Natural Science Division
Distinguished Alumni
Pepperdine Alumni Jake Kerby and his recent research highlighted on the Nature website: Article Published online: 29 October 2009
Amphibians rarely give earliest warning of pollution
To investigate how resilient amphibians really are, Jake Kerby at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion and his colleagues analysed more than 28,000 studies from the US Environmental Protection Agency's Aquatic Information Retrieval (AQUIRE) database (part of its ECOTOX system), detailing the effects of various chemical agents on aquatic species, including insects, bivalves, fish and amphibians. The team found 23,942 studies of 73 chemicals that had been tested on amphibians and many other creatures, totalling 1,075 species.
They broke the chemicals down into four categories: heavy metals, inorganic compounds, phenols and pesticides, and found that amphibians were much less sensitive to chemical exposure from heavy metals, inorganics, and pesticides than many other species. The most sensitive group proved to be brachiopods, which declined dramatically in the presence of heavy metals and inorganic chemicals. Insects, unsurprisingly, were the most sensitive to insecticides, whereas amphibians were most sensitive only to the phenol chemicals. The results appear in Ecology Letters4.
For the full story go to:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091029/full/news.2009.1048.html
From California to South Africa: Alumna Anna Jacobsen
Shares Her Passion for Science
Today Jacobsen is a professor in the Department of Biology at California State University (CSU) Bakersfield. Her husband Robert "Brandon" Pratt, also a graduate of Seaver College, is a fellow professor who researches plant ecophysiology. The couple has been happily married for three years.
Before taking these brisk walks to CSU Bakersfield, Jacobsen embarked on a much longer journey in 2003-2004 as the recipient of a prestigious Fulbright grant. She spent eight months at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape Province of South Africa, about an hour away from Cape Town. There Jacobsen was delighted to devote her time to researching plant evolution, particularly plant responses to stresses such as freezing and draught tolerance. "Animals can move and walk away," she explains, "but plants are stuck in one place. If things get tough, they don’t have the option of leaving."
As a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jacobsen was able to continue the research project she began in South Africa at Michigan State University. Support from the three-year grant began upon her return to the United States in 2004.
For Full story go to: http://www.pepperdine.edu/pr/stories/2007/jacobsen.htm
