortDirection=reverse&tag=adaptationlist/groups/evolution3000/search/?sort=modifiedDate&sortDirection=reverse&tag=adaptationAdaptationCustomTagSidebarCustomTagSidebar?sort=modifiedDate&sortDirection=reverse&tag=adaptation0/groups/evolution3000/sidebar/CustomTagSidebarmodifiedDate5CustomTagSidebarreverseadaptationAdaptationcustom/groups/evolution3000/search/index.rss?tag=hotlist/groups/evolution3000/search/?tag=hotWhat’s HotHotListHot!?tag=hot1/groups/evolution3000/sidebar/HotListdheubel5dheubel52012-11-14 16:36:03+00:002012-11-14 16:36:03updated5dheubel5dheubel52012-11-09 16:46:53+00:002012-11-09 16:46:53updated4Added tag - hotdheubel5dheubel52012-11-09 16:46:49+00:002012-11-09 16:46:49addTag3I thought this might be helpful in reading through everything. Let me know if you guys like it!dheubel5dheubel52012-11-09 16:46:24+00:002012-11-09 16:46:24updated2First createddheubel5dheubel52012-11-09 16:31:49+00:002012-11-09 16:31:49created1wiki2012-11-14T16:36:03+00:00groups/evolution3000/wiki/de98eFalseTable of Contents/groups/evolution3000/wiki/de98e/Table_of_Contents.htmldheubel55 updatesTable of Contents
Climate Change
Effects of Climate Change in the Environment
Oxygen Levels
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