Seminar "Apparent competition: Reflections on humans as mediators, agents, and victims" by Dr. Robert Dan Holt

Speaker: Prof. Robert Dan Holt

Title: Apparent competition: Reflections on humans as mediators, agents, and victims

Affiliation: Affiliate Eminent Scholar, Center for African Studies, University of Florida, USA

Hosted by Dieckmann Unit

Venue: L4E01, Lab 4

*Zoom is available: https://oist.zoom.us/j/96634727201?pwd=AbYu6XtCNIBar5Zed16b7AU2xQGL2Y.1

Abstract:

Apparent competition is an indirect negative interaction between species or populations due to a shared natural enemy.  Apparent competition plays a pervasive role in many conservation situations, because of introductions of species (predators or prey), and modification of habitat, and also be humans ourselves can be devasting top predators, impacting scarce prey species to the point of extinction — precisely because our population abundance, and behaviors, can be sustained by alternative productive prey or food resources.  One can likewise discern apparent competition, or comparable phenomena, in many drivers of human history and suffering, ranging from spillover infections of pathogens from wildlife to ourselves, to the working of our own immune system, to interactions among different social groups.

Biosketch:

Robert D. Holt is an ecologist particularly known for theoretical and conceptual contributions to population and community ecology, and for fostering the integration of ecology with evolutionary biology. His research examines how species interact, both directly and indirectly, in complex webs and he addresses the ecological and evolutionary consequences of such interactions, and how such interactions unfold across space, contributing for instance to geographical range limits. He was born and raised in Tennessee. He graduated from Princeton in 1973 with a degree in physics, but fortunately each semester took for fun an upper-level course in biology. This allowed him to pursue graduate studies in biology at Harvard, where he received his doctorate in 1979. He then moved to the University of Kansas, where he was on the faculty and a curator in the Museum of Natural History. In 2001 he shifted to the University of Florida to take the titles of Eminent Scholar and Arthur R. Marshal Jr. Chair in Ecological Studies. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences, and has been president of the American Society of Naturalists. He is a keen naturalist and has participated in expeditions to many remote corners of the globe.