Category: Research

The Fishy Business of Brexit

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fishing-boat-1281272_960_720Before you start to feel bad for the fishermen (fisherpeople?) on the Thames, here are some facts:

1) Quotas are important. If we fish all the fish, there are no more fish. The fishing industry has been utterly unable to regulate itself. EU quotas have led to the glacially slow recovery of managed stocks, because the quotas are higher than scientists advise. We need lower quotas combined with no-take zones, otherwise there will be no industry at all. Furthermore, UK quotas are divided among UK fishermen by the UK government so if one individual boat loses out it’s not necessarily the EU’s fault.

2) Three large companies own 61% of all fishing quotas. This isn’t about Michael Gove’s father alone on a tiny boat in a stormy sea. This is an industry monopolised by millionaires who are fighting regulation, just like all other industries. Viewed in that light it is completely unsurprising that “Big Fish” has joined Farage, alongside his banker allies.

3) Fishing rights to certain waters are set based on historic use. The fisheries industry does not want that to change because British boats are in loads of places that definitely aren’t British.

I know emotive stories about these poor Scots in their woolly jumpers and orange hats are relatable, but (as always) it is more complicated than that. It is completely understandable that they are unhappy: the history of their industry has generated a lot of jobs that simply cannot be supported through sustainable fisheries. It seems that the fishermen think Brexit would lead to higher quotas. Someday quotas might increase, but only if ecosystem-based management leads to increases in stocks that can support higher quotas, and that is the point of the EU Common Fisheries Policy.

Making my research more open using Kudos

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I’ve always tried to make sure that my academic work wasn’t tucked away on a dusty shelf (or paywalled in an obscure academic journal, which is the equivalent in the digital age) and that has meant that my digital footprint is huge. I have accounts on ResearchGate, Twitter, Slideshare, LinkedIn, Figshare, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, Flickr, and Google+ (as well as probably a few more that I’ve forgotten!). I don’t think I have lost anything by “scattering my wild oats” across a huge swathe of the internet, because I assume that it increases visibility. Indeed I get a few views across all platforms:

However, what I have been looking for is a service that allows me to aggregate all this content. Ideally it would have (i) a single page per publication, where I could bring together all the bits of information relating to that paper (data, preprints, press coverage, and a lay summary), and (ii) a personal profile page that brings all of those publication pages together under my profile. Well, I think I’ve found it!Read More »

How to write a scientific paper

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writing-427527_1280When we teach students how to write papers, we take it for granted that they have already absorbed the basic format of a scientific article from their reading of the primary literature. They should be familiar with abstract-intro-methods-results-discussion-references, for example, and the content that goes into each section in order to lead the reader through the work. However, it is easy to see how students might fail to grasp the general structure of a scientific paper. For example, we often hold up the high impact journals as models of scientific research, but journals such as Nature, Science, Current Biology and PNAS have a structure and a style that is really quite different from other journals (referenced abstracts, methods at the end, extremely brief structure). I have been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students how to write scientific papers and theses for a few years now, and I thought I would share my personal method (I think I can credit Phill Watts, now at the University of Oulu, for suggesting this to me years ago):

I hope it’s useful and please do let me know if it helps, either in the comments here or on the YouTube page. The video is released under Creative Commons.

Pedagogy and a Pint

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bar-406884_1280Academics have many draws on their time: research (grant applications, writing papers, speaking at conferences), teaching (planning lectures and workshops, delivering teaching, marking), and administration (committees on all of the above and more – admissions, marketing, student education, research, outreach). Most of that is just keeping things afloat, and so we sometimes lack the time to develop new ideas and discuss interesting and novel ways of working. Over the past couple of years I have been the “Academic Champion for Blended Learning” in the Faculty of Biological Sciences at the University of Leeds, and that has meant that I have spent a fair amount of time horizon scanning for teaching technology and working with early adopters. However, trying to roll-out big initiatives (like our brilliant new lecture capture system) can be hard because staff have limited time to engage. Recently, I tried something new to give colleagues an opportunity to talk about teaching: “Pedagogy and a Pint”.

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Ecology and Evolution PhD Opportunities at the University of Leeds

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I’m delighted to announce a suite of additional PhD projects in the School of Biology at the University of Leeds (scheme details are here).  These are in addition to the dozen or so competitively-funded projects through our NERC DTP, so please do check there as well if you are interested.  Most titles are indicative of the broad research area, but there will usually be a great deal of flexibility in the nature of the project depending on the interests of the student.  The deadline for all projects is Thursday 29th January 2015, and applicants will need to have submitted a research degree application form (see our “How to apply” page) and be in receipt of a student ID number prior to application for the scheme. Briefly, the titles are:

  • The Evolution of Plant Form
  • Marine microbial processes and interactions
  • Improving piglet survival and subsequent performance
  • Managing soil plant processes to enhance the sustainable intensification of agriculture
  • Emerging Infectious Diseases
  • Continental trends in, and drivers of, the spread of European aquatic invasive species
  • Biomimicry, biophilia, and urban design solutions
  • Identifying and investigating factors which improve sow performance in Irish pig herds

See the project summaries below for more details.Read More »

Do dragonflies give birth to live young?

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Heliocypha perforataSomething strange seems to be happening in one particular species of damselfly, the common blue jewel Rhinocypha perforata (pictured right). Or at least it has been caught on video for the first time… Aside from being a particularly attractive species of damselfly found in China, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and Vietnam, the common blue jewel seems to adopt a rather unusual form of reproduction (for an insect, at least). Read More »

How big is a damselfly, and why?

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Calopteryx_maculata_mating_(crop)Background: Body size is among the most important characteristics of animals and plants. Larger animals are capable of buffering against their environment (think big polar bear vs tiny chihuahua in the snow!) so that they can survive in a wider range of locations, are capable of eating a wider range of prey, and consume more prey than smaller animals leading to a stronger impact on ecosystems. However, we are still trying to understand the factors that influence body size, both ecologically and evolutionarily.

What I did: A number of previous studies have compared body size in particular animals across different locations to see whether or not there are consistent patterns in that variability. I wanted to collect specimens of a single species (the ebony jewelwing damselfly, Calopteryx maculata) for analysis from across its entire range in North America, but the range is so large (Florida to Ontario, and New York to Nebraska) that I wouldn’t have been able to travel to sufficient sites within the one season that I have available.  Instead, I asked a lot of local dragonfly enthusiasts to catch and send me specimens from their local sites. I am extremely grateful to all of them for helping, as this could not have been done without their kind volunteering of time and energy.  I ended up with a substantial dataset of animals from 49 sites across the range.  I showed that there was a general increase in size further north, but that this was not a simple increase. Instead, there was a U-shaped relationship between latitude and size with larger animals in the south and the north with an intermediate size in the middle. When I looked at the drivers of this trend, it appeared that warm temperatures resulted in higher body sizes in the south. In the north, the animals use shortening days as a signal to accelerate their development and so in the most northern regions animals were developing very quickly despite the cold.

Importance: Large scale (across the whole of an animal’s range) measurements of body size are essential to provide an ecologically relevant test of explanations for changing body size. These findings support previous laboratory work which suggested a twinned role for temperature and photoperiod in driving development in damselflies.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Time stress and temperature explain continental variation in damselfly body size”, was published in the journal Ecography in 2013. You can find this paper at the publisher’s website or for free at Figshare.

Image credit: Kevin Payravi, http://bit.ly/1q7B2Ph, CC BY-SA 3.0

More toxic frogs live longer, but more venomous snakes do not

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frog-284044_1280Background: It is thought that all animals age: they show an increased probability of death at greater ages. However, the lifespans of many animals vary widely. What is it that determines whether or not an animal lives for one year or one hundred years? One of the key drivers is thought to be how likely you are to be killed by something else. Those animals that that are unlikely to be eaten, whether that is because they are very large (elephants), well armoured (tortoises) or poisonous (poison dart frogs), tend to evolve lower rates of ageing. After all, if you are going to live for a long time anyway, you might as well make the most of it. On the other hand, if you live precariously from day to day then there isn’t much point in investing later in life because you probably won’t get that far.

What we did: We compared lifespans of amphibians and snakes that either had a chemical defense (in amphibians) or venom (in snakes) with those that did not have those traits. We showed that (accounting for their evolutionary history) poisonous amphibians had a significantly longer lifespan than non-poisonous amphibians, but there was no difference in venomous and non-venomous snakes.

Importance: This study has two major implications. The first is that it is vital to incorporate evolutionary history into these sorts of analyses. We had built our study on the findings of an earlier piece of work (which did not account for evolutionary history) that suggested that the snakes also showed a longer lifespan when they were venomous, but our results refute that earlier finding. Second, our findings offer yet more evidence for an offensive role for the origins of snake venom, which has been suggested in other recent studies.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Species with a chemical defense, but not chemical offense, live longer”, was published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology in 2013. You can find this paper at the publisher or for free at Figshare.

Image credit: Ephraimstochter, http://bit.ly/1xHxpks, Public Domain.

One simple way to increase visibility of your scientific publications

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Background: As well as publishing in ecology and evolutionary biology, I am also interested in how that publishing industry works. There is a clear need to disseminate information as widely as possible in order to accelerate the rate of testing of new theories and discovery of new information. However, some publishing models (and some publishing companies) hide scientific research away so that most people do not have access to that work. Self-archiving is a way for researchers to make available certain forms of their research without breaking copyright (which is almost always handed over to the publishers).

What I did: I reviewed some of the literature on the benefits of self-archiving, in terms of the access to the general public and what has become known as the “open access advantage”: papers that are more openly available are cited more. I also show that over half of all ecology and evolution papers could have been archived in a format that was almost identical to their final, finished format without breaking copyright. I then highlight key methods that researchers can use to self-archive their work: publishing through institutional repositories, third party websites, or self-creation of online portfolios using online tools.

Importance: Self-archiving has the potential to open up research (often funded by taxpayers) to a far wider audience, and this is an important step towards making research more accessible to the general public.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled ““Going green”: self-archiving as a means for dissemination of research output in ecology and evolution”, was published in the journal Ideas in Ecology and Evolution in 2013. You can find this paper for free at the publisher.

The psychology of animal camouflage

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DisruptiveColourationBackground: There are a number of ways in which animals and plants attempt to defend themselves from predators. Sometimes they look or sound like something that they are not, such as another animal or plant that is venomous, in a process known as “mimicry”. Other times, rather than attempting to deceive a predator after being seen, the animal or plant might try to hide altogether. This second defensive strategy, known as “camouflage”, can take a number of forms. One of the most interesting forms of camouflage is “disruptive colouration” which involves breaking up the edge of an animal to make it harder to detect.

What we did: Rich Webster is a PhD student at Carleton University who applied a novel approach to the question of how disruptive colouration helps to hide animals. He used eye-tracking technology with humans as predators searching for digital moths on pictures of trees. With this approach he was able to see where people were looking and how long it really took them to find the “moth”. Importantly, he could also tell how many times they looked at the moth without actually seeing it. We were able to show that the length of time taken to find a target and the number of times that the target was missed were both significantly higher when the moth had a larger number of patches on the edge of its wings.

Importance: Mottled colouration has been observed in many species, but until now we have not had a clear description of the mechanism by which this form of defensive colouration acts. Our results provide that first insight into how and why predators sometimes fail to find prey which are camouflaged in this way.

This is part of a series of short lay summaries that describe the technical publications I have authored.  This paper, entitled “Disruptive camouflage impairs object recognition”, was published in the journal Biology Letters in 2013. You can find this paper at the publisher or archived at Figshare.

Image credit: All images are by Rich Webster, and used with permission.