Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his Rosetta Stone paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.
This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great l...
Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.
Their result was a model-generated prediction: Given this rate of transmission, given that rate of recovery, given those unrelated mortalities, then . . . an intermediate grade of virulence should com...
Their most telling improvement involved a fundamental parameter: population size of the hosts.
The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.
The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren’t emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus o...
Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein.
People and gorillas, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We’re all in this together.
Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims (as Hendra does) or a few hundred (Ebola) in this place or that, and then disappearing for years.
One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten empl...
It comes and it goes. But epidemiologists have recognized that, with measles virus, as with other pathogens, there’s a critical minimum size of the host population, below which it can’t persist indefi...
Hamer was especially interested in why diseases such as influenza, diphtheria, and measles seem to mount into major outbreaks in a cyclical pattern—rising to a high case count, fading away, rising aga...
Continuation of the outbreak depended on the likelihood of encounters between people who were infectious and people who could be infected. This idea became known as the mass action principle. It was a...
But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.
And hopefully nothing will happen. But of course, as she well knew, something always does happen. It’s just a question of what and when.
AIDS began with a spillover from one chimp to one human, in southeastern Cameroon, no later than 1908
A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but they don’t explode, and they don’t melt. In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, was itself a misnomer, because...
Disappointment, in science, is sometimes a gateway to insight.
A mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce.