Places versus programs versus people

When I talk to students about how to pick a graduate program, I usually tell them to find “The guy.” ^* Find the person who is the best in the world at the kind of research you want to do, and who is a reasonable person for you to work with.

Now, “the guy” might be in a place you have never heard of. This, to my way of thinking, should not matter. Grad school is about personal relationships, not bricks and mortar.

At least, that’s what I’ve thought. But lately, I’ve had a gnawing worry about whether this is the right strategy.

At the undergraduate level, I was disappointed to read how much the average starting salaries differ for university graduates in the United States. As I started to think about the intangible factors that lead to scientific success, I went back to the list of some prominent scientists in an earlier post.

• Carl Sagan: Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dragons of Eden published in 1978. Degree from University of Chicago, worked for Harvard and Cornell.
• Stephen Jay Gould: Breakthrough paper on punctuated equilibrium published in 1972. Graduate work at Columbia and worked at Harvard.
• E.O. Wilson: Breakthrough book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis published in 1975. Degree from, and worked at Harvard.
• Richard Dawkins: Breakthrough book The Selfish Gene published in 1976. Degrees from, and worked at Oxford.
• David Attenborough: Major television series Life on Earth debuted in 1979. Degree from Cambridge.
• David Suzuki: Began as host of The Nature of Things in 1979. Degree from University of Chicago, worked at UBC.

Call me suspicious, but I see a fairly small cluster of institutions in these sorts of lists. It almost feels like people are only willing to let scientists from certain places be “prominent.”

Have I been wrong all this time? Should a student looking to go to graduate school just find the most “famous” school they possibly can, and consider who they might work with as an afterthought?

* “The guy” might well be a woman. I think “guy” can be almost gender neutral, but tell me if I’m wrong.

Tuesday Crustie: Gandalf the White

A hydrothermal vent crab (Gandalfus yunohana) that was recently reared for the first time.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons license.

May Carnivals

This is the first time I’ve mentioned the Carnival of the Blue, a carnival devoted to writings about the ocean. For some reason, although I write about marine creatures, I guess it was with a little less frequency than some other topics, so haven’t have a contribution in it before.

The new Circus of the Spineless is up at Arthropoda. Extra special, because it’s #50. And we love even numbers that are also multiples of five.

Finally, the Carnival of Evolution is hosted by the Evolution: Education and Outreach blog. I’d particularly pleased to point out this carnival, because next month, I’m hosting Carnival of Evolution right here at NeuroDojo!

I would particularly like to spotlight any and all posts on the evolution of brains, nervous systems, or behaviour, because that’s kind of the mission statement of this blog. All evolution related posts are welcome as usual, though.

Do octopuses feel pain as deeply as mammals?

The Everything Octopus blog provides, via People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an example of the low bar for scientific evidence in discussion around invertebrate pain. To be clear, I am in no way defending the practice described (eating live animals). I want to focus on this statement:

Because octopuses have sophisticated nervous systems and feel pain just as acutely as mammals do...

Octopuses and other cephalopods have sophisticated nervous systems, granted. I’ve written about their wonderful behaviour several times on this blog. But let’s look at the second half of that statement. “Feel pain as acutely as mammals do.” It sounds plausible, but what’s the evidence supporting it?

Pain is a very complicated subject. Comparing pain between humans is tricky, and we have the advantage of being able to talk to each other. Last week’s episode of All in the Mind contained this thought on the difficulty of comparing pain in different people (emphasis added):

Henry Greely: (P)ain is a huge question in law suits. Injury law suits, accident law suits, in workers’ compensation cases, in disability cases. And we don't have great tests for pain: we know that some people lie, that they say that their lower back hurts so badly they can’t go to work, but in fact occasionally a lucky defendant will have a private detective who's got video of the claimant bouncing up and down on a trampoline. But we don’t have a good test for it. ...

I don’t know that I see it ever as being plausible that we could say that the pain you're feeling is greater or less than the pain I am feeling.

We have crude methods of comparing nociceptive behaviour in very similar kinds of mammals. And even those crude measures give us very good reason to think that not all mammals experience pain to the same degree (see, for example, Park et al. 2008 on naked mole rats), which is an underlying assumption of the quote above.

Comparing levels of pain across the broad reaches of the animal kingdom? None that I know of. And given the paper that we just published (Puri & Faulkes 2010), I’ve been looking, trust me.

Let’s look at the more tractable issue of whether octopuses have nociceptors. There’s good physiological evidence that some mollusks have nociceptors; Aplysia californica do, for instance (Illich & Walters 1997). But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has shown nociceptors in octopuses. Varner (2003) wrote:

(Octopuses) have stunning learning abilities, but about whom little is known regarding nociception, endogenous opiates, and responses to analgesics.

I did find a paper on anesthetics in octopuses (Andrews & Tansey 1981), and those authors speculated that octopuses might have sensory neurons like mammalian nociceptors. An even more recent review (Mather & Anderson 2007) did not mention any physiological evidence for nociceptors in octopus, though providing a variety of behavioural reasons to suspect their presence.

Kavaliers (1988) noted that Wells (1978) claimed that there were “pain pathways” in Octopus vulgaris, but I don’t have the book at my fingertips to check what evidence Wells gives to support this claim.

To sum up, there are many good reasons to think that octopuses have nociceptors, but almost no experimental evidence. But is there anyone with the technical skills and the inclination to to to get that evidence? Not sure. While great for behavioural experiments, octopuses can be quite tricky animals to work with for detailed neurophysiology.

Given that cephalopods do have complex nervous systems, and that this has rightly fueled concerns about appropriate care levels for cephalopods, it may be very difficult for anyone to get permission to do the experiments that might determine if octopuses have nociceptors and what their properties are. The nature of octopus nociceptors would be incredibly interesting from a comparative and evolutionary point of view. Octopuses may have a completely different way of detecting tissue damage than is found in those organisms with a backbone.

Octopuses always challenge us, because there is no other organism on the planet that so obviously seems to have some kind of intelligence, but housed in an animal that might as well have come from another planet.

Update, 29 September 2017: This recent article points out the difficulty in recognizing whether humans are experiencing pain.

“It’s not possible at this point in time to say with any degree of certainty that a person does or does not have chronic pain based on brain imaging,” said Dr. Karen Davis, Head, Division of Brain, Imaging and Behaviour-Systems Neuroscience at UHN’s Krembil Research Institute and a Professor in the Department of Surgery and Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. “The only way to truly know if someone is in pain is if they tell you because pain is subjective and it is a complex experience. No brain scan can do that.”

If there is no “fingerprint for pain” in humans, we’re a long way from any such determination for other animals.

References

Andrews P, Tansey E. 1981. The effects of some anaesthetic agents in Octopus vulgaris Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part C: Comparative Pharmacology, 70(2): 241-247. DOI: 10.1016/0306-4492(81)90057-5

Illich PA, Walters ET. 1997. Mechanosensory neurons innervating Aplysia siphon encode noxious stimuli and display nociceptive sensitization. The Journal of Neuroscience 17(1): 459-469. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/1/459

Kavaliers M. 1988. Evolutionary and comparative aspects of nociception Brain Research Bulletin 21(6): 923-931. DOI: 10.1016/0361-9230(88)90030-5

Park T, Lu Y, Jüttner R, Smith E, Hu J, Brand A, Wetzel C, Milenkovic N, Erdmann B, Heppenstall P, Laurito C, Wilson S, Lewin G. 2008. Selective Inflammatory Pain Insensitivity in the African Naked Mole-Rat (Heterocephalus glaber) PLoS Biology 6(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060013

Puri S & Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Varner G. 2003. How facts matter. In: Armstrong, S. & Botzler, R. G., Animal Ethics Reader, pp. 92-93. London: Routledge.

Wells MJ. 1978. Octopus: Physiology and behaviour of an advanced invertebrate. London: Chapman Hall.

Photo by Joachim S. Müller on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Two updates on long-running stories

It’s been a long time since we’ve heard an update on Chris Comer’s ongoing battle with the Texas Education Agency. She was fired over forwarded email, sued TEA, lost in March 2009, and is now appealing.) The Washington Post has an update.

I don’t think this is going to go well for Comer, because the article reports that she admits she broke policy (emphasis added).

James Ho, Texas' solicitor general, said Comer doesn't dispute that her e-mail violated the agency's neutrality policy.

“This is a policy of employee neutrality, and neutrality is the touchstone of the establishment clause,” Ho said. “It’s certainly not a violation of it.”

The agency says Comer was fired for “repeated subordination.” Besides violating the neutrality policy, she allegedly attended meetings and presentations without agency approval and disclosed details of the school board's deliberations to non-board members.

“What makes this case unique is that there is a pattern of misconduct,” Ho said.

I’ve always thought that the strongest argument for her case would be to say that her actions did not violate neutrality. Reasonable people do not see a forwarded email with the three letter addition of “FYI” as “endorsement.” I don’t think she’s going to win.

Meanwhile, The New American interviews Don McLeroy on the Texas K-12 teaching standards. Most of it concerns the social studies and English standards, about which I have no comment, as I have no expertise. On the science standards, McLeroy’s happiness does not comfort me:

“Science was amazing. We hit a grand-slam there — pitched a no-hit shut out.” He said the new standards give students the opportunity to learn not only how things work (the effect) but also why they work (the cause). The guidelines allow students to question evolutionary claims on a scientific basis.

If you think that his recent electoral defeat means McLeroy will just go back to his dentistry practice, I hate to break it to you:

So what's next for this education crusader after his term expires in December 2010? “I've been on the board for 12 years and have learned so much. I have focused on education and have much to contribute,” he reflects. “I may write a book. I would like to go around the state to explain what the science standards say and how they can challenge evolutionary ideas.”

Emphasis added. McLeroy may be providing examples of how not to argue about science for a long, long, time.

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!

Comments for second half of April, 2010

Abel Pharmboy asks why a scientist would write when he or she doesn’t have to. Me? Vanity. Always vanity.

On The Loom, Carl Zimmer tells the cockroach mind control story that I covered here a while back. (An interesting compare and contrast study: one article by award winning science writer, and one by me.) But Carl inadvertently perpetuates the notion that invertebrates don’t have brains... sigh.

I join Dr. Jekyll’s rants against Science magazine’s crummy PDF exports.

Biochem Belle asks, “Does PowerPoint ever interfere with the discussion of science?” Couldn’t let that one go. PowerPoint exacerbates, but the problem is deeper and older.

Dr. Becca tells about a truly staggering number of applications.

DrugMonkey can’t believe he’s writing about typefaces. I can. ‘Cause that’s good stuff.

The Zen of Presentations, Part 33: PowerParody

Making fun of PowerPoint has gotten too easy, frankly. Too many people have written too much about how many people use it badly.

But this one made me laugh hard.

It’s coming out of this much forwarded New York Times article about the use of PowerPoint by the military.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Afghanistan Stability Chart
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

I suspect this bit was partly inspired by Peter Norvig’s famous Gettysburg address parody, but this one has a Star Wars clip. And that automatically makes everything better.

Crustacean nociception: Comparative

One of the things I like about our new PLoS ONE paper is that it lengthens my list of species for I have published original research by 23%.

1. Spiny sand crabs, Blepharipoda occidentalis (Paper)
2. Pearly sand crabs, Lepidopa californica (Paper)
3. Mole crabs, Emerita analoga (Paper)
4. Squat lobster, Munida quadrispina (Paper)
5. Signal crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus (Paper)
6. Cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus (Paper)
7. Yabby, Cherax destructor (Paper)
8. Balmain bugs, Ibacus peronii (Paper)
9. Slipper lobsters, Ibacus alticrenatus (Paper)
10. Spanner crab, Ranina ranina (Paper)
11. Spiny lobster, Panulirus argus (Paper)
12. Sea squirt, Ascidia interrupta (Paper)
13. Marmorkrebs, Procambarus sp. (Paper)
14. Louisiana red swamp crayfish, Procambarus clarkii (Paper)
15. Grass shrimp, Palaemonetes sp. (Paper; pictured)
16. White shrimp, Litopaneaus setiferus (Paper)

It’s hard for me to believe that this is the first time I’ve actually published data with Procambarus clarkii, which is used so often, and which I’ve had in the lab for a long time.

And I’m hoping to add to this list at least one more time before the end of the year.

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Crustacean nociception: The worry

Global warming. Evolution. Vaccines. Lobsters being cooked in pots.

The “lobster pain” question may not as headline-grabbing and contentious as the preceding issues on the list above, but it has something in common with all the rest.

Many people have strongly held opinions about the matter that don’t rely much on evidence. Animal rights people make “Being boiled hurts!” buttons. People associated with fisheries say things like, “No brain, no pain.”

People don’t debate the issue, they trade position statements. And they often say quite witless things in the process. Sometimes, arguments achieve a sentence to error ratio of 1:1.

Some people will hate our new paper on crustacean nociception and some will love it, not because of the science, but based on how it fits with their pre-existing beliefs. I’m betting some readers will fly right past the most important sentence in the paper:

We are not claiming that crustaceans do not feel pain.

That’s important, because it tries to maintain nuance, in case people try to simplify our research findings to fit their pre-existing positions. And sadly, I think it’s a matter of when, not if, someone tries to take the results in this paper out of context and try to make it say something it doesn’t. I’m half-expecting someone to accuse me of being in the pocket of “big fisheries.”

To those on both sides of the issue, I ask you to do the experiments. I don’t mean this in the literal sense that people should go buy an electrophysiology rig. I mean it in the sense of saying evidence matters. I know that is hard. The same day this paper was published, I found not one, but two articles about how resistant people are to evidence, even if – or perhaps especially if – it’s coming from a scientist.

If crustaceans have nociceptors, I want to know it. If they don’t have nociceptors, I want to know it. I don’t care who shows it, and I don’t care which way the outcome is. Stop the vicious circle of arguing in a vacuum, so we can make some informed decisions.

Picture from here.

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Crustacean nociception: The journal, PLoS ONE

I’ve got to hand it to the folks behind PLoS ONE.

When I told people we had a paper coming out in PLoS ONE, multiple people spontaneously said, “That’s a good journal,” or even “Wow!” ^*

This is a far cry from what most people thought when PLoS ONE debuted a few years back. The stated editorial policy of only reviewing for technical competence and not importance made people worry that PLoS ONE would look like this:

Somehow, PLoS ONE has managed to avoid that fate. I think it’s managed to shed that image because it has become so massive. It’s on its way to becoming the biggest journal in the world in terms of number of articles (it was #3 last year). I don’t think it’s because everyone is sending their best stuff there, but when you have a lot of people sending stuff in, there’s more than enough cream to rise to the top.

I also think part of the reason PLoS ONE has started to be viewed as a bit prestigious is that many researchers are still reluctant to pay publication fees. That publication fee creates friction, and friction helps make something seem valuable.

I am glad that is piece is in PLoS ONE, since the “lobster in the pot” question is frequently asked. In fact, when we had a guest lecturer here recently, she mentioned she had been asked the question in her intro biology course the week before. So open access is a good thing for this paper, as I’m hoping it might help provide a reasonable “key” into the question.

---

I wrote all of the above a couple of weeks ago, well before I read The Scholarly Kitchen and its alternative view on PLoS and particularly PLoS ONE. The discussion following is lengthy and lively.

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Dumping ground ohoto by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr; cream photo by Chiot’s Run on Flickr. Both used under a Creative Commons license.

^* The “Wow!” factor may have been an expression of the surprise that I’d published anything at all.

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.

Crustacean nociception: Origins, part 2

And now, the continuing backstory of our new PLoS One paper (previous post here)...

The idea of crustacean nociception hung around in the back of my mind as a good project in the first few years of 2000s. Periodically, I would go onto Google Scholar and elsewhere looking for papers, not just on crustacean nociception, but invertebrate nociception generally. I built a quite nice series of lectures for my neurobiology class along the way from that.

Around this this time, I started to see how often the question came up, and how badly botched the answers were. I blogged about it, and I got ever more annoyed, not just by the lack of an answer, but by how people were making assertions that had no basis in research.

A couple of students working with me did some very preliminary trials, looking for a way to test crustacean nociception experimentally. My first graduate student, Sandra, got a little bit of preliminary data that went into her master’s thesis. But it just wasn’t enough to push forward with the project.

Finally, Sakshi got on board, and we finally started to get the data that’s in this paper.

To give you an idea of how long we’ve been slogging away at this project, we started collecting data late 2007. We thought we were going to have this done in a couple of weeks, but the results didn’t cooperate. We gave a poster at a summer meeting Crustacean Society meeting in 2008 (visible here). Sakshi gave a talk at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in early 2009. Actual paper last week. So it’s been well over two years in the making.

So much of a research project is a story of false starts and points where you really wonder if you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. We had more than our fair share of those, starting from the very first experiments, where we weren’t getting the expected results.

None of that comes across in the technical paper. It’s nice to give at least a hint of that, even though, as I mentioned, I’m only telling a very small part of the backstory here.

Catch me at the International Association of Astacology or the International Society for Neuroethology meetings this summer, and I’ll tell you more!

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

“Don’t mention abiogenesis!” – You should, actually

“Origin” means beginning. So it’s unfortunate that the best known book on the subject of evolution is On the Origin of Species. Because the theory of evolution by natural selection is not, strictly speaking, about the origin of life.

A recent article by Paz-y-Miño and Espinoza made that rookie mistake. And they got called on it. And quite right, too. The letter writers, Rice and colleagues, however, are upset not just because Paz-y-Miño and Espinoza use the theory too loosely.

They’re scared.

The first reason they give to separate evolution from the question of the origin of life (a.k.a. abiogenesis) is:

(S)tudents often hold more tightly to a supernatural account for the origin of life than they do to a supernatural account for how the diversity of life arose(.)

This sounds dangerously like self-censorship.

I can almost hear Basil Fawlty’s voice in my head: “Whatever you do, don’t mention the origin of life!”

We talk about the branching pattern of classification as evidence for evolution. We talk about commonalities of living things as evidence for evolution. When you examine those pieces of evidence for evolution, it is a logical inference that life originated on this planet once. To completely separate natural selection and abiogenesis does a disservice to both.

Darwin, as usual, was ahead of the game and saw the two were logically connected. The last chapter of Origin (first edition), he wrote:

(A)ll living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. ... Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

Rice and colleagues also argue that abiogenesis is more the domain of physics and chemistry than biology. This sounds like an easy excuse for timid teachers: “Not my department, have a nice day.”

Scientists working on the origin of life problem are going to be testing hypotheses that life originated following the regular laws of chemistry and physics. That is, they will be testing materialistic hypotheses. Yes, some people are going to have problems with that for religious reasons, and won’t like that science does not allow for the immaterial. Yes, scientists currently have fewer responses to religious objections to abiogenesis.

But there is no point in trying to hide the science around the origin of life under the rug in an effort to get people to buy into evolution. It’s a cowardly way to teach science.

References

Paz-y-Miño C., G., & Espinosa, A. (2009). Acceptance of Evolution Increases with Student Academic Level: A Comparison Between a Secular and a Religious College Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2 (4), 655-675 DOI: 10.1007/s12052-009-0175-7

Rice, J., Warner, D., Kelly, C., Clough, M., & Colbert, J. (2010). The Theory of Evolution is Not an Explanation for the Origin of Life Evolution: Education and Outreach DOI: 10.1007/s12052-010-0225-1

Graphic by Arenamontanus on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hoping these are the only quakes caused today

It is now April 26, Coordinated Universal Time. Today is a good day to take a stand for rationality. Inspired by Jen McCreight at Blag Hag (see here and here)...

Big big love in wetas?

Weta is not just the name of a special effects studio; it’s the common name for one very large insect (pictured) that is found in New Zealand. Like many animals on New Zealand, it’s under a bit of pressure from introduced mammals, so there are definitely conservation implications if you can understand the mating system of the animal.

Wetas make an interesting case study for studying body size and mating, because they are large for their lineage, and there’s also a big size difference between the males and the females. In this particular species of weta (Deinacrida rugosa), females are about twice as heavy as males.

There’s a lot of permutations and combinations to figure out what factors are important in mating in these species. Having a large body can have a lot of advantages in the mating game. It can help you compete with other members of the same sex in a physical contest. But another way being large can help you compete is that bigger bodies can often mean bigger reproductive organs, and more gametes, which for males translates to more sperm.
Is having a large body size advantageous in either sex?

Four years of chasing wetas in New Zealand, radio-tagging them (yes, they’re big enough for radio tags), letting them copulate in buckets and burrows, and authors Kelly and company are getting closer to some answers.

Somewhat unexpectedly, they did not find any statistically significant relationship between body size of mating wetas. Big boys didn’t mate with big girls or small with small.

Second, heavy females received significantly less sperm than light females. This is again a bit unexpected, given that in invertebrates, large females almost always are able to produce more offspring. Typically, you find males will expend as much sperm on the highest quality females as possible. Additionally, male body size doesn’t limit how much sperm the males can produce, so there was no evidence of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

Why? One possibility is that weta males just don’t adjust their sperm allocation for mate quality. If so, this would be very surprising, given how often males in how many different species have been shown to be able to do this. Maybe female size isn’t an indicator of fecundity, though that also seems a bit hard to believe.

The authors also float the idea that large females are so sexually attractive, that males act as if they “assume” large, high quality females will be mated multiple times, and they produce less sperm so as not to “over-invest” in a competetive situation. The authors admit themselves that their data don’t support that; there isn’t a statistically significant relationship.

Reference

Kelly, C., Bussière, L., & Gwynne, D. (2010). Pairing and insemination patterns in a giant weta (Deinacrida rugosa: Orthoptera; Anostostomatidae) Journal of Ethology DOI: 10.1007/s10164-010-0211-7

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

Crustacean nociception: Origins, part 1

As I mentioned before, our new paper in PLoS ONE took a very long and winding road from idea to publication.

As an undergraduate, I helped my supervisor, Jennifer Mather, prepare a talk, “Ethical treatment of invertebrates: how do we define an animal?” Jennifer wanted to speak on this partly because Canadian Council of Animal Care guidelines had listed experiments with invertebrates at the same ethical level of concern as vertebrate tissue. Interestingly, that’s where most invertebrates remain to this day (see Appendix XV-B), although there are increased concerns for “cephalopods and some other higher invertebrates.”

I helped Jennifer make some slides for her presentation. I drew some cartoons on them for fun; things like a clam saying, “Where did the expression ‘Happy as a clam’ come from?” The talk was given at an Animal Behavior Society symposium (first conference I went to!). Her talk was ultimately published. ^* So I started thinking about invertebrates, their nervous systems, and what that implied for their care, early in my academic career.

In 2001, Ed Kravitz wrote an article for the International Society for Neuroethology newsletter. He described the experience of being interviewed on TV as part of a story about the ongoing question of whether boiling lobsters is inhumane.

In response to the question of whether lobsters feel pain, I said that we didn’t know.

Emphasis added. Of course, because Ed is a scientist, he went on to give a longer, more thorough answer.

I added that since pain is a perception we often don't know whether people feel pain either, unless we ask them, and that pain thresholds vary greatly among individuals. I mentioned that pain is a higher cortical function in humans and that there is no structure resembling a cortex in the lobster brain. In response to questions about the many minutes of suffering and struggling by lobsters to get out of pots of boiling water, I mentioned that neurons in the lobster brain cease to function at temperatures above 27° Celsius (about 80° Fahrenheit) and that in boiling water the brain would quickly reach that temperature. I felt it highly unlikely, therefore, that the banging around in the pot was struggling to escape and instead suspected that heat-induced contractions of the massive tail and limb musculature of already brain-dead animals was the cause. In case people were still worried about the suffering issue, however, I mentioned that after cooling an animal on ice to anesthetize it, the brain of a lobster could be immediately destroyed with a scissors cut between the eyes.

Ed’s answer was correct, but it still bugged me. It bugged me we didn’t have an answer backed by good evidence, just extrapolations and guesses (albeit educated geusses). People had studied crustacean nervous systems intensively for decades. You can find beautiful pictures of lobster brains by Gustaf Retzius from the nineteenth century. It seemed to me that whether crustaceans had nociception (about as close as we’re going to get to “pain” scientifically for invertebrates in the near future) was an empirical question that should have a reasonably straightforward, factual answer.

To be continued...

^* And that’s one of those moments where you go, “Wow, has it really been more than 20 years?”

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

File under, "We didn't listen to the warnings."

Last night, I was thinking about the fragility of a world economy made dependent on high-efficiency travel.

Watching the news? No, I was watching Doctor Who. And not the new series with Matt Smith, no. I was watching some old school Who: “The Seeds of Death.”

That’s right: back in 1969, writer Brian Hayles was worried about the risks of globalization and how easily interdependent economies can be disrupted if travel stops. It’s a teleportation system called “T-mat” in the show rather than good ol’ airplanes, but still. And the parallels don’t stop there.

A major part of the plot concerns the abandonment of rockets... and now we’re looking at the last space shuttle flight with no replacement on the near horizon.

The cause of our current woes? Eyjafjallajökull, a volcano in Iceland. (And seriously, you cannot tell me the name of that volcano sounds like the name of a Doctor Who baddie. You just can’t.) The cause of the woes in “The Seeds of Death”? Ice Warriors!

Crustacean nociception: Introducing my co-author

Continuing on the “extras” with our new paper in PLoS ONE this week on crustacean nociception, allow me to introduce the paper’s first author...

Sakshi was the perfect person for this project. She is a double major in biology and philosophy. She was part of a team that competed in the national Ethics Bowl competition this year and finished in the top half. That’s fantastic mix for a project that has such obvious ethical implications.

We had started working on crustacean nociception from a completely different angle and approach. Sakshi pushed for us to take a different approach, which – though not straightforward (okay, often incredibly puzzling and frustrating) – was ultimately the right way to go.

Proof positive that it’s not always the boss who comes up with the good ideas.

Indeed, one of the reasons I’m happy about it was how little I did. Sakshi owned this project. And is she a post-doc? No. Grad student? No. Undergrad researcher and proud of it. (Gloat: This is the second paper this year I’ve had with an undergraduate co-author; this is the first. Also open access.)

Another advantage of having a co-author? I don’t drink, but Sakshi does. So this was the first publication I ever got to pop open a bottle of champagne when we got the acceptance email.

But the best reason to have a co-author? The full contact hugs when you can get when you tell ‘em the paper’s accepted. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Additional: This is how the paper showed up in my RSS feed this morning. Sakshi as the author, and me as “et al.” Further evidence of my dispensability on this project.

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244

Crustacean nociception: The embargo lifts

There are some things I don’t blog about, even though I blog a lot.

One of those things is that I don’t say anything about is my ongoing research. Journals are notoriously twitchy about work being presented in other forums besides their own pages before publication. I don’t want to give the game away on projects before they are completed, accepted, and out there for people to see.

And this time, the paper was embargoed until now. Which, even though I know intellectually is something that happens to every paper in the journal, still felt a little bit sexy.

Today, my co-author, Sakshi Puri, and I have a new paper out in PLoS One that has had a very long fuse. It’s related to a problem that I’ve addressed multiple times on this blog (see links at bottom): the “lobster in the pot” problem, or, “Do crustaceans feel pain?”

“Do crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH?” is open access, like all PLoS ONE papers, so it’s free for all to read.

I’m going to be blogging about this paper over the next week or so, because I think there’s some interesting backstory that doesn’t fit into the technical paper. Think of the paper as the movie, and these posts as the bonus features on the DVD.

I also think there’s something to be said for follow-through. Fortunately, that something was largely said by Randy Olson.

But even having said that, if you ever catch me in person – at a conference, say – I can tell you some stories about this paper’s trek to publication that I won’t be telling you here on the blog.

Related posts

Fighting the forces of ignorance - 15 May 2003
Ignorance may not be bliss, but perhaps it is painless - 15 February 2005
Shell shock: Is the new way to dispatch a lobster a better way? - 26 November 2009

Reference

Puri S, Faulkes Z. 2010. Do decapod crustaceans have nociceptors for extreme pH? PLoS ONE 5(4): e10244. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010244