Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an “included-exclusion” within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics, and hence for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.

The Reflectance Signature of Canopy Components: Implications for the Interpretation of Remotely Sensed Images

The reflectance signatures of plantation pine canopy and understorey components were measured using a spectro-radiometer. The aim was to establish whether differences observed in the reflectance signature of stressed and unstressed pine needles were consistent with observed differences in the reflectance of multispectral Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images of healthy and stressed forest. Because overall scene reflectance includes the contribution of each scene component, needle reflectance may not be representative of canopy reflectance. In this investigation, a limited dataset of reflectance signatures from stressed and unstressed needles confirmed the negative relationship between pine needle health and reflectance which was observed in visible red wavelengths. However, the reflectance contribution from bushes, pine needle litter and bare soil tended to reinforce this relationship suggesting that in this instance, overall scene reflectance is comprised of the proportional reflectance of each scene component. In near infrared wavelengths, differences between healthy and stressed needle reflectance suggested a strong positive relationship between reflectance and tree health. For Landsat TM images, previous research had only observed a weak positive relationship between stand health and near infrared reflectance in these pine canopies. This suggests that for multispectral Landsat TM images, reflectance of near infrared light from pine canopies may be affected by other factors which may include the scattering of light within canopies. These results are seen as promising for the use of hyperspectral images to detect stand health, provided that pixel reflectance is not influenced by other scene components.

Larval activity levels and delayed metamorphosis affect post-larval performance in the colonial, ascidian Diplosoma listerianum

It is becoming widely recognized that extending the larval period of marine invertebrates, especially of species with non-feeding larvae, can affect post-larval performance. As these carry-over effects are presumed to be caused by the depletion of larval energy reserves, we predicted that the level of larval activity would also affect post-larval performance. This prediction was tested with the cosmopolitan colonial ascidian Diplosoma listerianum in field experiments in southern Australia. Diplosoma larvae, brooded in the parent colony, are competent to settle immediately after spawning, and they remain competent to metamorphose for > 15 h. Some larvae were induced to metamorphose 0 to 6 h after release, whilst others were induced to swim actively by alternating light and dark periods for up to 3 h prior to metamorphosis. Juvenile colonies were then transplanted to a subtidal field site in Port Phillip Bay and left to grow for up to 3 wk. Extending the larval period and increasing the amount of swimming both produced carry-over effects on post-larval performance. Colonies survived at different rates among experiments, but larval experience did not affect survival rates. Delays in metamorphosis and increased swimming activity did, however, reduce colony growth rates dramatically, resulting in 50% fewer zooids per colony. Moreover, such colonies produced initial zooids with smaller feeding structures, with the width of branchial baskets reduced by 10 to 15%. These differences in branchial basket size persisted and were still apparent in newly budded zooids 3 wk after metamorphosis. Our results suggest that, for D. listerianum, larval maintenance, swimming, and metamorphosis all use energy from a common pool, and increases in the allocation to maintenance or swimming come at the expense of post-larval performance.

Offspring size affects the post-metamorphic performance of a colonial marine invertebrate

The positive relationship between offspring size and offspring fitness is a fundamental assumption of life-history theory, but it has received relatively little attention in the marine environment. This is surprising given that substantial intraspecific variation in offspring size is common in marine organisms and there are clear links between larval experience and adult performance. The metamorphosis of most marine invertebrates does not represent a newbeginning, and larval experiences can have effects that carry over to juvenile survival and growth. We show that larval size can have equally important carryover effects in a colonial marine invertebrate. In the bryozoan Bugula neritina, the size of the non-feeding larvae has a prolonged effect on colony performance after metamorphosis. Colonies that came from larger larvae survived better, grew faster, and reproduced sooner or produced more embryos than colonies that came from smaller larvae. These effects crossed generations, with colonies from larger larvae themselves producing larger larvae. These effects were found in two populations (in Australia and in the United States) in contrasting habitats.

Signature of mott-insulator transition with ultracold fermions in a one-dimensional optical lattice

Using the exact Bethe ansatz solution of the Hubbard model and Luttinger liquid theory, we investigate the density profiles and collective modes of one-dimensional ultracold fermions confined in an optical lattice with a harmonic trapping potential. We determine a generic phase diagram in terms of a characteristic filling factor and a dimensionless coupling constant. The collective oscillations of the atomic mass density, a technique that is commonly used in experiments, provide a signature of the quantum phase transition from the metallic phase to the Mott-insulator phase. A detailed experimental implementation is proposed.

Offspring size effects in the marine environment: A field test for a colonial invertebrate

A central tenet of life-history theory is the presence of a trade-off between the size and number of offspring that a female can produce for a given clutch. A crucial assumption of this trade-off is that larger offspring perform better than smaller offspring. Despite the importance of this assumption empirical, field-based tests are rare, especially for marine organisms. We tested this assumption for the marine invertebrate, Diplosoma listerianum, a colonial ascidian that commonly occurs in temperate marine communities. Colonies that came from larger larvae had larger feeding structures than colonies that came from smaller larvae. Colonies that came from larger larvae also had higher survival and growth after 2 weeks in the field than colonies that came from smaller larvae. However, after 3 weeks in the field the colonies began to fragment and we could not detect an effect of larval size. We suggest that offspring size can have strong effects on the initial recruitment of D. listerianum but because of the tendency of this species to fragment, offspring size effects are less persistent in this species than in others.