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.

Scientists’ unguarded moments

Earlier on Twitter, I shared an Instagram picture of Dr. Katie Bouman at work, imaging a black hole.

This has been a widely shared picture, and I was a little surprised when I saw a friend on Facebook question it. She said when there was scientific discoveries that showed images of men, the men looked more composed and professional. This made the imaging of a black hole look like an almost accidental “Did I do that?” moment.

Certainly Bouman’s picture was not the only one available. Here’s a picture of another one of the black hold team, Kazunori Akiyama.

Both Akiyama and Bouman are at computers, looking at the historic images they made. But Akiyama’s is almost certainly a staged, posed picture.

I asked what she thought of this picture of the New Horizons team, looking at images of Pluto close up for the first time. The man in the middle is project leader Alan Stern.

She replied that she thought it did a disservice to the science and to Stern if it had been widely reported. It had been seen quite widely, though probably not as much as the Bouman picture.

This interested me, because it spoke to the risks and rewards of scientists showing their unguarded moments.

On the one hand, these spontaneous moments capture something that is, I think, deeply human. Excitement. Joy. Achievement. Surprise.

But I also get that these are moments where people look undignified or vulnerable. It’s easy to mock people for looking goofy. Especially for big projects that have a lot of taxpayer money behind them, it might not be a good look. It can look like people just screwing around.

Personally, I think that sharing those spontaneous moments are worth it. My wife has been watching a lot of Brené Brown talks recently, and she talks a lot about the concept of vulnerability. And how vulnerability is one of the best predictors of courage.

I think scientists could use a lot more encouragement. And if that means looking in a way that surprises people, that’s all right by me.

Since I’m talking black holes, there was some discussion over who did what. Bouman got a lot of media attention, Sara Issaon pointed out that the image was not Bouman’s algorithms alone. Weirdly, this snowballed into some trying to undermine her contribution entirely. Andrew Chael ably tackled the trolls.

References

First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole

External links

Meet one of the first scientists to see the historic black hole image

Twice in a lifetime: South Texas snowfall!

Last time, I only saw the aftermath.

This time, I got to see it happen.

Snow!

There hadn’t been snow in a century before 2004, and now twice in less than 20 years? This is crazy.

It started around 9:00 am, and ran for a couple of hours. It was big fluffy flakes that was coming down quite thick at one point.

I asked everyone I saw, “Are we having fun yet?!” Everyone was having fun. Everyone was happy. One student said, “This is the best thing that could have happened during finals!”

There were snowball fights outside the library.

Alas, it dod not last long. After a couple of hours, it had stopped. But there was so much snow on the trees, that as it melted, it sounded like a downpour.

Last time, I made a snowman. This time, I made something different:

A South Texas snow angel!

I can’t believe I got to see snow twice in South Texas during my time there. Today was pretty magical.

I’ve been inside for an hour now, and my fingers are still numb.

Related posts

Something wonderful
After the (snow)fall
Once in a lifetime

Me, 2017

My selfie game is not strong. And I generally feel super scruffy when I am out at the beach collecting. But I like how this pic of me in the field Tuesday came out.

I was scruffy, but the day was gorgeous. I was very lucky to be out on the beach that morning.

But this is a good opportunity to draw your attention  to Paige Jarreau’s project on scientist selfies. There is an Instagram account of other scientist selfies here, a Flickr collection; a Twitter hashtag, #ScientistsWhoSelfie (of which the picture above is one). And you can support her project on Experiment!

External links

To Selfie or Not to Selfie - How Can Scientists Foster Public Trust on Instagram?

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.

Nature wants to eat you

I’m trying to work out which is the more terrifying image.

This:

Or this:

The lion’s face is perhaps the purest expression of fury I have ever seen. The penguin picture is shocking because it is completely unexpected. It’s also a vivid reminder that birds are the direct descendents of meat-eating dinosaurs.

Seen on campus: Way cool science stuff

I have no idea why this should be plastered on the disused pay phone that sits outside my building. But I love it anyway.

Lost and found

You may have to embiggen this image by clicking to see the fine print...

(There are some witty pranksters on my campus.)

Ground squirrel manor

Saw these cute little juveniles walking into work this morning.

Where the science happens

Earlier this week, Jacquelyn Gill on Twitter said she wanted to see lab and fields sites. Let’s start with a field site:

Here is one of the places I go to collect sand crabs (Lepidopa benedicti) on South Padre Island, Texas (see Nasir & Faulkes 2011). This is some ways north on the beach, away from the main town center. You can see some of the high-rise hotels in the distance.

This particular day is not a happy collecting day: the amount of shells on the beach makes digging for the beasties a pain, pain, pain.The cloud cover is welcome, though. As you might imagine, south Texas sunshine while shoveling ten meter transects on the beach is, um, rather warm (euphemism for “sweating like a pig”). More papers from this site are forthcoming, I hope!

Sorry, Jacquelyn, but you’re not getting a picture of my lab until after the end of semester / start of summer clean up. Here’s an old one, with a crayfish condo under construction (I talked about this on another blog; see also Jimenez & Faulkes 2010; she’s the first author of that paper).

References

Jimenez SA, Faulkes Z. 2010. Establishment and care of a laboratory colony of parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs. Invertebrate Rearing 1(1): 10-18.
http://inverts.info/content/establishment-and-care-laboratory-colony-parthenogenetic-marbled-crayfish-marmorkrebs

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

What PubMed thinks I do

I’m glad that “neurons” is the largest word in the cloud. I was hired as a neurobiologist. But not all the research I’ve been doing lately have neurons in it.

Visualized with PubMed2Worldle. Hat tip to Steven Kembel.

A new form of DNA

This is way cool. Even though it isn’t aliens.

If you want serious coverage, go to Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer, who explains the skeptical point of view.

Additional: More criticism of the paper.

Reference

Wolfe-Simon F, Switzer Blum J, Kulp TR, Gordon GW, Hoeft SE, Pett-Ridge J, Stolz JF, Webb SM, Weber PK, Davies PCW, Anbar AD, & Oremland RS. 2010. A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258

It’s National Fossil Day!

It’s National Fossil Day here in the United States! What a wonderful idea!

How many people have been inspired to pursue science in part because of fossils? For some, seeing those massive skeletons of prehistoric beasts in museums. For others, it might have been finding fossil shells out in their backyard.

In honor of this, I’d like to share a fossil I keep handy...

My parents gave me this after mentioning on this blog I wanted a fossil I could carry around in case of emergency.

My trilobite taxonomy is a little weak, so I can’t tell you anything about the species. If anyone can say anything more specific about it, I’d love to hear from you!

Conferences and cathedrals

I spent most of last week in Salamanca, Spain, attending the Ninth International Congress of Neuroethology. Here’s a photo set of my favourite pictures that I took around Salamanca. Salamanca has been designated a world heritage site, and it’s easy to see why. As you walk around, you constantly are confronted with views like this:

This is the sort of place where the “new” cathedral was finished in the 1600s or something. It drove home to me the truth of an old joke:

In Europe, 100 miles is a long way. In America, 100 years is a long time.

On Thursday, it occurred to me that the experience of attending a scientific conference is much like walking around in Salamanca, through the cathedrals, the university, and Plaza Mayor.

That picture above, of the facade of one of the buildings of the University of Salamanca, has a very famous feature. Can you spot it? Click here for the answer!

Arthrobus

Did I mention our buses carrying neuroethologists from the Madrid airport to Salamanca and back looked like they had antennae?

 Kawaii!

A virtual camera lucida

Sometimes, the scientific literature sucks at getting information to you.

I was looking at the table of contents of a new issue of The Journal of Crustacean Biology and saw an article about how to photograph soft-bodied crustaceans. Hm, I wonder why photographing soft-bodied crustaceans is difficult, I thought.

And the abstract mentioned software to deal with short focal planes by merging several pictures. The software is Helicon Focus.

Yes, I should be happy that I have found something useful, but... dagnabbit, why didn’t I know about this years ago?

For instance, here’s part of Figure 3 from a paper a few years back (Espinoza et al. 2006) on the left, compared to a new picture processed with Helicon Focus (click to enlarge).

These are neurons stained through a technique called backfilling. The best backfills are really superb, and you can see a lot of detail. But they’re often in thick tissue, and neurons go all over the place through it, making it hard to see all the relevant detail. The way people usually got around this was to get a camera lucida attached to a drawing tube through a microscope, then trace the axons as you focused up and down.

I was actually very pleased with the pictures in Figure 3 as published, which had dark cells against a very clear background. But the one shown here on the left shows the problem of getting all the relevant detail in the shot. The cell bodies on the right are okay, but the ones down a little deeper in the ganglion on the left and their axons are already blurring out.

The processed version on the right is better.

Having played with this a bit, sometimes there are things you can see in the individual frames that do get lost in the processed version. The biggest problem is when there is some detail underneath something else. You can often see it under the scope and in the individual frames, but not so well in the composite image.

This was so startling and so useful to me, I briefly entertained the thought of trying to turn this into a neuroscience methods paper. Then I looked and found short references that it had been used in the invertebrate neurobiology literature a couple of years ago (Scanell et al. 2008) in a journal I read. D’oh! Another shrewd Faulkes scheme bites the dust.

But at least I can spread the word through a blog post. A slightly more recent paper by Berejnov and company (2009) has nothing whatsoever to do with biology, but gives a better example of what you might get from this kind of software.

As I was writing this, I read an interview with Neil Gaiman, where he said this, mostly in relation to book publishing in particular genres:

Information used to be gold: hard to find, expensive, the equivalent of going off into the desert and coming back with a perfect lump of gold. Now, it’s the equivalent of going off into the jungle, in which there is information everywhere and what you are trying to find is the piece that is useful, while ignoring the noise.

I do wish the process of finding useful things was a little less jungle-like.

References

Berejnov, V., Sinton, D., & Djilali, N. (2010). Structure of porous electrodes in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells: An optical reconstruction technique Journal of Power Sources 195 (7), 1936-1939. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2009.10.050

Espinoza SY, Breen L, Varghese N, Faulkes Z. 2006. Loss of escape-related giant neurons in a spiny lobster, Panulirus argus. The Biological Bulletin 211: 223-231. http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/211/3/223

Hegna, T. (2010). Photography of Soft-Bodied Crustaceans via Drying, Whitening, and Splicing Journal of Crustacean Biology 30(3): 351-356. DOI: 10.1651/09-3253.1

Scannell, E., Dell'Ova, C., Quinlan, E., Murphy, A., & Kleckner, N. (2008). Pharmacology of ionotropic and metabotropic glutamate receptors on neurons involved in feeding behavior in the pond snail, Helisoma trivolvis Journal of Experimental Biology 211(5): 824-833. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.011866

But I’m hungry!

Seen in the building this weekend:

Even if you did happen to crave jalapeno flavoured Cheetos, a closer look reveals you’re still screwed:

I pity the person who was trying to get the last thing in the machine. That must have been frustrating. So much for “lucky last.”

There’s a fail in here somewhere, but I just can’t figure out what it is.

Tuesday Crustie: Oh, snap

Snapping shrimp (Alpheus macrocheles). Picture from here.

Photo of the month

If you have a WWF Canada 2010 calendar, and you’re flipping over the picture for a new month today, that’s my mom’s picture you’re looking at.

Way to go, Mom!

Tuesday Crustie: Buoy

When you think of barnacles, you think of animals that are fixed in place. But they are not all like that...

The photographer tentatively identifies this floating barnacle as Lepas fascicularis, but searching around suggests that that name is no longer valid. It might be Dosima fascicularis, which are given the common name of buoy barnacles.

Diversity is wonderful.

Photo by Willapalens on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.