Biodiversity - John Spicer

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Résumé :

1 ?The pandemic of wounded biodiversity

Biodiversity - what was that again?

A long, leisurely trip to La Jolla

Directions

?

2 ?Teeming boisterous life

The big picture

The volleyball on Mission Beach

'A rose by any other name'...what's a species?

?? Morphological species

?? Identifying species without ever seeing them

?? Biological species

?? Evolutionary species

?? Naming species

How many living species...and what are they?

?? 1) To the nearest approximation (almost) every organism is an arthropod...?

?? 2) Greenery: The Plantae

?? 3) Fungi: Mushrooms, moulds and yeasts - The Fungi

?? 4) Mollusca: Shell life

?? 5) Chordata: Animals with backbones...mostly

?? 6) Protozoa or Protista?

?? 7) Nematoda: The roundworm that's the fly in the ointment?

?? 8) Bacteria and Archaea: Microbial life

?? Remaining animal groupings

?? Viruses: All the world's a phage... or nearly

New species

Planting and growing the 'tree of life'

?? The great chain of being

?? Linnaeus's hierarchical classification

?? Influence of evolutionary ideas

?? Chatton's two-domain idea

?? Whittaker's five-kingdom approach

?? Woese and the three-domain model

?? A new twist to the three-domain model

?? ...and when is a tree a bush?

Designs on life

?? The phylum and the Bauplan

?? Most phyla are not very species rich

An unequal distribution of life

3 ?Where on Earth is biodiversity?

From Berkeley, south to the Sea of Cortez

More is more

?? Back to Bird Rock

?? The species-area relationship

Those who go down to the sea in ships

Hotspots: A tale of two definitions

Big-scale biodiversity: Biogeographical and political regions

?? On land

?? Sea

?? Biodiversity by country

Latitude for life?

?? The land

?? The sea

?? Genetic diversity and latitude

?? Why is there a latitudinal gradient?

Altitude

?? Lessons from the tops of Scottish mountains

?? Biodiversity takes the hump with altitude

?? Mountains as islands?

?? Aerial plankton and organisms in flight

Depth

?? The short-lived azoic theory

?? Out of our depth

?? A journey to the centre of the Earth

Staying close to home

Congruence: The holy grail of diversity?

4 ?A world that was old when we came into it: Diversity, deep time and extinction

One every twenty minutes?

A life in the year of...

Precambrian - before life?

?? A schoolgirl changes our understanding of life before life - but no one believes her

?? The garden of Ediacara

?? A world of chemical energy, not driven by sunlight?

?? How familiar is the Ediacaran fauna?

Explosive Cambrian

?? Cambrian forms

?? Archaeocyatha: The only extinct phylum?

?? Why diversify now?

?? Cambrian explosion or short fuse?

Cambrian biodiversity: Good designs... or just lucky?

?? How a small quarry in Briti...