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David Sims (biologist)
David William Sims (born 1969) is a British marine biologist known for using satellite tracking to study wild behaviour of sharks and for the Global Shark Movement Project. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in Plymouth, and a Professor of Marine Ecology in the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton at the University of Southampton, U.K. He works in the field of animal ecology researching movements, behaviour and conservation of sharks. Research has estimated global spatial overlap of sharks and fisheries, climate change impacts on fishes, identified common patterns of behaviour ( scaling laws) across phyla and informed conservation of threatened species. Background He gained a PhD in animal behaviour in 1994 under the supervision of Quentin Bone FRS at the Marine Biological Association. Between 1994 and 1995 Sims did postdoctoral research on physiology of fish behaviour with Paul L.R. Andrews and J. Z. Young ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marine Biological Association
The Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (MBA) is a learned society with a scientific laboratory that undertakes research in marine biology. The organisation was founded in 1884 and has been based in Plymouth since the Citadel Hill Laboratory was opened on 30 June 1888. The MBA is also home to the National Marine Biological Library, whose collections cover the marine biological sciences, and curates the Historical Collections. Throughout its history, the MBA has had a royal patron. In 2013, the MBA was granted a royal charter in recognition of the MBA's scientific preeminence in its field. Origins and foundation In 1866 the Royal Commission on the Sea Fisheries, which included among its officers Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, had reported that fears of over-exploitation of the sea fisheries were unfounded. They recommended removing existing laws regulating fishing grounds and closed seasons. However, the increase in the size and number of fishing vessels was cau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nature (journal)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. ''Nature'' was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 '' Journal Citation Reports'' (with an ascribed impact factor of 42.778), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. Founded in autumn 1869, ''Nature'' was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the journal; ''Nature'' redoubled its efforts in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fellow Of The Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science". Fellowship of the Society, the oldest known scientific academy in continuous existence, is a significant honour. It has been awarded to many eminent scientists throughout history, including Isaac Newton (1672), Michael Faraday (1824), Charles Darwin (1839), Ernest Rutherford (1903), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918), Albert Einstein (1921), Paul Dirac (1930), Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944), Dorothy Hodgkin (1947), Alan Turing (1951), Lise Meitner (1955) and Francis Crick (1959). More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), David Attenborough (1983), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venki Ramakrishnan ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethology
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or to trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Throughout history, different naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Threatened Species
Threatened species are any species (including animals, plants and fungi) which are vulnerable to endangerment in the near future. Species that are threatened are sometimes characterised by the population dynamics measure of ''critical depensation'', a mathematical measure of biomass related to population growth rate. This quantitative metric is one method of evaluating the degree of endangerment. IUCN definition The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the foremost authority on threatened species, and treats threatened species not as a single category, but as a group of three categories, depending on the degree to which they are threatened: *Vulnerable species * Endangered species * Critically endangered species Less-than-threatened categories are near threatened, least concern, and the no longer assigned category of conservation dependent. Species which have not been evaluated (NE), or do not have sufficient data ( data deficient) also are not conside ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phylum
In biology, a phylum (; plural: phyla) is a level of classification or taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class. Traditionally, in botany the term division has been used instead of phylum, although the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants accepts the terms as equivalent. Depending on definitions, the animal kingdom Animalia contains about 31 phyla, the plant kingdom Plantae contains about 14 phyla, and the fungus kingdom Fungi contains about 8 phyla. Current research in phylogenetics is uncovering the relationships between phyla, which are contained in larger clades, like Ecdysozoa and Embryophyta. General description The term phylum was coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel from the Greek (, "race, stock"), related to (, "tribe, clan"). Haeckel noted that species constantly evolved into new species that seemed to retain few consistent features among themselves and therefore few features that distinguished them as a group ("a self-contain ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lévy Flight Foraging Hypothesis
The Lévy flight foraging hypothesis is a hypothesis in the field of biology that may be stated as follows: ''Since Lévy flights and walks can optimize search efficiencies, therefore natural selection should have led to adaptations for Lévy flight foraging.'' Background The movement of animals closely resembles in many ways the random walks of dust particles in a fluid. This similarity led to interest in trying to understand how animals move via the analogy to Brownian motion. This conventional wisdom held until the early 1990s. However, starting in the late 1980s, evidence began to accumulate that did not fit the theoretical predictions. In 1999, a theoretical investigation of the properties of Lévy flights showed that an inverse square distribution of flight times or distances could optimize the search efficiency under certain circumstances. Specifically, a search based on an inverse-square Lévy walk, consisting of a constant velocity search following a path whose length i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Climate Change
In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The current rise in global average temperature is more rapid than previous changes, and is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices increase greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide and methane. Greenhouse gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight. Larger amounts of these gases trap more heat in Earth's lower atmosphere, causing global warming. Due to climate change, deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Increased warming in the Arctic has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Higher temperatures are also causin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fisheries
Fishery can mean either the Big business, enterprise of Animal husbandry#Aquaculture, raising or Fishing, harvesting fish and other aquatic life; or more commonly, the site where such enterprise takes place (wikt:AKA, a.k.a. fishing ground). Commercial fisheries include wild fisheries and fish farming, fish farms, both in freshwater waterbodies (about 10% of all catch) and the oceans (about 90%). About 500 million people worldwide are economically dependent on fisheries. 171 million tonnes of fish were produced in 2016, but overfishing is an increasing problem — causing declines in some populations. Because of their economic and social importance, fisheries are governed by complex fisheries management practices and fisheries law, legal regimes that vary widely across countries. Historically, fisheries were treated with a "first-come, first-served " approach, but recent threats by human overfishing and environmental issues have required increased regulation of fisheries to prev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wildlife Conservation
Wildlife conservation refers to the practice of protecting wild species In biology, a species is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of ... and their habitats in order to maintain healthy wildlife species or populations and to restore, protect or enhance natural ecosystems. Major threats to wildlife include habitat destruction, degradation, fragmentation, overexploitation, poaching, pollution and climate change. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN estimates that 27,000 species of the ones assessed are at risk for extinction. Expanding to all existing species, a 2019 UN report on biodiversity put this estimate even higher at a million species. It is also being acknowledged that an increasing number of ecosystems on Earth containing endangered species are disappearing. To address ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animal Behaviour
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or to trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Throughout history, different naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motion (physics)
In physics, motion is the phenomenon in which an object changes its Position (geometry), position with respect to time. Motion is mathematically described in terms of Displacement (geometry), displacement, distance, velocity, acceleration, speed and frame of reference to an observer and measuring the change in position of the body relative to that frame with change in time. The branch of physics describing the motion of objects without reference to its cause is called kinematics, while the branch studying forces and their effect on motion is called dynamics (mechanics), dynamics. If an object is not changing relative to a given frame of reference, the object is said to be ''at rest'', ''motionless'', ''immobile'', ''wikt:stationary, stationary'', or to have a constant or time-invariant position with reference to its surroundings. Modern physics holds that, as there is no absolute frame of reference, Isaac Newton, Newton's concept of ''Absolute space and time, absolute motion'' can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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