Aiming low

In science, almost everyone is obsessed with what the “best” journals are and how to get their papers in those journals. I argue that sometimes, there are good reasons to publish in journals that are not seen as the “best” journals.

If there is a journal that you like, that has a mission you support, sometimes you should submit papers there even if you think it might be publishable in a “better” journal.

It might be an established journal. Maybe this is a journal that has just had a change of editors, is trying to make positive change to the journal.

It might be a journal published by a society that you belong to and support. For some scientific societies, the journal is one of their main sources of income. If you think that society is doing a good job, and you like the conferences they hold, and the scholarships they provide to students, maybe you should support it by submitting good stuff to their journal.

It might be a new journal. Starting a new journal has to be a scary experience for the editor, publisher, everyone involved. You hope that you are going to be able to fill blank pages, attract an audience, and make the journal a success. But someone has to blink first. Without researchers willing to take chances on new journals, we wouldn’t have journals that are shaking up the scientific publishing landscape like PLOS ONE or PeerJ.

I’ve seen advice that researchers, particularly early career scientists, should never publish in a new journal. While I understand this on some level, it’s a disappointingly conservative, small-minded strategy. This puts the onus on senior researchers, tenured researchers, to be bold and submit to journals for reasons besides, “What has the highest Impact Factor?”

Journals can improve themselves by internal reforms (improving review, updating production processes, etc.), but much still depends on the papers that are submitted to them. For a journal to improve, some people have to take a chance and aim low.

Related posts

What have you done lately that needed tenure?
Saying “Yes!” (sometimes)

Photo by zampano!!! on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments for first half of January, 2012

The Soapbox Science blog at Nature looks at science marketing hits for 2012. I want to add crowdfunding to that list.

The #OverlyHonestMethods hashtag game spills out from Twitter...

A hard to find article is a great example of why DOI is such an important thing to happen to academic publishing. This is why you should retroactively give DOIs to old articles, publishers! Yeah, I’m looking at you, The Journal of Experimental Biology!

Tuesday Crustie: Anubias house

Spot the crustacean!

There’s an ostracod on this aquarium bloom. Find it? Here, let me help:

Photos by eclectic echoes on Flickr (here, here); used under a Creative Commons license.

Promoting Peter David’s stuff

Fellow comics fans will probably know that Peter David, self-proclaimed “writer of stuff” recently had a stroke. While on Christmas vacation at a Disney park, no less. The good news is that he is recovering, but he still has a long way to go. His wife has two posts up (here, here) about how you can help him, mostly by buying his books, especially those from Crazy 8 Press.

For those of you who are not comics fans, let me introduce you to Peter David, and tell you why you should buy his stuff. Not just because he’s had a medical emergency, but because he’s a damn fine storyteller.

First thing you should know about Peter is that he is prolific. He works in comics, books (lots of movie novelizations and media tie-ins), columns (“But I Digress...”, being reprinted on his blog), screenplays for movies and television (including a couple of Babylon 5 episodes), and probably more I don’t know about. In other words, he has stuff for you even if you’re not a comics fan.

Second, David’s work is often laugh-out loud funny, irreverent, and with a healthy dose of pop culture references. For instance, here’s a mash-up of Doctor Who and Billy Joel he wrote (the words are a bit hard to make out in the video; the lyrics are here):


But there is always, always, a serious and emotional core in his stories. Sometimes, David has complained people pay more attention to the laughs than the serious stuff. But I’m convinced he wouldn’t have the audience and writing gigs that he does if he just wrote gags.

I first got to know Peter David’s work in The Incredible Hulk. Now, everyone knows the Hulk: green, dumb, and the strongest one there is. So imagine my surprise when I saw the character reborn as grey, smart, no longer the strongest there was (Ben Grimm finally beat him one on one... momentarily), and working as a Las Vegas bouncer named Joe Fixit.

I loved it because the whole dynamic of the book flipped. Bruce Banner had always been the one the one whose life was getting messed up by the Hulk. Now, the Hulk had a life that Banner could screw up.

I loved this story arc. Since then, I have followed Peter David’s work with interest, He’s one of those people that, when I learn he has a new project out, I at least check it out.

The green Hulk eventually returned, he did so an an unexpected way. Playing with the idea that Banner had a multiple personality, David played with a story arc of the struggle between Banner, the grey Hulk, and the green Hulk... all co-existing in Banner’s head, so to speak. This battle culminated in The Incredible Hulk #377, one of my favourite single issues, where the three personalities were joined into the new Hulk: green, but smart, but incredibly unstable.

David often explores the science of psychology through his comic characters. He used the Hulk to examine multiple personality disorder; Strong Guy in X-Factor, chronic pain; Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man, the nature of souls and decision making.

I’ve since loved his take on creating an all-new X-Factor, some of his Star Trek novels (particularly Vendetta; Vastator of Borg... what a great idea to make something that had been a joke into a scary threat), Spider-Man 2099 (a character he revisited in Spider Man: Edge of Time video game, which he wrote) and more recently, Fallen Angel. I’m behind on the work he’s done lately with X-Factor and other comics and books... I must get caught up!

I’ve done a little bit to help support Peter by buying Pulling Up Stakes, Part 2. (I’d already bought Part 1.) It’s a vampire novel that is very conscious of the traditions of the “vampire slayer” and Twilight genres, and stands both on their head.

I was able to meet Peter David at Con-Version, an SF convention in Calgary, a long time ago, and tell him a little about how much I appreciated his work. I’m pleased to do so again publicly, and hope that maybe one or two of you find as much enjoyment in his writing as I did.

Get well soon, Peter. I want to read more of your stuff.

External links

Here is how you can help Peter
How to Help Peter version 1.0 and some housekeeping notes

Public talk at World Birding Center next week!

Next Saturday, 19 January 2013, at 10 am, I will be giving a talk for the general public at the South Padre Island World Birding Center. The title of the talk is:

Things You Find on the Beach:
A new species for South Padre Island

I’m fairly excited, because it’s always fun to talk about finding a species that has never been seen in a place before. I will also talk a tiny little bit about my #SciFund expedition back in November. Here’s a teaser of the species that never been recorded on the island before:

This talk is part of a larger Winter Seminar Series presented by the Center for Subtropical Students and the World Birding Center. Here’s the complete list of talks.

• 19 January 2013: “Things You Find on the Beach: A new species for South Padre Island,” by Zen Faulkes
• 2 February 2013: “Birding and Bird Study in the Yucatan,” by Tim Brush
• 9 February 2013: “Sustainable Water Use in a Changing World,” by Frank Dirrigl
• 2 March 2013: “The Unique Chemistry of the Laguna Madre,” by Tom Whelan
• 9 March 2012: “Seagrasses, Lifeblood of the Laguna Madre,” by Hudson DeYoe

Here’s a map to help you get to the World Birding Center:


View Larger Map

The Zen of Presentations, Part 58: “Can you hear me?”

“Can you hear me in the back?”

If you’re asking because you want to know if you need to use the microphone, forget about the audience’s response. Use the microphone, even if the audience says they can hear you.

I heard this query at the SICB meeting earlier this week. This conference held in a hotel, as many conferences are. There are many rooms packed snugly next to each other. The walls are often not so much “walls” as temporary, movable room dividers. The sound isolation is not good.

There are people in the room on the left. There are people in the room on the right. There are people outside. And the people outside may be opening and closing the door as they hop from session to session. And it can get particularly noisy when people leave the room while you’re trying to field a question from the audience.

The combination of thin walls and a busy environment means that the noise level in the room can fluctuate wildly over the course of just a few minutes. If you ask, “Can you hear me in the back?” and people say “Yes” right now, that doesn’t mean they’ll answer “Yes” a few minutes from now. It’s easier to pick up a microphone, or position yourself to use one, at the start rather than trying to remember to switch to it halfway through, or at the end of your presentation.

That you are even asking the question means that you recognize, at some level, that this is a borderline environment for making yourself heard. So just use the mic already.

Photo by ganatronic on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Science Online (if you’re in the lobby): SICB 2013 and the Internet

The SICB conference this year was probably a good example of how ambivalent scientific societies are to the online world.

First, the only place you could get wi-fi was in the hotel lobby. It was not a long way to the lobby from some rooms, but live-tweeting was difficult. I could have used my phone to tweet, but it’s much easier with a tablet or laptop and a wi-fi connection.

The issue, I learned, is that the hotel does not provide wi-fi to it conference rooms. It is a separate company. While other conference services can be negotiated with the hotel, who has the carrot of many guests filling their rooms, this one cannot. And the wi-fi provider cares not one whit how many people come to the hotel.

If I remember right, it would have cost $35,000 to provide wi-fi connections throughout all the rooms for about half the attendees. This underestimates the scale, however, because it assumes each attendee has only one connection. A phone and a tablet connected through wi-fi is two connections.

Apparently, SICB is considering raising the registration fees to subsidize wi-fi connections if members are willing to foot the bill for the connections.

More good news was that this was the first conference I have ever been to that had a dedicated app for phones and tablets and such. This was, for a society that has been reluctant to embrace the online world, surprisingly progressive. Members were extremely interested in the app.

More bad news came in the actual usability of the app. There were many good ideas, but they were often poorly executed.

Among the issues...

The sorting of the events was made it almost impossible to find events. After “1” came - not 2 - but 11, 12, 13... then 100, 101, 101... and then 2. This is strict alphabetical order as a computer understands it, but was hell for people.

Although the apps required you to log in, if you had it on two devices, the accounts did not sync. If you added an event on your phone, it would not later show up on your tablet.

Updates from the conference organizers sent through the app went to a region called “Archived” rather than “Inbox”. There was no clear signal on the home page when there was a new message.

Maps of the hotel never showed up on the Android phone version of the app I was using.

I could not search for events on my phone (again, Android) in the “Discover” tab.

Some of the critical details for event listings, like time and room, were set in tiny light grey letters, which was not the easiest thing to read. I could accept this for the summary, but not the main listing with the abstract.

Short talk titles had the advantage of their listings being set in much bigger point size. Long titles were rescaled so more of the words would fit on one line.

And there was the irony of having an app that made extensive use of Internet at a conference where wi-fi was not provided in any of the conference rooms,

All of this made sense when I learned that SICB attendees were more or less being used as beta testers for the app.

Other observations:

• On the plus side, many people joined the society’s Facebook page in the few days before the conference.
• On the negative side, the society's Twitter account has been used exactly once: to send a tweet saying “test.”
• On the negative side, those people who were tweeting from the conference couldn’t agree on a hashtag. I was using #sicb13, but many (possibly most) were using #sicb, but I also saw #sicb2013. A strong official recommendation from the society’s Twitter feed would have helped.

I am hoping for much better things when the conference returns to Texas next year.

SICB 2013, day 5: crayfish!

(Crossposted from Marmorkrebs blog)

I spent my last day at SICB in the session I was speaking in... crayfish!

The special session at SICB may well have been one of the busiest days for Marmorkrebs news and announcements in a long while. There were at least three major pieces of new information about this remarkable crustacean.

Polyploidy

Peer Martin provided evidence that Marmorkrebs are polyploid. This is an important step forward in understanding the original of asexual reproduction in this species. This strongly suggests that this may have been a "one off" chance event, either through some sort of incomplete separation of chromosomes or duplication of chromosomes, or hybridization.

Crayfish plague

As part of Peer Martin's talk, he discussed whether Marmorkrebs are "the perfect invader" as they were so memorably called. He included a discussion about the importance of crayfish plague as an issue in the invasive potential for Marmorkrebs. In the questions, I asked whether anyone had actually tested whether Marmorkrebs carry the plague, or whether it was simply assumed they were resistance, because essentially all North American species are. There is apparently one doctoral thesis that reports a Marmorkrebs carrying crayfish plague. That said, many in the lab, and one wild-caught animal, have tested for the disease.

More introductions of Marmorkrebs in the wild

Chris Chucholl reported that there are now six confirmed populations in Europe, five of which are in Germany. During my talk, I reported the “breaking news bulletin” that I'd blogged while waiting in line at Starbuck’s for a croissant that Marmorkrebs had been found in Sweden. Tadashi Kawai mentioned that a population had been found in Sapporo, but that it apparently died out.

Other highlights

Marmorkrebs was not the only only game in town in this session, however.

Tonio Garza de YTa discussed his experiences over a decade in working with farmers to develop sustainable, productive, profitable aquaculture for red-clawed crayfish in Mexico. The lessons he had were to develop the market first. There is no point in producing food nobody will buy. Secondly, make sure your product does not give itself away. The red-clawed crayfish got away from their cultured ponds and successfully established populations, which could be harvested more cheaply than the aquacultured crayfish.

Francesca Gherhardi talked about the importance of understanding behaviour of potentially invasive species. To give just one example, she examined the interaction between temperature and fighting between different invasive crayfish species. Spinycheek crayfish (Orconectes limosus) become more less active and more likely to seek shelter as temperatures increase. Signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) become less competitive as water warms. Red swamp crayfish (Procambarus clarkii) change their aggressive behaviour very little, meaning swamp crayfish are poised to be the winners as temperatures warm under climate change.

Incidentally, my sympathy goes to Francesca, who was having quite severe voice problems. She had to whisper her whole talk. This worked to her advantage, as it gave her presentation an urgent, conspiratorial tone

Keith Crandall talked somewhat about some new research he is co-authoring on crayfish relationships, but much of his talk was geared to discussing tree of life projects, IN particular, I'm excited about opentreeoflife.org. Most taxonomic papers now are published as PDFs, which are great to look at, but hard to re-use any data in them.

The goals of the Open Tree of Life project are, in part, things near and dear to much of the online science community. They want to encourage refinement of the tree, annotation, and promote a culture of data sharing, not simply publication. Currently, people are as consistent about putting things into Treebase or Dryad as they are into GenBank.

Oh yes, and they want to assemble a complete tree of life in three years. Keith mentioned that the National Science Foundation has been supporting various tree of life related projects for about a decade now, and are getting quite eager to see a tree. This project will make it easier to identify holes in the existing tree.

SICB 2013, day 4

On Sunday, I saw biologists making do with lab tape, sunscreen, and “Wet and wild black matte fingernail polish.” There is still a lot of room for McGyver-style low tech equipment in biology.

I spent a good chunk of Sunday morning at SICB in a session on digging and burrowing. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, as it’s been one of the topics I've published on most consistently during my career.

Sarah Sharpe had a fun talk on how sandfish lizards bury themselves. Their lab had built a robot that could successfully mimic the lizard’s ability to travel through sand, but failed miserably at getting into sand in the first place. Through a series of simple experiments, Sarah showed that the sandfish lizards are hopeless if they cannot use their limbs. She showed a video of a lizard trying to submerge into sand with its limbs restrained, and it was just sad.

If they have just one pair available, the lizards can get into the sand, but they are very bad at it, particularly if they have only their back legs to work with.

Dwight Springthorpe did work that was probably closest to the stuff I had done in the past, looking at ghost crab burrow construction. He showed some very cool x-ray videos of crabs with tiny little lead strips glued to them so they would be visible in the x-rays. Ghost crabs definitely have a preferred side that they dig with, using their walking legs to hook and pull sand towards them. He also showed that crabs are much faster to burrow when they are burrowing horizontally rather than vertically.

Kelly Dorgan had my favourite quote of the day, during her talk on digging by polychete worms: “I did what I often do when worms don’t cooperate, which is turn to theory.” Haven’t we all thought that at one time or another? She had a rich talk that tied how worms dig to the path of meandering rivers, among other things.

Kelly Mead Vetter did some fairly qualitative descriptions of mantis shrimp burrowing, Her work was more interesting because much of the ecological and behavioural work on stomatopods suggested the their burrows were hard to build, but she showed they were much more dynamic and changing over time.

At the end of the digging session, I was completely jealous of all the work that is being done in this field. It would be nice to get back to it, but other people are much better equipped to do much of it than I am.

After the digging was done, I focused mainly on sensory biology in the afternoon.

Trevor Rivers showed that sea creatures that fluoresce when attacked benefit from glowing. Worms that are able to glow when predators attack have about a 40% survival rate. This may sound like a losing strategy, except that if you consider that their survival drops to almost nothing when their predators can’t see them.

Nicolas Lessios, a former conference roommate, showed that Triops, sometimes marketed as a "prehistoric" crustacean, use their vision to maintain the position in the very bottom on the shallow, short-lived pools they often live in.

Michael Bok, author of the Arthropoda blog, demonstrated a neat partly trick of stomatopod crustacean eyes. Along a central band of their eyes, mantis shrimp have two visual pigments that absorb ultraviolet light. But using filters in the lenses of the eyes, the animals are able to differentiate the ultraviolet spectrum with much more precision. The only problem now is that it is not at all clear why stomatopods have these highly specialized eyes. Why do they care about ultraviolet light so much? Still unknown.

Ashlee Rowe, one of my partners-in-crime on a nociception symposium last year for Neuroethology, ended off the day, not with a bang, but with a sting.

She has been studying the relationship between grasshopper mice and their scorpion prey. The sting of the Arizona bark scorpion is nasty: strong enough to kill a human. It’s also incredibly painful, Ashlee related one description from a sting victim, who said it was like “being burned with a cigarette, then having a nail driven through it.”

The scorpion toxin is painful because it causes a sodium channel in neurons to become more likely to open, and stay open. The practical upshot is that neurons start firing action potentials, wildly out of control.

The grasshopper mice feel the pain. Young mice in particular will drop a scorpion they’re attacking if they are stung, but they never learn to stop attacking the scorpion. This suggests that the stings aren’t particularly painful or aversive. (At this point, Ashlee showed a video of a young, cute mouse getting nailed in the face repeatedly by a scorpion, prompting an audible reaction from the audience in sympathy with the mouse.)

Surprisingly, the scorpion venom works on the sodium channels of the grasshopper mice exactly the same way as it does on regular mice (which are not resistant). The grasshopper mice have evolved changes in a second, separate sodium channel that works a little differently. The scorpion venom binds to a channel that sets the threshold for a neuron, but those channels cannot start action potentials. A second sodium channel does that. And that’s the one that is mutated in grasshopper mice. As a result, the grasshopper mouse neurons don’t start the crazy, out of control spiking that the scorpion causes in other mammals.

Scorpion thrusts. Grasshopper mouse parries. A beautiful story in evolution and neuroethology.

(Oh, those items I mentioned at the start of the article? The tape was used to restrain sandfish lizard legs; the sunscreen was used to stop the eggs of brownheaded cowbirds reflecting ultraviolet light; and the nail polish was used to blindfold lobsters attacking fluorescing prey.)

Grasshopper mouse and scorpion picture from here.

Tuesday Crustie: Encasing

Damnit, where’s the version for my Android phone?

I Can Haz Cheeseburger dubbed this the most impactical iPhone case ever.

Challenge accepted. Just wait ‘til you you my giant squid iPhone case. Life sized, of course.

Spotted here.

SICB 2013, day 3

It's nice to have a fitness center in a hotel. But you have to be willing to swallow your pride and do the walk of embarrassment from your room on the 17th floor, down through the lobby, around the corner, and back down into the sub-lobby, in your workout gear. This is easier at 5:00 am, which is when I woke up. My body is still on Central time, for which I am surprisingly grateful.

Never let it be said that tweeting to promote your talk is not worth it. Because Joel McGlothlin tweeted his talk, I went and saw it. He was talking about the evolution of garter snakes that resist deadly neurotoxin, which I’ve blogged about before. The wrinkle that Joel was bringing in is to look at is what order resistance evolved in. Different tissues have different kinds of sodium channels, so changing some will give you immunity to the poison, but only at low doses. If the amphibians get the ability to make more toxin, the snake needs another change in another channel to keep up.

Next, I saw Sonke Johnsen. He summarized some work on why giant squid have giant eyes. The answer, in broad strokes, was answered with "whales" a while ago. Sonke, in collaboration with others, has developed a general model of underwater visual ecology. Most of his talk had lots of equations, but the take home was that big eyes don't gain you very much because of water attenuation. The one advantage of a big pupil is looking at large, glowing objects. Like a whale setting of a lot of luminscence.

At the end, Sonke showed a picture of squid battling a sperm whale (this one), which was a cue for people to become marine biologists. “Hard not to after seeing that.”

Jean Alupay was looking at how often octopus are willing to lose one or more of their arms through autotomy. The particular species she was studying tend to autotomize their arms very easily. Over half were missing at least one arm. The front arms tend to be lost more, but there is a sex difference with the third arm, because that's where the sex organs are in males.

She showed some good video of a very active autotomized arm. It would be easy to see how it could distract a predator.

Feifei Qian had robots running through sand. Her question was how animals locomoting over sand deal with the variety in the size of grains, rocks, and boulders. This was more a robotics / automation talk than a biology talk.

However, she showed that automation is happening everywhere. She started off running her robots across sand in tanks that were maintained by undergrads. Initially, it two students two weeks working long hours to get preliminary data (67 runs). So instead, she built a completely automated system that reset the robot, sand, and boulders after each run. Now, this recording system can do a hundred trials in one day. She said she stills needs an undergraduate student though: she needs one student to take three seconds to press the start button.

Jayne Gardiner was interested in how sharks hunt. Sharks have a whole series of sensory abilities, that detect potential prey from close to tens of meters away. Do the senses combine, or do they switch from one sensory system to another?

My favourite moment in her talk was some video she showed of a bonnethead shark, where they had blocked electroreception. This left the poor shark completely unable to eat. The bonnethead shark can’t get food if the electroreception is blocked, because that’s the trigger for opening the jaws. They’ll swim in the tank all day, and hit the prey over and over and over again, but never open their mouths.

That's got to be a shark's version of hell.

Margot Schwalbe presented on a favourite of comparative biologists, African rift lake cichlid. Like most (all?) fish, these have canals that are part of the lateral line system that detect water movement. Are widened lateral line canals adaptations for prey detection? Some niche differentiation? She has two Lake Malawai cichlids species that feed on the same prey, but one has wide canals and one has narrow canals. The species with widened canals tended to use the lateral line system more than the narrow one.

Savithi Nair took me back to octopus arms for the second time today. She was looking at the behaviour of individual suckers in the arms. You might recall that probably half the nervous system of the octopus is in the arms, but how much do all those cells communicate? Is information shared between suckers? She found that they do, and that suckers do respond differently to different chemicals. The distance matters, as the reposes drops off with distance for the stimulus.

Still with cephalopods, Julia Samson showed that cuttlefish responses to sound. That cuttlefish can hear was not new, but her question was what sounds are ecologically relevant and matter to these molluscs? What behaviours occur in response to sound?

Cuttlefish don’t have "ears" in the proper sense; they're detecting sounds through organs called statocysts. Statocysts are more orientation and gravity sensors, but they way they work allows them to detect other kinds of disturbances. This means that the sounds have to be quite loud for cuttlefish to hear them. At high sound intensities, you get inking and startle responses. At lower volumes, the animals reacted with smaller colour flashes or fin movements.

David Ernst warmed my crustacean-loving heart by talking about ghost crab burrows on a beach. He showed that ghost crabs rarely return to their burrows. Any crab burrow is most likely to be occupied by a new crab every single night. This is a little surprising given the amount of time and energy that the crab has to invest in making the burrow.

Buddhamas Kriengwatana was the last talk I saw today. She was doing some nicely designed experiments testing how food shortages during development change the brains and behaviour of zebra finches. For instance, she found that continual food shortage means longer search times in finding mood, which means worse spatial memory. Being short on food late in development only specifically affected the finches on tests intended to measure their behavioural flexibility.

I had lots of interesting talks at the poster sessions that I can't summarize in full here, but remind me later to tell you the story of cryolite.

SICB 2013, day 2: When predators attack! (And prey escape)

Ah, the first day of a conference, when the first talks in the day might actually get some people showing up.

I spent the morning in "When predators attack," which was about the behaviour and neuroethology of attacks and escapes. Given that conference panel diversity is an ongoing topic of conversation, this one stacked up... with room to improve, with 25% of the speakers being female.

The rundown:

Jerome Casas talked about using game theory to model pursuit and evasion between crickets and spiders, and also parasitic wasps. His team modeled the spider in computations to see the disturbances the spiders made, and it matched quite well. This means that there is a very specific sensory signature of a spied attack that the cricket can recognize, and it's nothing like anything you see in the biotic world.

But having done that for 15 years in the lab, he moved into the real world (Dupuy et al 2012). They moved their piston in the field, with all the leaf litter and noise, and I'd field electrophysiology. They got evidence that the crickets can detect the spider by the wind the spider makes. But they found that the cricket "listens to everything". They could pick up cars driving by and planes flying overhead in their physiological recordings from the cricket cerci.

Barber and Kawahara gave a very cool team talk about hawkmoths. They generate my most popoular tweet of the day: some hawkmoths are able to deter bats from attacking them by making noises at the bats... with their genitals. (Strictly speaking, it was the genital scales, but that little detail got lost in the tweet.)

Chuck Derby asked: Can prey "turn off" the senses of predators, maybe using chemicals (sensory inactivation)? He suggested for octopus ink or bioluminescent flashes, but said that there is not a lot of experimental evidence. He showed some nice experiments that show opaline from sea hares (Aplysia) will block sensory neurons, primarily by the physical actor covering them with sticky goo.

Anthony Leonardo and Stacey Combes gave two talks on dragonfly attacks, both emphasizing the dynamic visual strike the dragonflies make. Leonardo emphasized more the decisions to attach, while Combes looked at the differences in the hunting behaviour from species to species, and how they handle different prey items. Turns out that while big prey have a lot more energy, they are much herder to catch.

In between the dragonfly talks, Paolo Domenici discussed variation in escape responses. Traditionally, escape responses have been viewed as stereotyped, almost reflexive behaviours, but Domenici argued (mainly using fish examples) that variation is crucial to escapes. He also showed many fast behaviours that are almost indistinguishable from escape that make distinguishing the escape responses from other behaviours tricky.

Roy Holzman is interested in what makes a good predator, and what makes a successful strike. Many models don't take into account something like suction, where a predator can capture a prey without even touching it.

Sheila Patek (one of my science crushes) asked: what does it mean to be fast? We normally think of this as pure speed, but colloquially and in science, it's more complex. She also asked us to question our assumptions about what speed "means" in a predator-prey interaction. Patek noted that the typical hypothesis is that predators and prey species are locked in an arms race to be the fastest animals. Her preliminary data from many species showed, however, that predators that are chasing after evading prey are not the fastest animals out there.

Sheila had one of the most honest moments of the session, when she described how she had this hypothesis that mantis shrimp that spear actively swimming prey should be faster than mantis shrimp that smash unmoving prey. "I tortured my grad student Maya for six years, because I did not believe her results. So this talk is in honor of grad students being tortured by PIs." Her hypothesis was wrong. The smashers are faster (comparatively; deVries et al. 2012 JEB), even though the basic mechanics are the same.

Malcolm MacIver is looking at the similarities and differences in zebra fish and electrician in how they use vision and electroreception, respectively. Larval zebra fish have a very limited range, and you also have differences based on the morphology. Zebra fish hunt in front of them, and can switch laterally very quickly, so their prey are close and near the head. Knifefish can go backward, so their prey can be in a much wider range of space.

I also learned that the cloaca (a sort of all-in-one excretory opening) of knifefish has moved way forward compared to other animals, and sits almost under the head of the fish. This is probably related to the lengthening of the anal fin the fish use to swim.

Bill Stewart was also looking at fish, but this time, how fish detect predators. Water flow is important. An intact lateral line in larva zebrafish means it is eight times more likely to escape an attack than a fish with an ablated lateral line. This also means that they can escape in the dark, using the bow wave from the predator as a directional cue to escape.

Eve Robinson talked about predators that don't move. Sea anemones are benthic predators, but that they are relatively immobile means that their hunts, and the ability of their prey to escape, is heavily affect by local water flows. Flow increases encounter rates, but this doesn't necessarily translate into changes in capture rates. Copepod prey, for instance, land on tentacles less often under low water flow, but they stay on the tentacles for a much longer time.

Speaking of copepods, Thomas Kiørboe used copepods to make the point that all animals are both predators and prey. This can make it dangerous to eat (for a copepod!).

Copepods have three feeding strategies: ambush, crushing, and creating a feeding current. These three mechanisms are not equally efficient, and each has different predation risks due to fluid disturbance. Hovering is highly efficient, but is risky and has high energy costs.

I enjoyed this session tremendously. The one problem, though, was that it made me insanely jealous. I want to be able to use all the wonderful toys they had, so I can answer a bunch of lingering questions about escape responses in decapod crustaceans! (See my review in Brain, Behavior, and Evolution on these issues.)

SICB 2013, Day 1

Given my woes traveling in 2012, I've been nervous making the trip to San Francisco. My first scare was that my flight to Houston was overbooked, and I was wondering, "Am I getting bumped off the plane?" The second scare came when the plane from Houston stopped on the runway, and the Captain informed us that they was a computer problem that was requiring them to restart the computers on the plane. Fortunately, both were resolved without incident, and I was on my way to San Francisco.

I also took my own advice to talk to someone I spotted with a poster tube. As a result, was rewarded with a nice chat with someone from Texas A&M Galveston. He will be showing a poster on the biomechanics of sea lion feeding that he did at Vancouver, near my old stomping grounds.

At the hotel, I discovered that there is free wi-fi in the lobby... but not in the conference rooms. Or my room. While there was grumbling about the unsuitability of this on Twitter, in one way, this is kind of brilliant. It forces a lot of people to be in one central location, and this creates more opportunities for meeting up with people you know, or want to know. It enhances personal networking, even though there is a cost in online networking.

At the plenary session, it was mentioned that this was the largest SICB meeting EVAH. No actual attendance numbers were given, though.

Rich Satterlie gave the plenary talk, which was great for me, as he did invertebrate neuroethology. The introduction mentioned he was criticized for him leading SICB in a very public stand against Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal over teaching of evolution, and refusing to hold SICB in Louisiana (applause). "Some things were said about him that were not true; others that were not possible."

When RIch started, he said, "You might want to move to the side. One reasons is to see the slides, the other is that when I get excited, I start to salivate." That was about the funniest Rich got. I loved the work he presented, but I think I've seen him give better presentations.

After the plenary was a nice opening social, with a layout of resolution-breaking deserts. They were positively deadly for anyone with anything like a sweet tooth. San Francisco, what is it with you and your delicious cupcakes?

I had a good talk with Justin Scioli (https://twitter.com/justinscioli/status/287077446057095169). You should follow him on Twitter and pester him about when he's going to start his blog.

Talks start in earnest on day 2, with an embarrassment of riches. I think I will be spending most of the day in predator/prey interaction talks.

Scientific success with or without citations

Would you work on a project that you expected would not be cited for years?

I've had a couple of main lines of research for a good chunk of my career. I've published a fair amount on digging and sand crabs. In the last few years, a lot of my attention has been focused on Marmorkrebs (with nociception and other projects thrown in for good measure).

I've started to notice the difference in these two lines of work. The sand crab kinds stuff gets cited very slowly. The Marmorkrebs stuff is getting its first citations within a year or two.

Since I'm doing both, I don't think that one set of papers is that much higher in quality than the other. I approach both the way, and write them the same way, and they end up in more or less the same kinds of journals.

The difference is in community. There's an active little community of Marmorkrebs researchers (who I'll be meeting at SICB this week), but there isn't a cohesive community of sand crab or digging researchers.

Is the lesson here that: If you want to be a successful scientist, maybe you should do what everyone else is doing?

Maybe a little. A recent article over at the College Guide blog asked if it was worth putting out papers that are not cited. Certainly part of why I do research is because I want it to be useful to other people.

There are many measures of success, however. The external validation of having other people cite your research is wonderful, but you also have to have some belief in the intrinsic value of your own work.

Sand crabs are an obscure little group of animals. Always have been, and, despite my efforts, probably will stay so. But that is one of the things that makes me happy to work on them. I know that I am learning something new. I feel more like I'm pushing back the boundaries of ignorance with those projects.

I'm personally happy that I have a mix of projects. I think that it can be tempting to favour one or the other too strongly. Spend too much time chasing citations, and you do end up simply one of the pack, anonymous. Be too convinced that all knowledge is valuable, even in the face of evidence that nobody cares, and you end up as an oblivious loner.

Building or beast?

There are different schools of thought about giving a species its scientific name, and what that scientific name should reflect. Personally, I like scientific names that refer to some feature of the organisms. But many species are named in honor of a person. But particularly for older species, it can be hard to track down who that person was.

I was working on a presentation about sand crabs, and one of the sand crabs in the Gulf of Mexico is Lepidopa websteri. I went looking for the original description (Benedict, 1903), and found a terse, single line:

Named for the collector, Prof. H. E. Webster.

I thought having only initials instead of first and second names might make this person tricky to find, but it was easier than I expected. A little searching on Google Scholar found the name “Prof. H. E. Webster” was most often associated with Union College. When I added the name of the university into the mix, I was surprised to learn that this gentleman, Harrison Edwin Webster, was prominent enough to rate a New York Times obituary.

Having the full name led me to information about his work at the university. Wayne Somers, editor of the Union College Encyclopedia, had this to say:

He was an interesting guy who’s hard to summarize, but unfortunately he wasn’t a very good president(.) He fought in the Civil War, and he was the only scientist to become a college president at Union. His specialty was sea worms.

I can just imagine how this fellow, out collecting worms on a beach, might have stumbled across this crab accidentally. The original specimen was reported on in 1879 under a different name (Lepidopa venusta), before Webster became the university president (1888). But when the species was given the name it bears now, Webster’s tenure at Union College had already come and gone. It seems funny to name a species after someone who seems to have been rather prominent in his field without mentioning some of his achievements.

The Somer quote above from a page describing Webster Hall, previously a library and now student residence.

Which would you have be your namesake? A building or an obscure species?

Reference

Benedict JE. 1903. Revision of the Crustacea of the genus Lepidopa. Proceedings of the United States National Museum 26: 889-895.

Webster House photo from here.

Seeking Republican scientists

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature argues that American scientists are at risk of making themselves politically ineffective, because so many of them support the Democratic party.

Sarewitz is right that science has generally been supported by both U.S. parties.But Sarewitz misses the repeated attacks and / or gross errors on well-established science, notably:

• Biological evolution;
• Climate science, and;
• Female reproductive biology.

His claim that these are attacked because they are blurring into “social science,” and the Republican party is been hostile to that specifically is not convincing. There’s little doubt that with regard to the two areas of biology that the repeated attacks are due to religious conservatism.

It's hard to sit at a table for productive discussion with a party that contains members who assert your career is “lies from the pit of Hell.” Who wants that kind of grief?

Are there any evolutionary biologists who are active in the Republican party? And my follow-up is: how much armour do you have to wear when you go to a party meeting?

P.S.—And before anyone leaves a list of incorrect science supported by Democrats, I will point out that one person’s error does not justify or excuse anyone else’s error.

External links

Science must be seen to bridge the political divide

Changing rewards: who first?

A fairly popular theme among scientists in academia is to change what scientists are rewarded for. One of the most recent was by Gary Marcus.

Restructure the incentives in science. For many reasons, science has become a race for the swift, but not necessarily the careful. Grants, tenure, and publishing all depend on flashy, surprising results. It is difficult to publish a study that merely replicates a predecessor, and it’s difficult to get tenure (or grants, or a first faculty jobs) without publications in elite journals. ... Instead of, for example, rewarding scientists largely for the number of papers they publish—which credits quick, sloppy results that might not be reliable—we might reward scientists to a greater degree for producing solid, trustworthy research that other people are able to successfully replicate and then extend.

Another new paper makes similar points, specifically targeting journal metrics.

Thus, granting of research funds, awarding of academic rank and tenure, and determination of salaries (including bonus payments) have become tied to manipulable journal metrics rather than the significance or quality of reported research. Therefore, it is no wonder that the integrity of science is more often being questioned. How should a young investigator approach the “publish or perish” dilemma? Performing sound research and preparing optimal materials for publication must remain the overriding goals(.)

These proposals are frustrating. It’s hard enough to convince tenured scientists of the need for change. Most of them have had some level of success under the current system, which is how they got to be tenured. But even if you could get scientists on board, it's not just up to us, unfortunately.

Administrators will be even harder to persuade. Many of them have never been scientists. I think many are more interested in playing the game rather than changing the game. At my own institution, I've watched our administration rush headlong into creating exactly the sort of reward structure that Marcus is talking about here.

I wonder what department, university, would be the one to publicly declare that their changing their reward structure. And how many institutions would have to do so to start to change the balance.

Tuesday Crustie: Year’s best

This image was one of Olympus’s BioScapes contest:

But this fearsome claw doesn’t do justice to the whole animal:

This is a crustacean called Phronima. It’s a voracious predator that has often be compared to H.R. Giger’s design for the original monster in Alien.

Bottom photo from here.

Comments for second half of December, 2012

Reaction Norm examines the phone interview process for academic jobs, and, in another post, addresses the common question of how a candidate is expected to “fit” in a department (wherin I cameo).

2012: waiting and DIY

The first word that came to my mind when thinking of my publishing this year was "waiting."

I didn't publish as much science this year as last. But that's as expected. 2011 may have been my annus mirabilis, with six papers. This year, just two: one journal article and one book chapter. I haven't even seen the book chapter myself in the flesh yet - but it's been shipped, so I'm willing to believe it exists. I'll have a post about the long genesis of the book chapter once I have the printed copy in my hands.

Almost every attempt to publish this year was an exercise in patience. The typesetting of the published manuscript happened at a crawl. Another manuscript that I mentioned in the same post is still on an editor's desk, where it seems to have been for almost a year and a half since I first submitted it. One person asked my why I haven't contacted the editor about it, and my rationale is that time they spend reading an email from me is time that they're not spending getting papers published. Another manuscript went through a much longer review process than I expected. I am hoping that those papers will see the light of day sometime this year.

And it wasn't just the manuscripts, but new projects. I had a couple of very promising little projects that just need a few last pieces of information before I can write them up and send them out the door. But these are also taking longer to get completed than I was hoping.

But as I thought about it a bit more, I remembered that this was also a year where I dabbled with a couple of self-published experiments. I published a paper here on my blog – not a first, but still unusual enough that the story behind it was my most read post of the year. I also self-published my Presentation Tips ebook in a Kindle version, which has earned me a cool $13 in profit.

Getting a proper research article published through the usual routes feels like a greater accomplishment, just because you have had to go through more barriers. The ease of self-publishing stands in stark contrast, and makes that route look very appealing. It's only been a few months since those self-published projects came out, though. This year may help determine whether I actually made a ripple with those experiments.

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