How it started:
How it’s going:
Second photo from https://x.com/lenakumba/status/1731423282228867322
26 December 2023: Originally posted on 3 December 2034 on the Better Posters blog by accident.
Showing posts with label conferences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conferences. Show all posts
26 December 2023
30 January 2023
DORA at ten: Publisher ban roundtable
On a bit of a whim, I proposed an event for the 10th anniversary events around the Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA).
Publisher bans and DORA
And they said yes?
And now I have to do this. Mark your calendars and if you’re interested in being part of the roundtable, email me!
Publisher bans and DORA
Publishers like MDPI, Frontiers, and Hindawi have experienced enormous growth in the number of submissions from researchers, which would suggest they they are meeting needs of the research community and providing good value to researchers. But multiple institutions have told scientists that research in journals from these publishers will no longer “count” for assessment. Such policies suggest that these are “predatory” publishers that do not perform the basic functions of academic journals. The publishers dispute this, as do many authors whose work appears in their journals. Many authors believe that choosing where to publishing their findings is part of their academic freedom. Blacklisting publishers with hundreds of journals may be too blunt an instrument for research assessment and inconsistent with DORA. Are there cases where such bans are valid and useful to the community?
This event will be held as an online round-table discussion followed by a moderated Q & A session.
Update, 12 March 2023: I have created a registration form for the publisher bans and blacklists event so that you can be notified of updates.
14 June 2022
End abstract sponsorship for the Neuroscience meeting
This meeting does something that I have never seen at any other meeting. Every presentation and poster needs a society member to “sponsor” the abstract. And a member can only sponsor one scientific and one “metascience” presentation.
“So just become a member.” Not that easy, because membership also requires you to be sponsored by two active existing members. So if you are in a smaller campus, there may be no existing member who can sponsor you.
If you are in a lab with three society members but want to present four posters, you’re stuck.
The problem is so obvious that the Society’s Twitter account has taken to trying to help people rustle up a member to sponsor abstracts by retweeting requests. Like this.
Desperate last minute request from a @UniLeiden postdoc! Would anybody mind sharing their @SfNtweets membership ID for me to be able to use as a sponsor? Much appreciated 🙃
Or this or this. Not to mention this and this.
This is a failure on a couple of levels. First, it’s a stressful waste of time for people who want to present at the meeting. Second, it’s clear that people are willing to sponsor presentations they had nothing to do with.
I suspect that this policy could also cause problems with around representation, which occur pretty much any time you create an obstacle that has anything to do with money.
And it shouldn’t be up to a social media account to try to fix a conference admission problem.
- Keeps out cranks, kooks, and quacks who want to present crackpot ideas. I think there are better ways of achieving this.
- Limits the size of the meeting. Sorry, but that ship has sailed.
- Drives membership. This is the bad reason. Look, either make membership worth having or increase the registration fee for non-members to compensate for lost revenue.
The meeting has done this for a long time. I ran into the problem the
very first time I submitted an abstract. And that was, as they say, a
while ago now. It feels like the kind of policy that sticks around because “We’ve
always done it this way” instead of serving any valuable purpose.
External links
16 May 2022
New interview on Scholarly Communication podcast
While the ostensible reason I was on was to talk about the Better Posters book, the conversation ranged widely. Daniel and I talk about narrative, collaboration, and efficiency in the realm of academic communication more generally.
Here are a couple of posts I mention during the interview.
First, this is the post where I talk about my wariness anyone says, “We need to do a better job training Ph.Ds in...”.
Second, this is the post where I talk about how my writing class completely, totally, 💯 rejected the idea that storytelling has any place in science. So storytelling is dead, long live narrative.
You can listen at the New Book Networks website or probably any other place you get your podcasts (like Stitcher).
External links
10 August 2021
Thanks to you, ComSciCon!
Just briefly wanted to follow up on my appearance last week at ComSciCon. The storytelling panel I was part of was excellent (despite my presence) and I was also able to work with small group on short journalism pitches. There was not a coherent thread or panel hashtag, so here are tweets from the storytelling session. (Darn it, I miss Storify.) These are in roughly chronological order, and I would normally cut and paste the tweet text, but I have some other tasks to do and it would take too long to make it pretty right now.
Thanks to the organizers for posting a non-derpy Zoom screenshot of me!
Related posts
31 July 2020
Animal Behavior Society virtual meeting, Day 4
Today, I tried to see more cool science!
Unfortunately, one talk I thought was very cool began and I to blog about began with, “Please don’t share these results on social media.”
Mike Smotherman, who once was nice enough to host me at Texas A&M, had a very cool talk about bats using echolocation to detect texture. He suggests that bats’ auditory detection of texture is very like human touch detection of texture.
Susan Finkbeiner showed butterflies could distinguish different wavelengths of ultraviolet light. But only the females could do it! The males could not do this, because only females express two photoreceptors.
My colleague Kelly Weinersmith gave a great summary of her work on crypt keeper parasitoid wasps. I’m just going to share this screenshot because it looks like she is kung fu fighting.
Thienthanh Trinh presented some new work on the increasingly famous fungi that parasitise and manipulate ants. She showed a very cool maze she created to monitor the behaviour of infected ants, and was able to show infected ants wandered more, at all times of day, unlike uninfected ants, which had more of a daily rhythm and focused on food rewards.
My favourite title for a talk today was “Ants Dance Revolution,” and the presenter, Andrew Burchill, ran with that, and created a talk with lots of fun references and sound effects to Dance Dance Revolution.Andrew showed that you can do more with a video presentation than recording a narrated PowerPoint deck. The tank, however, was more about ant-mimicking spiders than ants. He showed that not only do spiders look like ants, they walk in the same weird patterns that some ants do.
I get the impression that there are more presentations about the
underlying physiology of animal behavior than in past Animal Behavior Society meetings (but then, I don’t go every year). But there seemed
to be much more endrocronology than neurobiology.
One thing that is similar in the virtual and face-to-face conferences: you start to lose track of all the stuff you saw very easily. It might be worse in a virtual conference because of interruptions and such unless you are closely tracking what you have seen in real time.
I did manage to get in to some more of the live Q&A sessions on Zoom. They are turning out to be very variable. Moderators need to make sure there are questions read for each speaker so there is no “dead air” waiting for questions to be typed into the chat box.
I also couldn’t help noticing people’s skill in camera placement. I saw lots of people’s ceilings. Some people, I couldn’t see all their face. Some people were so close I could practically see their skin pores.
Nice piece of news is that the Animal Behavior Society (US) and the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (UK) will be hosting a world-wide conference on Twitter in January 2021!
The talks are all up until the end of August, so I am hoping to catch up with a few more talks thatI didn’t catch in their scheduled time slot!
Related posts
Animal Behavior Society virtual meeting, Day 3
I didn’t want to mention this in my ABS Day 1 report, but the bookmarking for the conference is weird. I keep seeing bookmarked talks that I am almost certain I did not bookmark. I asked about this on Twitter, and I was not alone. This is frustrating.
A few observations as the meeting is wearing on.
The talks are 6 minutes long. That’s about half the length of a typical conference presentation, but frankly, I don’t miss the extra time. If anything, 6 minutes still feels too long. A lot of presentations would do well in a graphic abstract or poster format.
I’m finding it hard to get to all the talks I want before the Q&A session.
The Q&A sessions are moderated Zoom meetings. They go through each talk from a session in order, taking questions from the chat function. This is mixed. The interaction is pretty good, but if you haven’t seen all the talks in the session, or only have questions about one talk, there is a lot of filler for an audience member to sit through.
The meeting materials will be available until the end of August.
29 July 2020
Animal Behavior Society virtual meeting, Day 2 and Plant Biology 2020, Day 3
A particularly 2020 problem: attending two conferences simultaneously.
As I mentioned yesterday, I am attending the 2020 Animal Behaviour Society meeting. But some time ago, I also agreed to give a workshop talk about graphics at the 2020 Plant Biology meeting.
Now, my talk for Plant Biology was only supposed to be 12 minutes long, so easy to spend most of the day in Animal Behavior, dip in to the Plant Biology Zoom talk, give my presentation, and pop back to animals, right? Quart of an hour times commitment, right? Wrong!
First, I was still practicing my talk this morning. I decided I was going to give a short, snappy talk which was clocking in at 8 minutes instead of 12. But that meant I had to nail the delivery to get it done right. So the morning had no conference attendance.
Second, I had to show up early for my Plant Biology workshop and stay throughout. So the time spent there was not 12 minutes, but an hour and a half.
But the good news was that we have about 325 people in the
Plant Biology workshop, with very little dropoff during the hour! As the
last speaker, I was kind of worried about people drifting away. And the
feedback for the workshop seemed quite positive.
So, I got to see Animal Behaviour talks in the afternoon, right? Wrong! In theory, I should have watched a bunch of talks, but in practice, yesterday and today were “interesting” days that dumped tasks and decisions on me that I did not anticipate would be happening at the start of the week.
Maybe I’ll get a chance to watch more talks tonight.
People talk about “conference fatique” and information overload with a single in person conference. Welcome to 2020, which says, “You want information?! Here, take two!”
External links
Animal Behavior Society virtual meeting, Day 1
A mix of old and new. The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) was the first scientific society I joined and the first scientific conference I attended. So I feel it’s appropriate that ABS is the first online conference I will be attending. And I’ve decided to do daily blog posts rather than tweet things, because I think it will be easier to create a coherent post from my desktop than it would be in a conference hall.
The first thing I want to talk about is also a mix of old and new. The virtual conference home page is new, because this is the first time they have done it, but the graphics?
A very literal cartoon of a convention center. Not terribly high resolution. It kind of takes me back to 1990s Microsoft efforts like Microsoft Bob:
It was a time when computers were becoming more common in homes, graphics were getting more sophisticated, and nobody was quite sure how people were going to interact with computers, so they interpreted everything as literally as possible.. Your calendar is shown as a calendar on a wall. Your desktop is a space on a cartoon desk.
I kind of thought we had moved past that. Most user interfaces are either more abstract and less literal (your decktop in Windows no longer has to be shown on top of a desk), or the interface is more graphically sophisticated (think of a 3-D video game environment; maybe Legend of Zelda).
Now, I suppose that for a first online conference, maybe that step back to a more literal convention center cartoon interface will help people. I don’t think it will be the sort of format you see for future conferences, though. We’ll see.
What else does the interface do? Well, there is a bookmarking function for talks you want to see. That’s good. But when you go get a list of your bookmarks, it doesn’t show when the events are. You have to click each entry individually, which defeats the purpose of bookmarking.
The times are all given in Eastern. There is a dropdown menu to change the time zone, but it doesn’t apply to all times. It will change a session time, but not the listed “Office hours,” which is confusing.
The format is that there are pre-recorded talks, live Q&A sessions, and “office hours.” You have to be really on the ball to watch the talks you’re interested in before the Q&A session starts! Hopefully, this is mainly a problem for the start of the meeting, and people can “get ahead” of the presentations before Q&A as the week goes on.
The live Q&A sessions are a little tricky, because all speakers for a session are there at once, each gets a tiny sliver of time, and questions are being taken using the chat function. So when a new speaker is on to take questions, there’s “dead air” when people start typing questions.
However, there is an asyncronous “ask a question” feature – a little like a bulletin board – which works very well. You can leave a question for the presenter, who gets an email with a notification, and then you get notified with a reply. So far, I have had 100% responses to my questions this way.
One nice thing I noticed was that recorded talks allow joint presentations. Just have people record their section, and edit together. Awesome. Nice way of showing teamwork and allowing multiple people to shine.
The system automatically logs you out after inactivity, and its not a very long delay before you’re kicked out.
But enough about the interface! What cool science did I see?
I saw some awesome talks updating me on a science story I have been following for some time: the evolution of Hawai’ian cricket populations that have lost the ability to sing. Some of those populations are evolving a new song, which is such a cool story of evolution in action.
Also saw some interesting talks related mostly to crustacean fighting.
To be honest, I didn’t see as many talks yesterday as I hoped, because yesterday turned out to be a much, much more interesting day that I expected, and I had stuff pulling me away from the computer.
That’s the biggest problem I’m finding: going to a meeting physically forces you to think about just that. An online meeting puts you in competition with the laundry, taking out the garbage, picking up mail, washing dishes, and all the innumerable little things that pull you away from the computer for a few minutes here and there.
External links
29 June 2020
What’s a nice zoologist like you doing in a plant conference like this?
I’ll be speaking at the Plant Biology 2020 meeting next month as part of the workshop, “Get your message across: a guide to artwork and illustrations for better impact and clarity.”I will be joined by Magdalena Julkowska and Patrice Salome. They will be hard acts to follow!
If you are attending that meeting, please join me! If there is anything you would like me to address, @ me through Better Poster on Twitter or email me at the Better Posters account.
29 July 2020. Don’t miss it!
External links
06 November 2018
Pick one conference to go to every year
Because I have science attention deficit disorder (science ADD) and am not independently wealthy, there is no conference I go to each and every year. The only one which I have made a point to go regularly for the last few years has been the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, because I’m a committee chair. (Which reminds me I have some bookings to make.)
Over the years, I’ve been to the meetings about evolution, ecology, crayfish, crustaceans, natural history, coastal research, neuroethology, animal behaviour, neuroscience, parasites, and more. Because I have been living in Texas, a reasonably popular conference venue, my strategy has been to wait for meetings to come to me so I don’t have to travel and increase my conference carbon footprint.
This is a bad thing for me.
In the last few years, I’m coming to the realization that my capricious conference selection might be not the best strategy for professional opportunities.
I got to thinking about this after reading Terry McGlynn’s post about the shock and awe of going to the Neuroscience meeting.
Terry worries about the size of the conference being alienating. I have felt alienated at conferences, but it’s never been conference size made me feel that way.
Now, I started going to Neuroscience meeting when it was about 60% of what it is now, so I’m used to the scale of the bigger than big conference. And I’ve never used conference size as a factor for deciding what meeting to go to. Both large and small meetings can be great.
In the last few years, I’ve gone to new meetings I’ve never been to before. What put me off and made me feel excluded, particularly as an established mid-career scientist, were constant reminders that there you are not one of the people who come to this meeting every year. There are in jokes made during symposia, keynotes, and talks to things that happened in previous years. It’s very clear who are “conference buddies” that see each other every year.
(Part of this is probably my own damn fault, since I can be quiet, grumpy, or both. I’m working on this.)
But the point is that those conference regulars have clearly built a lot of social capital and created important professional networks that I haven’t.
And the moral of the story is:
Pick one conference that you like. Large or small, doesn’t matter. Go to that conference every year as religiously as you possibly can. Something to present or not, doesn’t matter. You will start building that group of conference buddies that will improve your conference experience (no more lunches alone!) and will become better known in your field.
External links
Huge conferences and the potential for alienation and isolation of junior scientists
Over the years, I’ve been to the meetings about evolution, ecology, crayfish, crustaceans, natural history, coastal research, neuroethology, animal behaviour, neuroscience, parasites, and more. Because I have been living in Texas, a reasonably popular conference venue, my strategy has been to wait for meetings to come to me so I don’t have to travel and increase my conference carbon footprint.
This is a bad thing for me.
In the last few years, I’m coming to the realization that my capricious conference selection might be not the best strategy for professional opportunities.
I got to thinking about this after reading Terry McGlynn’s post about the shock and awe of going to the Neuroscience meeting.
As soon as I walked into the poster hall, I was like ZOMG. HOLY MOLY. WHAT THE WHAT.
Ginormous cannnot do justice to explain the scale of this endeavor. Here’s an attempt: Imagine that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but instead of wooden crates, it’s an endless morass of posters upon posters, in which one of those slots is where you have the honor to have your work visible for a few hours.
Terry worries about the size of the conference being alienating. I have felt alienated at conferences, but it’s never been conference size made me feel that way.
Now, I started going to Neuroscience meeting when it was about 60% of what it is now, so I’m used to the scale of the bigger than big conference. And I’ve never used conference size as a factor for deciding what meeting to go to. Both large and small meetings can be great.
In the last few years, I’ve gone to new meetings I’ve never been to before. What put me off and made me feel excluded, particularly as an established mid-career scientist, were constant reminders that there you are not one of the people who come to this meeting every year. There are in jokes made during symposia, keynotes, and talks to things that happened in previous years. It’s very clear who are “conference buddies” that see each other every year.
(Part of this is probably my own damn fault, since I can be quiet, grumpy, or both. I’m working on this.)
But the point is that those conference regulars have clearly built a lot of social capital and created important professional networks that I haven’t.
And the moral of the story is:
Pick one conference that you like. Large or small, doesn’t matter. Go to that conference every year as religiously as you possibly can. Something to present or not, doesn’t matter. You will start building that group of conference buddies that will improve your conference experience (no more lunches alone!) and will become better known in your field.
External links
Huge conferences and the potential for alienation and isolation of junior scientists
03 July 2017
American Society of Parasitologists, Day 5
Sara Brandt: Schistosome taxonomy. Thinks snail ecology plays the biggest role in determining the schistosome relationships.
Santos Portugal (@jsportugal3): Tick phylogeny.
Tim Ruhnke: Cestode tapeworm phylogeny.
Veronica Mantovani Bueno: More cestode tapeworm phylogeny. The revision the taxonomy of host skates and rays led to big changes in interpretation of the taxonomy and ecology of their cestode parasites. There seems to be very relaxed associations between host and parasite. Some of the cestodes she studies have very similar DNA sequences, but dramatically different morphology.
Anna Phillips: new medicinal leech. #CollectionsAreEssential
Carlos Ruiz: I came in late and missed the start of this talk, but it involved possible new copepod species.
Jackson Roberts: Turtle blood flukes, of which he described one new species. A bunch of stuff is coming about flukes in South American turtles.
Bret Warren: Looking at flukes in sturgeon. I learned that Lake Winnebago has a sturgeon fishery, which is spearfishing in winter, through holes in ice. That alone was worth the price of admission. Here’s a video of this great tradition:
Carlos Ruiz again (this was sprung on him about 10 minutes before the talk): Myxozoans are parasitic jellyfish. In this case, they cause “whirling disease” in fish. Very tough to get rid of. Started with reports from anglers noticing strange fish. State natural resources came on board to get samples.
After the contributed talks, the moment I had been waiting for: poster session! I had a poster that I was very happy with. I’ll show it on the Better Posters blog after the paper is published. (I’m writing it now!)
I was also super pleased to be reunited with my SICB symposium partner in crime, Kelly Weinersmith, who had new progeny with her.
Because the diversity of parasite research is so wide, it can be hard to detect commonalities across a conference (which I saw less than half of, at best). But there were a recurring theme from this meeting.
Parasitology, like much of biology, has been transformed by molecular biology. The techniques are making it possible to answer questions that would have been very difficult to answer without them. For instance, “Is this species of parasite in this intermediate host the same species in this definitive host?”
But parasitologists emphatically do not want molecular biology to take over their field.
Several speakers referenced the #CollectionsAreEssential hashtag on Twitter, which was prompted by the possible loss of NSF funding supporting museum collections. Museum collections are constantly under threat, and constantly proving useful to current science.
Several people noted that DNA sequence data needs to be connected to “ground truths”: you have to be able to see the organism whose DNA you are sequencing.
The recurring theme of this meeting was that for parasitology to remain a viable field, never mind a vibrant one, organismal biology has to remain strong. This is going to be a challenge, because many people find the “Sequence it all and let algorithms sort it out” approach enticing and alluring.
One last note that is tangential to the conference, but relevant to a recent post on publishing costs, The Journal of Parasitology has very competitive article processing charges, particularly for open access. Even nonmembers can publish open access for $1,000, about the same as PeerJ, which is one of the most cost effective open access megajournals.
Related posts
01 July 2017
American Society of Parasitologists, Day 4
These are my notes from talks I saw on Friday's sessions!
R Grunberg gave a very nice talk about whether parasite abundance (density) scales with body size (Damuth’s Law). Her data suggests not. But host body size comes into play: if you do that, the parasites follow Damuth's Law. How you feed and disperse tweaks the effect a little.
Janine Caira: This project started with a donation of a huge, awesome army ant collection. Over 500 species were associated with just one species of army ant – guests associated with the army. Lots of ectoparasites live on specific parts of specific species. This prompted a lot of outreach at her campus, around the tag line, “Be our guest.” Antu.uconn.edu
Jessica Light: surveyed parasites on property in South Texas, supported by East Foundation. Not many mammals in museum collections are from South Texas. #collectionsareessential Found 19 mammal species, about 70% parasitized. Tick borne diseases are particularly interesting.
Niyomi Wijerardena: pika parasites! Pikas have five very distinct lineages, but the endoparasites don’t track those lineages. What about the ectoparasites? Fleas don’t track those lineages either, suggesting ancient contact between pika populations that are not recorded in DNA.
Lijun Lu is doing transcriptome work on what makes snail resistant to infection by schistomes.
Lauren Bassett was looking at the genetics of a microsporidium that is a potential biocontrol for red invasive fire ants.
Maria Castillo is also studying protein expression related to schistosomiasis infection of the snails. Thioester containing proteins seem to be related to resistance to various kinds of infection.
Presidential lecture by Gerald (Jerry) Esch. Described three stories, each of decades long and filled with obstacles from fights, fallacies, and waiting for blind luck, to emphasize the long road that research faces. He ended saying, “What does the future hold? I don’t know. But neither did the researchers who founded the field of parasitology 150 years ago.”
Michael Zimmerman starts describing the mating system of bluegill sunfish, which has dominant alpha males and beta males, which perform “drive by insemination.” Parasites may contribute to the maintenance of these two forms. The alpha males had higher diversity and abundance of parasites than beta males or females.
Nicci Carpenter: Helminths reduce fitness in mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis, also known as the plague fish)mosquito fish. The nematodes reduce brood size, and parasite diversity reduces embryo size.
Victor Vidal Martinez: healthy ecosystems have more parasites. Studying parasites on the fish on the Mexican portion of the Gulf of Mexico, which are subject to pollutants. Saw a higher diversity of parasites off the Yucatan Peninsula, which is good! It indicates a a healthier ecosystem than in the rest of the Mexican region of the Gulf.
Isabel Caballero: Although the cestode species she studies are definitely inbred, they show no strong evidence of inbreeding depression.
Stephen Greiman (@sgreimanbio): what drives species interactions now and in the past? He points out that when you look at just the top ten museum for mammal species, there are literally millions of samples in just those ten institutions. Using next generation sequencing, he was able to use next generation DNA sequencing to identify known parasites in shrews. Different sequences were slightly better at resolving some groups than others.
Seth Bromage: Bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish are about the same size, but very different parasite infection patterns. The same species, U. dispar, is bigger on bluegill. Seth filled his talk with speculation, because “It’s fun for me.”
P Robison: For fish, salinity is a major environmental factor that limits distribution. Guppies will tolerate salty water in an aquarium, but you never find them in any salty water in the wild. Metacercaria are very high near the range limit, but rare near the center of the distribution (further from ocean). Exposure to brackish water killed more fish, and resulted in a higher parasite load, for the guppies.
John Shea: How do horsehair worms find each other to reproduce in hosts? Blood borne parasites can potentially have miles of blood vessels to search. It looks like in aquariums, there is substantial luck involved. But it looks a little better in lower water depth, with more evidence of successful mate detection.
Justin Wilcox: Most parasitologists think most animals are parasites, but that is just a hunch. He tested the hypothesis that parasite diversity will be comparable to free living microbial communities, using parasites in macaques and next generation sequencing. Diversity of parasites and free living species is comparable. And there is a lot of diversity in these macaques.
Matt Bolek: presenting work of master’s student Chelsie Pierce. How do amphibian tadpoles differ from the adults in their parasites? Tadpoles are herbivores, e.g., and adults are carnivores: very different parasite habitats. Tadpole size, just like adults, affects parasite communities. Difficult to compare species, because the tadpoles’ basic natural history is so different. But parasite life cycle strategies were major factors in determining community structure.
Charles Criscione: The goal is to try to work out mating systems in parasite systems in the wild, and the particular focus here is on inbreeding. We know little about the ecological drivers of parasite mating systems. Looking at gecko tapeworms, which probably have high inbreeding. But, as mentioned in Isabel’s talk, not evidence of inbreeding depression.
The day ended with a student/faculty mixer, which the organizers called “The Vortex.” It was a good idea, although it might have done with a little more room.
R Grunberg gave a very nice talk about whether parasite abundance (density) scales with body size (Damuth’s Law). Her data suggests not. But host body size comes into play: if you do that, the parasites follow Damuth's Law. How you feed and disperse tweaks the effect a little.
Janine Caira: This project started with a donation of a huge, awesome army ant collection. Over 500 species were associated with just one species of army ant – guests associated with the army. Lots of ectoparasites live on specific parts of specific species. This prompted a lot of outreach at her campus, around the tag line, “Be our guest.” Antu.uconn.edu
Jessica Light: surveyed parasites on property in South Texas, supported by East Foundation. Not many mammals in museum collections are from South Texas. #collectionsareessential Found 19 mammal species, about 70% parasitized. Tick borne diseases are particularly interesting.
Niyomi Wijerardena: pika parasites! Pikas have five very distinct lineages, but the endoparasites don’t track those lineages. What about the ectoparasites? Fleas don’t track those lineages either, suggesting ancient contact between pika populations that are not recorded in DNA.
Lijun Lu is doing transcriptome work on what makes snail resistant to infection by schistomes.
Lauren Bassett was looking at the genetics of a microsporidium that is a potential biocontrol for red invasive fire ants.
Maria Castillo is also studying protein expression related to schistosomiasis infection of the snails. Thioester containing proteins seem to be related to resistance to various kinds of infection.
Presidential lecture by Gerald (Jerry) Esch. Described three stories, each of decades long and filled with obstacles from fights, fallacies, and waiting for blind luck, to emphasize the long road that research faces. He ended saying, “What does the future hold? I don’t know. But neither did the researchers who founded the field of parasitology 150 years ago.”
Michael Zimmerman starts describing the mating system of bluegill sunfish, which has dominant alpha males and beta males, which perform “drive by insemination.” Parasites may contribute to the maintenance of these two forms. The alpha males had higher diversity and abundance of parasites than beta males or females.
Nicci Carpenter: Helminths reduce fitness in mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis, also known as the plague fish)mosquito fish. The nematodes reduce brood size, and parasite diversity reduces embryo size.
Victor Vidal Martinez: healthy ecosystems have more parasites. Studying parasites on the fish on the Mexican portion of the Gulf of Mexico, which are subject to pollutants. Saw a higher diversity of parasites off the Yucatan Peninsula, which is good! It indicates a a healthier ecosystem than in the rest of the Mexican region of the Gulf.
Isabel Caballero: Although the cestode species she studies are definitely inbred, they show no strong evidence of inbreeding depression.
Stephen Greiman (@sgreimanbio): what drives species interactions now and in the past? He points out that when you look at just the top ten museum for mammal species, there are literally millions of samples in just those ten institutions. Using next generation sequencing, he was able to use next generation DNA sequencing to identify known parasites in shrews. Different sequences were slightly better at resolving some groups than others.
Seth Bromage: Bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish are about the same size, but very different parasite infection patterns. The same species, U. dispar, is bigger on bluegill. Seth filled his talk with speculation, because “It’s fun for me.”
P Robison: For fish, salinity is a major environmental factor that limits distribution. Guppies will tolerate salty water in an aquarium, but you never find them in any salty water in the wild. Metacercaria are very high near the range limit, but rare near the center of the distribution (further from ocean). Exposure to brackish water killed more fish, and resulted in a higher parasite load, for the guppies.
John Shea: How do horsehair worms find each other to reproduce in hosts? Blood borne parasites can potentially have miles of blood vessels to search. It looks like in aquariums, there is substantial luck involved. But it looks a little better in lower water depth, with more evidence of successful mate detection.
Justin Wilcox: Most parasitologists think most animals are parasites, but that is just a hunch. He tested the hypothesis that parasite diversity will be comparable to free living microbial communities, using parasites in macaques and next generation sequencing. Diversity of parasites and free living species is comparable. And there is a lot of diversity in these macaques.
Matt Bolek: presenting work of master’s student Chelsie Pierce. How do amphibian tadpoles differ from the adults in their parasites? Tadpoles are herbivores, e.g., and adults are carnivores: very different parasite habitats. Tadpole size, just like adults, affects parasite communities. Difficult to compare species, because the tadpoles’ basic natural history is so different. But parasite life cycle strategies were major factors in determining community structure.
Charles Criscione: The goal is to try to work out mating systems in parasite systems in the wild, and the particular focus here is on inbreeding. We know little about the ecological drivers of parasite mating systems. Looking at gecko tapeworms, which probably have high inbreeding. But, as mentioned in Isabel’s talk, not evidence of inbreeding depression.
The day ended with a student/faculty mixer, which the organizers called “The Vortex.” It was a good idea, although it might have done with a little more room.
30 June 2017
American Society of Parasitologists, Day 3
I brought my iPad, with one of those nice little keyboards, and all the keys were working except the space bar. Great. That rather slowed my plans for tweeting, blogging, and so on.
The day started with the presidential research symposium on parasite ecology, given by Celia Holland on Ascaris. She is talking about how parasites tend to aggregate: the variance to mean ratio is almost always greater than one (higher numbers mean more aggregation). Ascaris infection is a very bad, neglected tropical disease – maybe one of the worst in terms on number of people infected world wide. A big chunk of her talk was about trying to develop a model for Ascaris infection. The only animal that Ascaris will go through its entire life cycle are pigs. Well, pigs are big, expensive, and tricky to house. So, can we do it in a mouse? Well, sort of. The Ascaris will do some of their life cycle in mice, and some mouse strains are better hosts than others.
Kim Jacobson talked about using parasites as tags for fisheries management. Artificial tags are often too big for commercially important fish, like anchovies. Parasites can tell you were fish have been, since they can only get infected in the parasite’s endemic range. They used parasites to try to figure out the migration of sardines.
Derek Zelmer (who apparently is the punchline for many jokes at ASP) talked about the synchrony of parasite populations in sunfish. Variance to mean ration of 1 is random, variance to mean ratio less than one is even. Over and over, he saw more synchrony between sites that were further away from each other. This can allow for “rescue effects”: if one population drops, another can replace it.
Notes from some of the regular contributed talks I saw:
Rachel Paseka showed carbon,nitrogen,and phosphorus ratios vary across species. This is mostly related to body size; growth needs phosphorus.
Sarah Bush gave one of my favourite talks so far. It was like the classic peppered moth story in evolution, except with lice and bird feathers instead of moths on blackened tree trunks. Feather lice are under strong selection pressure from host preening, and they evolve cryptic colouration to match feather colour quite quickly.
Martina Laidemitt: amplification or dilution effects. Coolest part of this talk was discussion of how one trematodes species can completely take over a host from competitor species.
Tim Anderson more snail parasites. Schistosomes parasites vary in Ho the time in when their cercaria are shed. Some species synchronize their release. In one case, the same species releases at different times depending on what host they have infected. Does this have a genetic bases? Oh yes. And they have tracked it down to chromosome 1, which affects lots of cercaria release traits.
Laura Eliuk: trematodes life cycles often have a three host life cycle. Not much research on mollusk (first intermediate) hosts. Parasites may alter mucus composition of first intermediate host, to make them more attractive to the second host. The moral of her talk was never trust sweet smelling snail snot (my summary, not hers).
Alyssa Gleischner: does parasite competition influence virulence? Related parasites should have reduced virulence, as per kin selection theory, since if host dies, it takes all kin with it. But if parasites are not related, there is direct competition, so you care less if competitors die. She tried answering this in schistosomes. Results were sometimes supportive of kin selection, sometimes not, depending on what you measure. Low virulence for intermediate hosts, high for definitive hosts. Stage in life cycle may also matter.
Frederick Chevalier: schistosomes were transported from Africa to South America. How are they adapting to new habitat? Quite well.
Erika Ebbs was supposed to be speaker, but Sara Brant ended up giving it instead. Watch the fun when a supervisor has to take over a student's talk. Duck ecology shapes influence microevolutionary changes of parasites. I think at one point she mentioned that one of her duck species was infected 98% of the time, and she couldn't remember seeing prevalence that high before. Heh. I got something that ties that; come to my poster tomorrow!
The afternoon ended with a student session about funding. People discussed NIH, NSF, and small society grants. I took over the session for a minute or two to talk about crowdfunding.
Then, I walked around. San Antonio is a very walkable city.
The day started with the presidential research symposium on parasite ecology, given by Celia Holland on Ascaris. She is talking about how parasites tend to aggregate: the variance to mean ratio is almost always greater than one (higher numbers mean more aggregation). Ascaris infection is a very bad, neglected tropical disease – maybe one of the worst in terms on number of people infected world wide. A big chunk of her talk was about trying to develop a model for Ascaris infection. The only animal that Ascaris will go through its entire life cycle are pigs. Well, pigs are big, expensive, and tricky to house. So, can we do it in a mouse? Well, sort of. The Ascaris will do some of their life cycle in mice, and some mouse strains are better hosts than others.
Kim Jacobson talked about using parasites as tags for fisheries management. Artificial tags are often too big for commercially important fish, like anchovies. Parasites can tell you were fish have been, since they can only get infected in the parasite’s endemic range. They used parasites to try to figure out the migration of sardines.
Derek Zelmer (who apparently is the punchline for many jokes at ASP) talked about the synchrony of parasite populations in sunfish. Variance to mean ration of 1 is random, variance to mean ratio less than one is even. Over and over, he saw more synchrony between sites that were further away from each other. This can allow for “rescue effects”: if one population drops, another can replace it.
Notes from some of the regular contributed talks I saw:
Rachel Paseka showed carbon,nitrogen,and phosphorus ratios vary across species. This is mostly related to body size; growth needs phosphorus.
Sarah Bush gave one of my favourite talks so far. It was like the classic peppered moth story in evolution, except with lice and bird feathers instead of moths on blackened tree trunks. Feather lice are under strong selection pressure from host preening, and they evolve cryptic colouration to match feather colour quite quickly.
Martina Laidemitt: amplification or dilution effects. Coolest part of this talk was discussion of how one trematodes species can completely take over a host from competitor species.
Tim Anderson more snail parasites. Schistosomes parasites vary in Ho the time in when their cercaria are shed. Some species synchronize their release. In one case, the same species releases at different times depending on what host they have infected. Does this have a genetic bases? Oh yes. And they have tracked it down to chromosome 1, which affects lots of cercaria release traits.
Laura Eliuk: trematodes life cycles often have a three host life cycle. Not much research on mollusk (first intermediate) hosts. Parasites may alter mucus composition of first intermediate host, to make them more attractive to the second host. The moral of her talk was never trust sweet smelling snail snot (my summary, not hers).
Alyssa Gleischner: does parasite competition influence virulence? Related parasites should have reduced virulence, as per kin selection theory, since if host dies, it takes all kin with it. But if parasites are not related, there is direct competition, so you care less if competitors die. She tried answering this in schistosomes. Results were sometimes supportive of kin selection, sometimes not, depending on what you measure. Low virulence for intermediate hosts, high for definitive hosts. Stage in life cycle may also matter.
Frederick Chevalier: schistosomes were transported from Africa to South America. How are they adapting to new habitat? Quite well.
Erika Ebbs was supposed to be speaker, but Sara Brant ended up giving it instead. Watch the fun when a supervisor has to take over a student's talk. Duck ecology shapes influence microevolutionary changes of parasites. I think at one point she mentioned that one of her duck species was infected 98% of the time, and she couldn't remember seeing prevalence that high before. Heh. I got something that ties that; come to my poster tomorrow!
The afternoon ended with a student session about funding. People discussed NIH, NSF, and small society grants. I took over the session for a minute or two to talk about crowdfunding.
Then, I walked around. San Antonio is a very walkable city.
29 June 2017
American Society of Parasitologists, Day 1 and 2
I missed Day 1 entirely. Nothing to report. Sorry.
I drove up to San Antonio on Wednesday afternoon. During the four hour drive, I reflected on how I chose this meeting to come to this summer instead of many of the others that interest me because it was “close.” Ah, Texas, where a four hour drive is “close.”
I got there too late to get my name tag. But when I walked up to the social without the name tag, the man at the door gave me two drink tickets, unprompted.
I guess I looked scruffy enough that I couldn’t be anything but a biologist.
I drove up to San Antonio on Wednesday afternoon. During the four hour drive, I reflected on how I chose this meeting to come to this summer instead of many of the others that interest me because it was “close.” Ah, Texas, where a four hour drive is “close.”
I got there too late to get my name tag. But when I walked up to the social without the name tag, the man at the door gave me two drink tickets, unprompted.
I guess I looked scruffy enough that I couldn’t be anything but a biologist.
24 June 2017
Texas losing academic opportunities from its dicriminatory agenda
Yesterday, I learned that the Society for the Study of Evolution will not hold meetings in Texas for the foreseeable future. And they were in Austin just last year.
Yesterday, I learned that public employees of California cannot come to Texas using state funds. This includes professors from the University of California system and the California State University system, such as Janet Stemwedel, who visited our campus back when it was UTPA.
The reason is that Texas is one of several states that has been actively pushing legislation that allows for discrimination against LGBTQI individuals (e.g., with so called “bathroom bills”) and against certain religious views.
I doubt that these will be the last academic and scientific organizations that will be taking public stands against Texas and other states with this agenda. I’m deeply disappointed that these actions should be necessary, but they are. These are the right decisions on the part of those organizations. Sadly, I doubt legislators will pay attention. But one can hope.
Yesterday, I learned that public employees of California cannot come to Texas using state funds. This includes professors from the University of California system and the California State University system, such as Janet Stemwedel, who visited our campus back when it was UTPA.
The reason is that Texas is one of several states that has been actively pushing legislation that allows for discrimination against LGBTQI individuals (e.g., with so called “bathroom bills”) and against certain religious views.
I doubt that these will be the last academic and scientific organizations that will be taking public stands against Texas and other states with this agenda. I’m deeply disappointed that these actions should be necessary, but they are. These are the right decisions on the part of those organizations. Sadly, I doubt legislators will pay attention. But one can hope.
19 January 2017
How a catchy title bit me in the butt
At SICB, the committee I chair, the Student and Post Doc Affairs committee, SPDAC, has a noon event every year. It’s usually some sort of workshop. This year, I wanted something that would complement the society’s incoming Code of Conduct for the meeting ,and wanted more of a roundtable than a presentation.
The title I came up for the roundtable was: “Low on the totem pole: power structures and power struggles in academia.”
But the title was called out on Twitter as “cultural appropriation.”
It isn’t great considering that the Society is pushing for more inclusivity, and even has a Broadening Participation Committee (which I was encouraged to attend). And inclusivity is something I try my best to support.
The gist of the argument, as I understood it, was that the use of the phrase was inaccurate: the position on a totem pole in First Nations cultures didn’t indicate anything about power or status.
My first reaction was to clench up and want to say, “I didn’t do anything wrong!” But after a few seconds thought, that didn’t seem to be a particularly helpful reaction.
The first thing I did was to make clear that the title was entirely my choice, and therefore my fault. That way, if anyone was going to be mad about it, they knew to be mad at me, and not the Society in general or the Executive Committee or anyone else. It was my decision, and I had to live with it.
I also said that I was happy to talk about it. The SPDAC had a booth in the conference vendor room, so I did have a place anyone could come and find me. There was a little more discussion on Twitter, but no face to face conversation.
I had some conversations with some people I trust about this to try to judge just how badly I misstepped.
Having thought about it, I realized that I could have used several other turns of phrase to get the same point across (like, “Bottom of the heap,” say). And when someone makes a polite request that you not use a phrase, and you can think of another one that makes the exactly point with only a few seconds thought, there’s no point in trying to argue that you were justified in using the phrase.
Constant improvement is the samurai way.
12 January 2017
Bound by ribbons: SICB 2017
I’ve been to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting before, and I’ve been to conferences in New Orleans before. Based on that, you would think this meeting would be routine for me.
It was not. It was a very different meeting experience, for a couple of reasons. First, I was coming off a very intense teaching semester, and I was nowhere near as prepared as I should have been. I felt discombobulated a lot during this meeting,
Second, I was at the meeting not to present any of my own science, not to see any new science. I was participating in my role as chair of the Society’s Student and Post-doctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC). This not only gave me ribbons to put on my badge, it completely changed my conference experience.First, there were the meetings. I understood that I had my own committee’s meeting to chair. But I didn't quite realize that I was also expected to be at two executive committee meetings, and at the Broadening Participation committee meeting. And two of those were at 7:00 am! By the time I rolled into the second early morning meeting on the last day of the conference, I was grumpy and hated the conference and the world and no amount of variety in the hotel’s breakfast offerings would cheer me up.
All of this meant I didn’t see as many talks, or have as many port unities to explore nearby, as I normally would at a meeting.
I also found out rather late in the game that I was expected to give a talk at the first timer’s orientation session. I had a slide deck from their previous year’s talk as a starting point, but I wasn’t given any other parameters. I thought I might be faced with maybe high tens of people, max, in an average sized room.
Instead, I was facing hundreds of people in a combined ballroom. This was just after I had posted my a little essay on why you should always be afraid during a presentation, and it was easy. I would have done things much differently if I’d known how big the room was. I just tried to be breezy and quick and show a lot of advice from people on Twitter. Fortunately, several people told me afterwards that it was good, so I got to breath a big sigh of relief.
My other performance was as the moderator of the SPDAC roundtable on academic power struggles. It took the conversation a little while to get rolling, but once it did, it was very thoughtful and enjoyable. There were lots of good ideas about how students can approach conflict resolution.
I also added three new pokémon to my pokedex in Pokémon Go.
While I had a good time and managed not to have any epic fails during the meeting (other than stores that I wanted to visit closing by the time I got there), I felt the frustration of feeling that I wasn’t prepared and could have done so much better.
The good news is that I have a chance to prove that I can do better in about 51 weeks time, when I head to San Francisco for SICB 2018.
Conference low point: Biting into a Zapp’s Voodoo flavored potato chip. I am a potato chip purist: carbs, fats, and salt are all I crave in a chip, not flavours. But the SPDAC meeting had a box lunch with only Voodoo flavoured chips. I was hungry, thought I would try it, and Cat (one of the committee members) offered me a bite of hers so I didn’t have to commit to opening the whole bag.
I had to spit it out. My instant reaction was, “People eat these voluntarily?”
22 June 2016
Evolution 2016, Day 5
Perhaps the highlight of my last day of the Evolution meeting was learning from Paul Durst that you can get fleas off a (dead) mouse by putting the body in a paint can shaker. The next speaker, Matthew Forister, started his talk by saying, “Dead mice in a paint shaker. Tough act to follow.”
Forister also won the “Overly honest methods” award for saying at one point, “Does this have anything to do with the real world? I don’t know.”
Some final impressions of this meeting.
I was surprised by how humourless the talks were. Dead mice in a
paint shaker notwithstanding,very few people tried to make a joke. I
only saw one Star Wars quote in a talk, even though a social game for students, Evolution bingo, encouraged people to put Star Wars quotes in their talks. I didn’t see any clown noses in the poster sessions, either.The food and drink was very good. I’ve been at some small meetings that had snacks this good, but not a conference that was this big.
This was probably the smoothest running set of presentations I have ever seen. While I made fun of the chimes, they worked better than conference moderators. People started and stopped on time.
The precision timing of the talks mattered little, however, when you have one talk in room 10-C and the next one in Ballroom C. The distance between them was long enough that it took probably 3 minutes to get from one end of the meeting rooms to the other, so you were invariably missing the starts of talks.
On a related note, sixteen concurrent sessions is too many.
When you see a lot of cool talks using the same sort of organisms, you feel like the stupidest person in the world for not working on them. “Why am I not studying guppies? What is wrong with me?!”
External links
Evolution 2016 bingo card
21 June 2016
Evolution 2016, Day 4
Yes, I saw some cool science, yesterday, including some cool and contradictory results on how predators shape brain evolution (big brains are favoured in high predator environments in guppies but not killifish?) and jump right to the big news.
The Society for the Study of Evolution's flagship journal, Evolution, will be moving to an online only journal, with all papers becoming open access two years after publication. Decades of papers, including many classics, will be free to read in early 2017.
The Society is also launching a new online, open access, "high impact" journal in early 2017, Evolution Letters.
Let me be among the first to congratulate the Society for the Study of Evolution for moving their publications toward a superior and more modern way of scientific communication.
And I think I am among the first to pat the Society on the back, because, judging from the reaction in my Twitter feed, these announcements are widely regarded as bad moves.
People are mad that Evolution won't be immediate open access, that the two year embargo is too long for NIH funded researchers, and that the journal is still being published by Wiley, one of the biggest for profit publishers.
People (including, it must be said, myself) worry that Evolution Letters might as well be titled Evolution Rejects. The perception is that the journal will be a dumping ground for those papers that are not considered novel enough for the flagship journal.
I've been critical before about the creation of new journal that serve no editorial purpose. I worry Evolution Letters will be one of those. It's not being created to define an emerging field of research, but as part of a business plan. But I have no doubt that it will have an audience. Scientific manuscripts expand to fill the available journals.
I worry that the "54 40 or fight" attitude to open access might be a little counterproductive. While It's important shift that Overton window, it might be that criticizing good but imperfect progress might discourage people from trying to make any progress at all.
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