Who co-authored the most read paper in JCB? Me.

Yes, I know there are all kinds of problems with mystery metrics. Yes, I know this reflects the new paper I co-authored being, well, a new paper with no paywall. Yes, I know that this won’t necessarily reflect the long time impact of the paper.

Still. It feels nice.

Far too often, publishing academic papers feels like shouting into a vacuum. Or the most agonizing of slow burns, where it takes years to know if other people will pick up on what you’ve done. So a little short term feedback like this is pleasant.

Interstellate goes international

Caitlyn Vander Wheele showcased the latest iteration of her Interstellate magazine project today! It is featured in the French magazine L’ADN, the their theme issue, “Game of Neurones.”

(Americans will not fully appreciate this pun, because Americans say the name of brain cells as “neuron,” with a short “o” – rhymes with “brawn.” Europeans have tended to favour pronouncing the name of brain cells as “neurone,” with a long “o” – rhymes with, yes, “throne.”

I couldn’t be more pleased that somehow, my contribution from Volume 1 snuck into the issue! You can see the abdominal fast flexor motor neurons of Louisiana red swamp crayfish in the upper left.

Merci, L’ADN! Je suis très heureux d’être dans votre magazine!

External links

Interstellate, Volume 1
Interstellate, Volume 2

More multimedia: Crustacean pain and nociception talk

Last year, I gave a talk at Northern Vermont University about crustacean pain. It was recorded by the local public access television station, Green Mountain Access TV, and is now up on Vimeo.



Current Topics in Science Series, Zen Faulkes from Green Mountain Access TV on Vimeo.

Big thanks to Leslie Kanat for hosting me and for Green Mountain Access TV for recording it!

Tuesday Crustie: For your crustacean GIF needs

Been meaning to make GIFs of a sand crab digging, suitable for social media sharing, for a while.

Here’s a serious one.

And here’s a fun one.

“Crustacean Compassion” advocacy group gives one-sided view of evidence

This morning I learned of the UK advocacy group “Crustacean Compassion”, which wants to change laws around the handling of crustaceans in the United Kingdom. They are currently engaged in a campaign to recognize the decapod crustaceans as having “sentience.”

They claim to be an “an evidence-based campaign group,” but when I went to their tab on whether crustaceans feel pain, I was presented with a one-sided view. Not lopsided. One-sided.

All the evidence comes from one lab, that of Professor Robert Elwood.
Weirdly, the page is so singularly built from Elwood’s work that it even omits research from other labs that could be viewed as supporting their premise that decapod crustaceans might feel pain.

They present experiments that have not been independently replicated as though they were unquestioned. They discuss none of the interpretive problems behind those experiments. They act as though there is a clear consensus within the scientific community when there is not (review in Diggles 2018).

Their full briefing for politicians is similarly one-sided.

In science, single studies are not definitive. Studies all arising from a single lab are not definitive.

If you claim to be all about the evidence, you have to present all the evidence, not just the evidence that supports your position. Some of the individuals behind the group have academic and scientific backgrounds, but judging from their bios, none have training working with invertebrates. None have training in neurobiology.

While I have reservations about the information provided by their group, the part of me that loves graphic design gives them full points for their clever logo (shown above).

References

Diggles BK. 2018. Review of some scientific issues related to crustacean welfare. ICES Journal of Marine Science: fsy058. https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsy058

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2015. Can crayfish take the heat? Procambarus clarkii show nociceptive behaviour to high temperature stimuli, but not low temperature or chemical stimuli. Biology Open 4(4): 441-448. https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.20149654

Related posts

Crustacean pain is still a complicated issue, despite the headlines

What we know and don’t know about crustacean pain

Switzerland’s lobster laws are not paragons of science-based policy

 

Giving lobsters weed

I’ve been studying issues roiling around the question of “Does it hurt lobsters when they go into a pot?” for about a decade. After ten years or so, you get a little jaded. I’m used to seeing the same bad arguments. I’m used to it popping up and making the rounds in news about twice a year. The first time this year was when Switzerland put laws into place about lobster handling. This is the second.

And I’ve got to say:

That’s new.

A Maine newspaper is reporting on a restaurant owner, Charlotte Gill, is sedating lobster with marijuana.

I am pretty sure cannabis as a sedative not been the subject of any peer-reviewed scientific papers on crustacean anesthesia. But a quick Google Scholar search (thank you thank you thank you Google for this tool) shows that spiny lobsters and other invertebrates have cannabinoid receptors (McPartland et al. 2005). This makes the technique plausible on the face of it.

The behavioural effects reported were interesting.

Following the experiment, Roscoe’s (the experimental lobster - ZF) claw bands were removed and kept off for nearly three weeks.

His mood seemed to have an impact on the other lobsters in the tank. He never again wielded his claws as weapons.

I am surprised by the apparent duration of the effects. Weeks of behaviour change from a single treatment? That seems long compared to soporific effects of marijuana smoke in humans doesn’t seem to last multiple days.

Earlier this week, Roscoe was returned to the ocean as a thank you for being the experimental crustacean.

I’m not sure of the ethics of this. Will Roscoe the lobster, who has apparently forgotten how to use claws, going to become a quick meal for a predator? A lobster without claws in the ocean is just bait (Barshaw et al. 2003). Releasing Roscoe may doom him!

I am a little concerned by what seems to be Gill’s quick dismissal of other techniques:

In Switzerland, the recommended method of cooking the crustacean is to electrocute it or stab it in the head before putting it in the boiling water.

“These are both horrible options,” said Gill. “If we’re going to take a life we have a responsibility to do it as humanely as possible.”

I don’t know if she has anything but intuition to support that opinion. There’s research on electrical stunning, and the results so far are mixed. Fregin and Bickmeyer (2016) found shocks “do not mitigate the response to external stimuli,” but Neil (2012), Roth and Grimsbø (2016), and Weineck et al. (2018) found electric shocks seemed to knock down neural activity effectively. But the impression I get is that using shock is tricky: you need different protocols for different animals.

It’s also worth noting that a new paper by Weineck et al. (2018) showed chilling was effective as an anesthetic, which the Swiss regulations forbade. Research I co-authored (Puri and Faulkes 2015) showed no evidence that crayfish responded to low temperature stimuli.

Of course, another complication around this technique is its legality. The legal landscape around marijuana in the U.S. is tricky. Marijuana is still regulated federally, but certain states permit different kinds of uses. The article notes:

Gill holds a medical marijuana caregiver license with the state and is using product she grows in order to guarantee its quality.

This is interesting, but it’s not clear to me that this is a more cost effective or humane way to sedate a lobster than what many crustacean researchers have been doing for a long time: cooling on crushed ice.

Hat tip to Mo Costandi.

References

Barshaw DE, Lavalli KL, Spanier E. 2003. Offense versus defense: responses of three morphological types of lobsters to predation. Marine Ecology Progress Series 256: 171-182. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps256171

Fregin T, Bickmeyer U. 2016. Electrophysiological investigation of different methods of anesthesia in lobster and crayfish. PLOS ONE 11(9): e0162894. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162894

McPartland JM, Agraval J, Gleeson D, Heasman K, Glass M. 2006. Cannabinoid receptors in invertebrates. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 19(2): 366-373. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2005.01028.x

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2015. Can crayfish take the heat? Procambarus clarkii show nociceptive behaviour to high temperature stimuli, but not low temperature or chemical stimuli. Biology Open 4(4): 441-448. https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.20149654

Roth B, Grimsbø E. 2016. Electrical stunning of edible crabs (Cancer pagurus): from single experiments to commercial practice. Animal Welfare 25(4): 489-497. https://doi.org/10.7120/09627286.25.4.489

Weineck K, Ray A, Fleckenstein L, Medley M, Dzubuk N, Piana E, Cooper R. 2018. Physiological changes as a measure of crustacean welfare under different standardized stunning techniques: cooling and electroshock. Animals 8(9): 158. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/8/9/158

Related posts

Switzerland’s lobster laws are not paragons of science-based policy

External links

“Hot box” lobsters touted
Maine restaurant sedates lobsters with marijuana
New England marijuana laws – where it’s legal, where it’s not and what you need to know

BugFest blues

Anticipation.

I had been anticipating the chance to speak at the North Carolina Natural Sciences Museum for a good long while. I’d been asked to speak at BugFest, one of their biggest events, which draws tens of thousands of people to the museum. I’d been wanting a chance to go since I heard so much positive about the museum when Science Online was held in the area. When I went to Science Online, I missed the chance to go because my flight didn’t arrive on time.

Anticipation.

This Sunday, I started to get a sinking feeling as I watched weather forecasts and my Twitter timeline. It’s hurricane season. Models were starting to predict Hurricane Florence was heading straight for North Carolina.Now it looks like Florence is all but going to the doorstep of the Natural Sciences Museum and knock on the door when BugFest was supposed to happen.

I emailed the organizers, got word that a decision would be made at the start of the week, and today I got word that the event was postponed.

“Whew!” from me. I did not want to get on a plane and fly towards a major hurricane.

I’ll come and talk science and crayfish after things have calmed down.

I hope everyone in North Carolina – those I know and those I don’t – can stay safe through Florence. It looks like it’s going to be very bad.

(But it was a little fun to come up with this cancellation tagline.)

Crayfish clothing contest conqueror!

You are looking at the winner of the International Association of Astacology T-shirt contest! By me!

• First place: “Astacus fluviatilis” by Zen Faulkes
• Second place: “Euastacus,” front and back design by Premek Hamr
• Third place: “Astacolic” by Alexa Ballinger (which you can see here)

I haven’t yet see the runner-up designs, which were shown at the last IAA meeting in Pitssburgh, but I look forward to seeing them! This started with the quote. I found it on page vi of Thomas Henry Huxley’s monograph on the crayfish (also Google Books edition). It took a little digging to find the author’s complete name and year of the quote. (Yes, my academic training is showing: obsession with complete and correct citations.)

While looking up the person who wrote the quote, I discovered that Rösel von Rosenhof was an amazing illustrator of the natural world. And he painted crayfish! So I was able to combine this wonderful quote about crayfish with this brilliant plate by the same person.

I cleaned up an image of one of Rösel von Rosenhof’s paintings, cleaning up page blemishes left over from the scan and making it a little brighter.

I kept some of the writing on the painting but repositioned it. The quote that started me off was not on the page, so I had to add it. I had just the thing: the Adorn font family evoked the style the old plate well. But the wonderful thing about a well made font family is that you can use a lot of different variations of text, and it still feels coherent.

Adorn has a lot of built in letter variants, and it was fun to play around with different swashes in CorelDraw! I am pleased people like this, but I’m sure that it won the contest is more a tribute to the artistry of Rösel von Rosenhof than my own graphic design skills. But this was not the only T-shirt design I submitted. Oh no. I was having fun with the shirt designs. This was actually the first concept I worked on:

The outline is a signal crayfish claw, if I remember right.The words inside the claw outline are the names of every genus of freshwater crayfish (according to Crandall and de Grave 2017). Originally, I played with the idea of using the name of every species of crayfish, but with over 600 and rising, there were too many and it was too likely to go out of date soon.

I like this design, but I was never able to get it to look exactly like it was in my head. I wanted the shape of the claw to be defined by the words alone. I like the big, bold shape of the claw and that it includes all the crayfish diversity within it, though.

I worried that the genus names might be too small and fussy for a T-shirt, but I liked that claw shape, so I made this variant:

It’s bold, though I worry that it’s a little simple.

To be honest, this was my favourite design:

I traced an image of a crayfish using in CorelDraw. I love Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, and modified the lines making up the trace to taper, giving it a sort of brush-like appearance. The font is Cherry Blossoms, which I wrapped around on an oval. This font, like Adorn, has a lot of options, and I had way too much fun trying out different swashes. (Discovering alternate glyphs and swashes has been a revelation.)

Initially, I only had “International Association of Astacology.” But the words traced out the oval so clearly on the top that the bottom looked broken and incomplete. I needed something to complete the shape, so I added in “the science of crayfish.” I loved this, because I feel like one of the big problems with being a member of the International Association of Astacology is explaining what “astacology” is!

I made variations of the three no-winning designs, too, changing the fonts and colours in different ways.The first version of the brushwork crayfish above had the colours flipped, with the crayfish in red, and the text above in black. But since ink was the inspiration, making the crayfish black made more sense.

Even though my favourite design didn’t win, I am completely thrilled to have won the T-shirt contest. I am mentioning this award this in my annual review folder!

And maybe a few more people will discover and appreciate the fine artwork of Rösel von Rosenhof.

References

Crandall KA, De Grave S. 2017. An updated classification of  the freshwater crayfishes (Decapoda: Astacidea) of  the world, with a complete species list. Journal of Crustacean Biology 37(5): 615-653. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcbiol/rux070

External links

August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof
How to swash: using a font’s alternate glyphs, text styles, and numbers
Critique: The Capricorn Experiment, plus: Font families

What defines a brain?

A side effect of my bafflement yesterday over how lobsters became some sort of strange right-wing analogy for the rightness of there being winners and losers (or something) was getting into a discussion about whether lobsters have brains.

That decapod crustaceans are brainless is a claim I have seen repeated many times, often in the service of the claim that lobsters cannot feel pain. This article, refuting Jordan Peterson, said:

(L)obsters don’t even have a brain, just an aglomerate of nerve endings called ganglia.

This is a bad description of ganglia. It makes it sound like there are no cell bodies in ganglia, where there usually are. Here are some. This is from the abdominal ganglion of Louisiana red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii):

These show cell bodies of leg motor neurons from several species (sand crabs and crayfish, I think; these pics go back to my doctoral work).

These are neurons in a ganglion from a slipper lobster (Ibacus peronii), where those big black cell bodies are very easy to see:

And these are leg motor neurons in slipper lobster:

And there is substantial structure within that alleged “not a brain” in the front:

And we’re know this for well over a century, as this drawing from 1890 by master neuroanatomist Gustav Retzius shows:

So ganglia are more than “nerve endings.” So putting that aside, are there other features that make brains, brains?

Intuitively, when I think about brains, I think of a few main features. Two anatomical, and one functional:

1. Brains are big, single cluster of neurons. Even though there may be many neurons in, say, the digestive system (and there are not as many as some people claim), it’s so diffuse that nobody would call it a brain.
2. It’s in the head, near lots of sensory organs. In humans, our brain is right next door to our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, which covers a lot of the old-fashioned senses.
3. It’s a major coordinating center for behaviour.

Decapod crustaceans (not to mention many other invertebrates) meet all those criteria. Sure, the proportion of neurons in the decapod crustacean brain may be smaller than vertebrates, but I have never seen a generally agreed upon amount of neural tissue that something must have to be a brain instead of a “ganglion in the front of the animal.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that some people will argue that only vertebrates can have brains because we are vertebrates, and vertebrates must be special, because we are vertebrates. That is, people will define brains in a way to stroke human egos.
 And, as I implied above, some people make the “no brains” claim out of self-interest. I don’t think it’s any accident that I see “lobsters don’t have brains” coming from institutes that have close ties to commercial lobster fisheries.

I suppose that some could argue that limiting the word “brain” to vertebrates is a way of bringing recognizing that vertebrate and invertebrate nervous systems are structured very differently. They are, but why only do this for one part of the nervous system? This is a little bit like saying “invertebrates don’t have eyes,” because they have compound eyes instead of our camera-style eyes. We routinely give things in invertebrates and vertebrates the same names if they have the same functions.

And in practice, I see people referring to octopus brains all the time. They do so even though, like other invertebrates, a large proportion of the nervous system sits outside the brain. From memory, roughly half the neurons in an octopus reside in its arms.

In practice, I am far from the only person that calls the clump of neurons at the front end of decapod crustaceans, “brains.” From this page:

So, fellow neuroscientists, if you don’t think invertebrates can have brains, why not? What is your dividing line?

Hat tip to Hilary Gerstein.

The economy of crayfish

While searching for crayfish news (as you do), I stumbled across this description of the value of crayfish.

• Crayfish are the most popular dish in China.
• Crayfish support five million jobs in China.
• Crayfish are a US$22 billion market in China.

Besides the size of the market, I am surprised because I am willing to bet that it is all invasive species, Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii. That’s what the pictures look like, anyway.

This shouldn’t surprise me, considering I remembered this from an article about crayfish in CHina from years ago.

This novel perspective on invasive species was perhaps most elegantly stated as we made small talk with a taxi driver in Wuhan. As we explained our research through an interpreter, the taxi driver smiled and asked, “Can they really be considered a problem if people eat them?"

Yet somehow, I doubt most people would be able to guess just how much money there is in crayfish in this one country. This page (dated 2012) estimates that in Louisiana, one of the biggest American producers of crayfish (hey, it is the Louisiana red swamp crayfish) :

The total economic impact on the Louisiana economy exceeds $300 million annually, and more than 7,000 people depend directly or indirectly on the crawfish industry.

External links

Crayfish was China's most popular dish in 2017
China's crazy love for crayfish created jobs for 5m in 2016
Louisiana Crayfish: Good, Bad and Delicious

Picture from here.

Switzerland’s lobster laws are not paragons of science-based policy

What are you thinking, Switzerland?

At the start of this week, I saw a news story about new Swiss regulations for the handling and killing of lobsters. (Coincidentally, it came very shortly after this very good article about similar issues around fishes.) This started with a motion by Green Party politician Maya Graf. She wanted to ban lobster imports into Switzerland outright, but Switzerland already had a trade agreement with the European Union that ruled that out.

This is the short version of the Swiss law (auto-translated from German):

The lobster is better protected in the future

Lobster and other crayfish may no longer be transported on ice or in ice water. This is important for the import to Switzerland. All species living in water must always be kept in their natural environment - this also applies to the lobster. In addition, crayfish must be stunned before being killed. The usual dipping in the gastronomy not stunned lobster in boiling water is therefore no longer permitted.

Further information: Articles 23 (1), 178 and 178a of the Animal Welfare Ordinance .

 A Q and A document says:

New scientific evidence shows that crayfish are just like vertebrates, sentient and capable of suffering.

But it does not summarize what scientific evidence was examined and used to justify this decision. However, the Swiss website links to a document from the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which implies they agency agrees with the material contained within. The RSPCA document does have a reference list of research papers, with the most recent references dating to 2015.

The RSPCA document is not intended to be a scientific literature review. But that it does cite scientific papers can give an impression of greater certainty and consensus in the scientific community than is perhaps warranted.

For context, and in the interests of full disclosure, there are very few research groups have published empirical behavioural data about crustacean noceiception. One is led by Roger Elwood, and another is led by me. There are a few other papers from other places.

First, two research labs is a small fraction of the crustacean research community. Even if those two labs were entirely in agreement about the data (the two labs have contradictory results on one effect) and the interpretation of those data, two labs should not be taken to represent a broad scientific consensus. A 2014 book on crustacean nervous systems and behaviour alone has somewhere around 30 authors, none of which are from the two labs I mentioned.

Second, the RSPCA document cites only Elwood’s papers. (In fairness, the most relevant paper I co-authored on this subject was in 2015, the same year as the newest paper in the RSPCA document. That paper may have been too new to make it into the RSPCA document.)

Third, not all researchers examining the data are in agreement, even those with expertise in the relevant issues. In her book Can Fish Feel Pain? (reviewed here), Victoria Brathwaite describes having long conversations with Elwood about this topic. Despite Elwood’s arguments, Braithwaite concluded that lobsters do not feel pain. Joe Ayers (who was an examiner on my Ph.D.) also disagrees.

Fourth, the papers cited by the RSPCA do not claim that lobsters (and other large decapod crustaceans) are sentient, nor do they claim that they suffer. The papers are appropriately cautiously worded, and say the results are consistent with crustacean pain. Elwood has said this when speaking to scientists. “Consistent with” means “not ruled out.” It doesn’t necessarily mean likely. But when speaking to the general press, Elwood has said lobsters probably feel pain. As quoted above, the Swiss Q and A goes even further and says lobster pain has been shown.

And thus do we move from “possible” in data, to “probable” in the public eye, to “definite” in law.

The specifics of the policies are also puzzling. It forbids lobsters from being transported on ice. It is not clear in my translation (“Direct contact with ice or iced water can cause cold in the animals damage arises.”) if this is because of concerns about “pain”. A paper I co-authored in 2015 that showed crayfish do not avoid very low temperature stimuli.

The law seems to require that lobsters and crayfish are anaesthetised before being killed (Google translates the word as “stunned,” but this doesn’t seem to refer to electrical stunning). But when you ask crustacean biologists how to aneasthetize crustaceans, one common answer is, “Put them on ice.” Even the Q and A recommends cooling lobsters before killing them. It’s not clear why cooling is recommended but ice is illegal.

I don’t agree with this article that mocks the Swiss law, saying:

(T)here’s no scientific evidence to support the position.

The material quoted as being from the Lobster Institute is, like the Swiss law, far more confident than the data suggests. The article pulls out the “lobsters have no brain” myth. We have known for more than a century they do have brains. Absolutely nobody knows what the minimal amount of nervous system is for generating “pain.”

The recommendations for killing lobsters in the RSPCA document are generally consistent with what I do when using decapod crustaceans for research. (Image also shows up here.) The image at the top of this post shows how I was taught to sacrifice decapod crustaceans in a humane way. It is not the only way, but I think it is reasonable and fairly easy.

I agree with the goals of this law. You should be careful in handling and killing animals rather than careless. But it’s not a strong model for science informing policy.

P.S.—One interesting tidbit I learned in perusing the Swiss documents is that Crustastun (which I wrote about eight years ago; see also here) makes no equipment, according to the Swiss Q and A document.

Related posts

What we know and don’t know about crustacean pain
Crustacean pain is still a complicated issue, despite the headlines

External links

Revision of various regulations in the veterinary field (Hat tip to Taking Apart Cats on Twitter)
Questions and answers about lobster (PDF in German)
Humane killing and processing of crustaceans for human consumption (PDF in English)
Swiss ban against boiling lobster alive brings smiles — at first
Do lobsters feel pain when we boil them alive? (Contains earlier version of image I created from top of page.)
Switzerland bans boiling lobsters alive, grants other protections to the crustaceans
Lobsters 'very likely' feel pain when boiled alive, researcher says
Fish feel pain. Now what?
Science Pushed to Back Burner, as Swiss Outlaw Live Lobster Boiling
Another country has banned boiling live lobsters. Some scientists wonder why.
Switzerland rules lobsters must be stunned before boiling
The Swiss Consider the Lobster. It Feels Pain, They Decide.

Tuesday Crustie: The river of woe

Surface dwellers, meet Cherax acherontis. Cherax acherontis, meet surface dwerllers.

There are plenty of burrowing crayfish in Australia, but this crayfish from the island of New Guinea is the first cave dweller, not just in the region, but south of the equator. That's quite remarkable, considering that the Pacific is a hotspot of crayfish biodiversity, and there are southern hemisphere crayfish in Madagascar and South America.

The name is from Acheron, one of the rivers the ran through the underworld of Greek mythology.

References

Patoka J, Bláha M, Kouba A. 2017. Cherax acherontis (Decapoda: Parastacidae), the first cave crayfish from the Southern Hemisphere (Papua Province, Indonesia). Zootaxa 4363(1): 137-144. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4363.1.7

End of a project

Eight years ago and three months ago, I started a project to accommodate Jessica Murph’s request to do fieldwork (she was a student in the NSF REU program I ran then). It was a simple project to try to figure out some basic biology of the local sand crab species, Lepidopa benedicti.

Jessica finished her year in the program, and I kept going. And going.

Along the way, the project yielded three papers (Murph and Faulkes 2013, Faulkes 2014, 2017). The last paper covered up this project from 2011 to the end of 2015, and I have gathered two more years of data, making it seven calendar years of continuous monthly samples.

It’s a project where I genuinely felt I learned a lot. There was, at the start of this project, very little known about any species of this family. This project was a good first step in understanding the natural history not just of L. benedicti, but the family. And I found a species that had never been documented in the area before.

There were times when things got crazy when I could just think to myself, “I have to go to the beach.” They were good opportunities to decompress.

That project came to a close for the foreseeable future yesterday.

Posting here has been slow this semester, because I stuff that I didn’t want to blog about. It’s good stuff, not bad! I have some big plans that start early next year that I am very excited about.

But for every door that opens, one closes. These projects will be taking me away from South Texas, and I’m not going to be able to visit my field site for a while. I can’t go collect and measure “my” sand crabs.

I’ve had other projects that have ended before, but I can’t think of another that ran so long. It’s tough knowing that I still have questions that I will only be able to answer by collecting, and not knowing if or when I might be able to pick up the project again. Even if I do, I won’t have the bragging rights of a nice, continuous record.

On the plus side, I do still have two more years of field data in the can that I can analyze. I hope that I might be able to squeeze one more paper out of this project.

But I’m still a little sad.

References

Faulkes Z. 2014. A new southern record for a sand crab, Lepidopa websteri Benedict, 1903 (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Crustaceana 87(7): 881-885. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003326

Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1

Murph JH, Faulkes Z. 2013. Abundance and size of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae), in South Texas. The Southwestern Naturalist 58(4): 431-434. https://doi.org/10.1894/0038-4909-58.4.431

Photo by Karren Faulkes. Thanks, mom.

When two lines of research collide

It’s so nice to have two new papers drop in short succession! I had one come out in Journal of Coastal Research last week, and another paper drops today in PeerJ!

A couple of years ago, I posted this picture to try to explain who I ended with papers strewn across multiple research fields.

Little did I know then that a couple of those lines of research were to destined to collide:

This paper started, as several of my papers had, with an unplanned chance observation. I was working with a summer undergraduate student on a project related to my ongoing project to understand the basic biology of the sand crab crab Lepidopa benedicti (reviewed in yesterday’s post).

I looked under the microscope at a sand crab brain we were staining, and thought, “Hey, I recognize that!” It was a larval tapeworm. I’d coauthored two papers about how they infect the nervous system of local white shrimp (Carreon et al. 2011, Carreon and Faulkes 2014).

I had already co-authored published a paper on parasitic nematodes in sand crab (Joseph and Faulkes 2014). But when we did the initial screen for whether there were any parasites in this species, we missed the tapeworm larvae entirely! Even though we has spent a lot of time looking at them in shrimp, we did not notice them.

Once I recognized that there was this familiar parasite in sand crabs, it was off to the races. I knew how to visualize the parasite from the “tapeworm in shrimp” papers. I knew behaviour tests we could do from the “nematodes in sand crabs” paper. This project was, to me, very low hanging fruit that I was confident could yield a paper quite quickly.

But it became so much cooler than I ever expected as the data started rolling in. I had both sand crabs and mole crabs available, so I checked both for tapeworms. It became obvious quickly that the infection patterns in sand crabs and mole crabs were very different. I tweeted out a few graphs while I was collecting the data:

You don’t get differences that obvious that early that often. And it held up! And it was consistent with something else in my archive...

I had some unpublished data from the nematode project. My former student, Meera, had searched for those nematodes in mole crabs. We couldn’t find any. That result was okay for a conference poster at the 2014 parasitology meeting, but on its own was just an observation and probably not publishable.

But having two parasites show the same infection pattern in two species – one species heavily infected, the other one practically uninfected – now that was much more interesting.

The paper came together, as expected, pretty quickly. I submitted it to PeerJ. I’ve published with them before, and I was recently reminded how much I like their editorial process. They truly did build the better mousetrap. They are prompt but thorough. I still think PeerJ’s submission process for figures is still far more fiddly than it needs to be, even though I realize why it is that way.

I also wanted to milk my PeerJ lifetime membership more. I got it when it was $99 per author for life. With two papers, buying that membership when I did had probably save me thousands of dollars in article processing fees.

One thing that makes me happy about this pair of papers that has just come out (this and the phenology one) is that I genuinely feel that I have made progress in understanding the basic biology of these sand crabs. Yes, albuneid sand crabs are obscure little critters that few other people care about.

But a lot of papers feel like you’re mostly filling in details, or are variations on an established theme. It’s very satisfying to have a project where you genuinely feel you are shedding new light on topic. That’s why I kept doing the sand crab papers.

And I did have a student email me with a question about sand crabs not too long ago, so maybe these papers aren’t just to make me happy. Maybe some other people will find them cool and useful, too.

Related posts

Connections in my scientific career

Staying active in the lab and/or field when you’re the boss

823 days: A tale of parasite publication

Where’s the site for the parasite?

Tracking tiny worms

References

Carreon N, Faulkes Z. 2014. Position of larval tapeworms, Polypocephalus sp., in the ganglia of shrimp, Litopenaeus setiferus. Integrative and Comparative Biology 54(2): 143-148. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu043

Carreon N, Faulkes Z, Fredensborg BL. 2011. Polypocephalus sp. infects the nervous system and increases activity of commercially harvested white shrimp (Litopenaeus setiferus). Journal of Parasitology 97(5): 755-759. https://doi.org/10.1645/GE-2749.1

Faulkes Z. 2017. Filtering out parasites: sand crabs (Lepidopa benedicti) are infected by more parasites than sympatric mole crabs (Emerita benedicti). PeerJ 5: e5832. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3852

Joseph M, Faulkes Z. 2014. Nematodes infect, but do not manipulate digging by, sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti. Integrative and Comparative Biology 54(2): 101-107. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu064 

Fiddly bits and increments

You have to be honest about your papers. I am happy with my latest paper, for several reasons.

• It’s probably the longest I’ve ever collected data for a paper (five years). 
• Part of it was crowdfunded. 
• Part of it was first published in a tweet. 
• It’s open access.

But I admit this paper is a little scrappy.

My newest sand crab paper continues a project that started because an REU student, Jessica Murph, wanted to do a field project. Jessica collected about a year’s worth of data from the field. I continued for a second year because I didn’t think it would be publishable with only one year of data. It took a long time (don’t get me started), but we got that paper published (Murph and Faulkes 2013).

But even after two years of data gave us a paper, I just kept going out to the field every month. I didn’t have any super strong reason to do so. I needed sand crabs for other projects (like Joseph and Faulkes 2014), but I didn’t need to keep records of size and sex and number per transect of animals I was bringing back to the lab. But I did anyway.

One cool thing that happened while I did so was that I found a new species for the area – Lepidopa websteri – in 2012. That turned into a little paper of its own (Faulkes 2014). But a couple of years later, I found another specimen of this species. And then a third. While range extensions are an accepted thing in describing the distribution of a species, confirmations saying, “Yes, it’s still here” are not enough to publish a paper. Even when they are notoriously hard beasties to find.

Later, I found an orange sand crab. I’d co-authored a paper (Nasir and Faulkes 2011) saying that they were all grey or white, so that was a neat little wrinkle on the colour story. I found a second orange one when I was curating Real Scientists, and tweeted that out. Thus, a tweet was the first official “publication” of a new colour morph for Lepidopa benedicti! But I only had a couple of individuals, which was, again, not enough to publish a paper.

I did have a few ideas percolating in the back of my mind. I was interested in comparing the local sand crab population with the Atlantic population, and ran a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2012 to do so. (If you weren’t around for my crowdfunding campaigns, those were a lot of fun.)

I collected sand crabs in Florida, but the number of animals I found (three) was – again – not enough to hold up a paper on its own.

Are you seeing a pattern here yet?

Meanwhile, the basic data was slowly piling up and I was getting a sharper and sharper picture of what this population of sand crabs locally was doing month in, month out. Things that I thought were bad luck when I started (like, not finding any animals for months at a time) turned out to be part of a pretty predictable pattern. But that wasn’t a new finding; it was just a refinement of a pattern I’d published in the first paper (Murph and Faulkes 2013). An incremental improvement in understanding seasonal abundance was probably not enough for a paper.

The one finding that was genuinely new, and that made me think another paper was viable, was figuring out the reproductive cycle of the sand crabs. In the first two years of data (Murph and Faulkes 2013), we had no evidence of these animals reproducing at my field site at all. Now I know that while reproductive females are hard to find, they are there, I know when they appear (summer). And I know when the little ones appear (September / October).

That’s why I say this paper is a little scrappy. It includes a lot of fiddly bits and bobs that would not be enough to stand as independent papers. But I wanted to get them in the scientific record somehow. So I used one finding, the annual reproductive cycle, as a sort of tentpole to hold up a few others.

After experimenting with posting a preprint that contained a lot of these data, I settled down to the job of trying to find a real home for all this. I like to try to get papers in different journals, and I had been eyeing the Journal of Coastal Research. Some senior biology faculty at UTPA (Frank Judd and Bob Lonard) had published there multiple times. It was even more on my radar after attending the 2013 national conference of the ASPBA on South Padre Island.

The submission date on the paper says received 8 July 2016, but I hit “submit” in March. It was only through a haphazard “Hey, I wonder what’s the deal with my paper?” that I thought to log in to the journal’s manuscript review system, when I learned what was going on. The editor wanted me to fix a things in the manuscript to bring it in line with the journal’s formatting rules before it went out for review. But the submission system never generated an email to me from the editor saying, “Fix these.” Great. There’s a few months wasted.

But I do want to give the journal credit for things they did well. First, they did very intense copyediting, for which I am always grateful. There are always typos and errors and things that need fixing, and I never find them all on my own. And they drive me mad afterwards.

Second, Journal of Coastal Research is not known as an open access journal. There is no mention of open access publishing options in their (extensive) instructions to authors. But I asked about it during the copyediting and production stage, and was delighted to find that they did have an open access option. And the article processing fee was quite competitive.

I am glad to tell you the story of this sand crab paper, for I have another one to tell you about when it drops... tomorrow!

References

Faulkes Z. 2014. A new southern record for a sand crab, Lepidopa websteri Benedict, 1903 (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Crustaceana 87(7): 881-885. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685403-00003326

Faulkes Z. 2017. The phenology of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae). Journal of Coastal Research 33(5): 1095-1101. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-16-00125.1

Joseph M, Faulkes Z. 2014. Nematodes infect, but do not manipulate digging by, sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti. Integrative and Comparative Biology 54(2): 101-107. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icu064

Murph JH, Faulkes Z. 2013. Abundance and size of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda: Albuneidae), in South Texas. The Southwestern Naturalist 58(4): 431-434. https://doi.org/10.1894/0038-4909-58.4.431

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. https://doi.org/10.1651/10-3356.1  

Related posts

Back to the start

1,017 days: when publishing the paper takes longer than the project

Way down south: stumbling across a sand crab (Lepidopa websteri)

Amazons and Goliaths, my #SciFund expedition blog, now available!

A pre-print experiment: will anyone notice?

 
External links

Are two years’ data better than one?

Tuesday Crustie: Say a prayer

Australian crayfish are often like the country itself. Big, brash, and often highly charismatic. This newly discovered crayfish is a fine example of that.

Meet Euastacus vesper.As the Australians say, “She’s a beauty.”

Sadly, the authors expect this species is already criticially endangered. Like many crayfish species, it has a tiny distribution. But in slightly more cheerful news,the authors note they are working on describing even more new species in this genus.

Reference

McCormack RB, Ahyong ST. 2017. Euastacus vesper sp. nov., a new giant spiny crayfish (Crustacea, Decapoda, Parastacidae) from the Great Dividing Range, New South Wales, Australia. Zootaxa 4244(4): 556–567. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4244.4.6

External links

Euastacus vesper, a new Euastacus for NSW
Eustacus vesper – a NEW Euastacus for NSW

 

Tuesday Crustie: Sticker shock

Last week, I polled people on Twitter, asking what people thought was the highest price paid for any invertebrate.

I was surprised that most people guessed over $10,000.^* If you had asked me, I could not think of any invertebrate that could command that sort of price tag.

I polled because I had read about this crayfish, named “Chao Khun Chang.” It’s an unusual colour morph, but otherwise, it is the ubiquitous Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii.

As far as I know, it was sold for the highest price ever paid for a crayfish, and possibly for an invertebrate:

It sold for 1 million baht in Thailand, which is in the neighbourhood of US$28,500.

By way of comparison, I’ve been examining the price of crayfish in the North American pet trade for several years now (Faulkes 2013, 2015). The average sale price is $5 to $25 (depending on species). The highest asking price I’ve ever seen for a crayfish was $80, and the highest price paid (including shipping) was $65 (Faulkes 2015).

This crayfish is the invert arowana. It’s amazing.

^* Winner of the best response was David Dobbs, who wrote:

Way over $10,000. Paul Ryan doesn’t come cheap.

References

Faulkes Z. 2013. How much is that crayfish in the window? Online monitoring of Marmorkrebs, Procambarus fallax f. virginalis (Hagen, 1870) in the North American pet trade. Freshwater Crayfish 19(1): 39-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.5869/fc.2013.v19.039

Faulkes, Z., 2015. Marmorkrebs (Procambarus fallax f. virginalis) are the most popular crayfish in the North American pet trade. Knowledge and Management of Aquatic Ecosystems 416: 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/kmae/2015016

External links

Crayfish with rare colours sets B1m record
Distinctive species of ghost crayfish fetches one million baht price
Man sells cow-patterned crayfish for 1 million baht

Pokémon in real life: biologists catch them all!

Pokémon are back in the news. The property that was a mega-popular trading card game in the late 1990s is back with a new smartphone game, Pokémon Go, that launched last week and is suddenly thing the thing on everyone’s lips.

You are going to read about a zillion hot takes and think pieces about this game, but remember: the Southern Fried Scientist, Andrew Thaler, got there first.

In our afternoon of wandering, it was clear there was no ‘typical’ Pokémon Go player. We saw parents with their kids, young adults, older couples, grandparents, and one gnarly Harley rider who excitedly called to his buddies in the Yorktown Pub “Hold up, I found a Pidgey!” The Colonial Triangle (Yorktown, Jamestown, and Williamsburg) in general is so snow-blindingly white that no one even thinks twice about calling it the Colonial Triangle. Yet, this afternoon was the most diverse gathering of people I’ve ever seen in Yorktown.

Asia Murphy has came up with the idea of creating a pokédex for real organisms. Thus, the #PokemonIRL hashtag was born.

I made mine up at the top, and you can, too! A template is here. You will need a graphics editor and a bit of experience, but you can make one pretty quickly. It’s a cool idea to spread the joy of finding critters, which are just as wild and exotic as any that the Pokémon Company creates.

Additional: The person who created Pokémon was a frustrated insect collector, Satoshi Tajiri (Thanks to Jon Mooallem).

Alex Lee points out that Pokémon is doing a much better job of inspiring kids than nature is. This is perhaps to be expected. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, “A game is life with the dull bits cut out.”

External links

The power of Pokémon Go
#PokémonIRL (blog post) 
Pokémon in real life blank templates
Is ‘Pokémon Go’ Good for science?
If you must play Pokémon Go, ‘catch’ some real animals while you’re at it

Tuesday Crustie: Under the microscope

Arthropods are wonderfully charismatic and photogenic under a scanning electron microscope. Here are a few pictures of Emerita benedicti that my student Claudette and technician Tom took for no reason than they look cool.

The animals were under the microscope for a research project that we have going on. We got some other nice pictures that may make their way into a manuscript. These were just a bonus.

“Threats from pets” free talk next week!

I’m giving a free public talk next weekend! It’ll be held at the Coastal Studies Lab on South Padre Island on Saturday morning, 16 January. I’ll be talking about the aquarium trade in crayfish.

This will probably be my prettiest talk in a long time, because I was able to get a lot of gorgeous, jaw-dropping crayfish pictures from ace photographer Chris Lukhaup. There will be eye candy. Oh yes.