afl quiz 9

What else does a good title do that might affect what words you put in it?

includes search terms

What’s wrong with the following titles for a scientific journal article (or for one of your independent project papers)?

Study of molds and food

Algae and pollution: an experiment

Fungus survey at two sites

Fungus survey at the Sanctuary and the College Farm

They are all pretty vague with regard to purpose and location.  With regard to location, remember that scientific journals are typically distributed to readers in multiple countries

What’s an abstract and what parts of the paper should it summarize?

Should the Results section be summarized extensively, or should the abstract mostly introduce the paper and give methods? 

have a sentence or two or three to summarize each of the major sections:  the intro, the methods, the results, the discussion

What four things should be in the Introduction?  (Yes, the fourth can be very brief or implied)

1.  Question or questions

2.  Why questions are interesting or important

3.  Background, including literature references.  Meet with me if you want help searching; next week’s lab is one good time

4.  Hint of what type of methods are used

Should papers be written in active or passive voice, or does it depend on the situation?  Explain.

depends on the journal, but most ecology journals prefer active because it is more precise 

Where do the captions of tables go, and where do the captions of figures go (traditionally)?

captions of tables go above while captions of figures go below

What is the grammatical structure traditionally used in a table or figure caption? 

First sentence of a caption is traditionally a sentence fragment. If you need another sentence or two after the initial sentence fragment, make them complete sentences.  If you have error bars in a figure, say what kind of error bars they are in the caption.

Should you use a period, not a colon, after the initial "Figure 1" or "Table 1"?

period

How do you get the reader to look at a particular table or figure right when you want him to, while he is reading your results section?

by placing the figure nearby, and referencing the table or figure and what exactly you want the reader to be looking at  

Where do you report statistics in the Results section?

The primary spot is the text.  However, you can also slip results of statistical tests into a table devoted just to that, or you can slip results of statistical tests into the captions of figures and tables so that they are right with the data in the figures and tables. 

In the Discussion, what are you trying to accomplish?  Is it all to be a discussion of what could have gone wrong or what did go wrong in your study?

interpret your results in light of what is already known.  Literature citations are useful here too to connect it all. also reflect on what could have been done differently

In our examples, are the authors citing (author, date) in the text and then listing citations in a format alphabetized by author, or are they using numbered end notes as in the Whittaker 1969 paper that we looked at in the beginning of the semester?

author, date

 Which format should you use in your independent project paper for the course? 

use the author, date citations and have the Literature Cited papers alphabetized by author as in the slime mold and squirrel sample papers

Where do water molds occur?  (multiple places)

freshwater and moist soil

What do they do for a living?  (multiple things)

As decomposers, they absorb nutrients from dead organisms, and as parasites, they infect and harm living hosts like fish, plants, and other invertebrates. 

2) a few parasitize algae or aquatic fungi and other aquatic organisms including fishes

3) a few cause devastating plant diseases such as damping off disease, downy mildew, late blight of potato/tomato, white rust

If you wanted to get hold of some of the nonparasitic aquatic water molds, or if you wanted to set traps to see what kinds of water molds inhabit a given stream, what would you do to “bait” them?

bait with dead insects or seeds

Find any TWO water molds and any ONE chytrid, and know what their common names are and what dinner item they attack. 

Black wart of potato: It's a Chytrid, a fungus with swimming spores. It mostly lives inside the host cells of the potato

What is the other way that Phytophthora infestans can disperse without human help, that happens earlier, before the zoospores break out of the sporangium (spore chamber)?

they produce swimming spores

What closely related plant does Phytophthora infestans also attack, besides potatoes? (HINT: same family of plant and rhymes with potato)

tomato

On what continent did potatoes and the disease originate?

central and south america

When did the disease get to North America and to Ireland, and why was it traveling across the ocean at about that time? 

started in the early 1800s, became a national issue in 1845

Why did it have a lot more impact on the human population in Ireland than elsewhere?

extreme poverty, control from England

What happened to the Irish population as a result of the potato crop failures of 1845, 1846, 1848, and some later years?   Did the Irish people die, leave, adjust?  Have some idea of how many people OR, if you prefer, what proportion of Ireland’s population was involved.

~1 million died and ~1.5 million emigrated

The Reverend Miles Joseph Berkeley observed mold on potato leaves and proposed that the mold was a fungal disease and that it caused the potato blight.  He got into a long series of public arguments with Dr. Lindley on this issue.  What did Dr. Lindley believe was the cause of blight?  (Hudler)

Dr. Lindley blamed the problem on plants becoming “overladen with water.” He theorized that they had been growing so fast and furiously during the good weather that when rain came, they soaked up too much water

How did Anton de Bary PROVE in 1861 that Phytophthora infestans was responsible for late blight of potato?

by demonstrating that only when potatoes were inoculated with a fungus did they succumb to the frightful disease

In the late 1800s, it became popular to control plant disease fungi by spraying plants with “Bordeaux mixture.”  What is in that mixture and what biological effect does it have in fungi? 

copper sulfate and lime. preventing infection by the downy mildew fungus

Why is late blight of potatoes harder to combat in North America now, either by fungicides or by breeding of resistant potato strains, than it was before the 1980s?

Originally only one mating type was present in the US so it was easy to stop reproduction (asexual only) but now that there is the other mating type they can reproduce sexually which allows for rapid recombination of genes (aka the ability to become resistant to pesticides)

Did late blight of potatoes help or hurt the Germans in World War 1?

hurt: most copper was redirected to making shell casings so less pesticides were being produced so the blight was not fought!

By the 1970s, more specific fungicides were being developed that don’t target other organisms.  Briefly, what is a drawback of these specific fungicides?

more specific fungicides such as metalaxyl, the wonder drug released in the 1970s, inhibit the “water mold version” of the polymerase enzyme that builds RNA molecules for protein synthesis.  Such specificity is good but is relatively easy to evolve around

Where do chytrids occur and what do they do? 

same habitats as water molds as well as estuaries 

same habits as water molds: most are saprotrophs; some parasitize algae or aquatic animals; a few are crop pests

Give an example of a ruminant

cattle

Microorganisms that live in the rumen (first stomach of a ruminant) include not only the anaerobic rumen fungi in question 2 but also assorted bacteria and archaea.  How do these microorganisms benefit the ruminant?

1) These microorganisms in the first stomach chamber of ruminants are able to digest cellulose into sugar.  Mammals cannot do this on their own because we do not have the proper enzyme (cellulase).  Therefore, when humans eat veggies, we don’t get a lot of calories out of them.   But when cows and other ruminants eat grass and other veggies, they get a lot of calories because the microorganisms break down the cellulose into sugars that the cows can use.

2) Veggies are also low in protein for humans but the microorganisms in cow stomachs take ammonia ions (NH4) that are in the vegetables and stick them onto carbohydrate to make amino acids out of them, thereby building their own protein.  Then, when some of the microorganisms accidentally pass out of the first stomach and on through the other three chambers, the cow digests them and gets protein for itself.

The first stomach or rumen is a nice place for microorganisms.  It doesn’t have oxygen so the microorganisms have to be anaerobic, but it has a reasonable pH.  The microorganisms can reproduce prolifically there.  Some of them inevitably slide on into the second, third, and fourth stomach chambers with the food that they are digesting for the cow, deer, antelope, or whatever.  By the time they have slid into the third and chambers, what happens to the pH and what happens to the microorganisms as a result? 

very acidic: They get digested, giving protein to the cow, deer, etc

Where do trichomycetes (members of Phylum Zygomycota, Class Trichomycetes) occur in nature?

found in the digestive tract of arthropods

Besides the water molds (Oomycota), the chytrids (Chytridiomycota), the near-chytrids (Blastocladiomycota), and the bread molds (Zygomycota), there is another phylum that has a few aquatic members, including swamp beacons.  What is the name of that phylum?

Phylum Ascomycota

Ascomycota spores do not have flagella, but aquatic species of Ascomycota often have “tetraradiate” spores, or spores with four spikes on them.  Why would those four spikes be handy for a spore that is floating around in the water?

allows them to anchor to substrate