Green Drakes (Ephemera guttulata) flying upstream and resting in the trees.

The ‘sip’ and ‘slap’ of rising fish had disappeared and you could be forgiven for thinking the rushing water had stagnated, for it too could not be heard. Flowing upstream, a din of emerald mayflies fluttered en masse above the water. Standing chest high in the creek, I was assailed by papery wings, crawled over as a resting place. We mustered metaphors, ‘a plague of beautiful locusts!’, catching bodies in our mouths as they opened to shout ‘Awesome!’.

The train quietened. I was sorry that it was over so soon. Until an even louder juggernaut came by, thousands of Green Drakes strong. As they pushed on forward at head height, the bodies of those just-mated floated limply back around my hips. A life-cycle diagram on a too-white page had never seemed so ridiculous. Hands in the water, I collected and inspected: yellow, large bodies – females; whiter, smaller bodies – males. Fish started to feast and with them began the whistle of a fly rod pendulum, but it was all a nothing to me, as I stared at the river of corpses.

The water grew colder, the night blacker and the great green flies were replaced by their black, biting rivermates. It was time to leave. Now, I’m haunted by questions: Why weren’t there bats and birds swarming?; What’s the chance of any one individual mating?; Is it not a law of diminishing returns – the group gets so large that, while an adult escapes predation, its also unlikely to mate?; Why do they drive upstream?…

Once paralyzed in wonder, the mind whirs faster.

A Green Drake female (top) mating with a male (bottom) with the possible addition of some larval gunk on top! (Macro-capabilities courtesy of Jim Marden's camera).

Yesterday’s forecast predicted all-day rain, and so when Jessi suggested waiting until after work to go tarping it seemed like a good idea.  Then, in the early afternoon, the rain stopped.  I started to panic.  I calmed myself down enough to check the radar map and it looked like the rain would return right around 5:30-6:00.  Perfect.

Monica, Jessi, Ike and I headed over to the hill by the stadium, and set up the tarp.  6:00 came, no rain.  6:15, the blue peaked out from behind the clouds, uh oh.  6:25, we looked at the weather map on our phones; the clouds seemed to be parting around us.  Then at 6:30, we heard thunder.  Finally, a positive sign, sort of.  A bolt of lightning — count the seconds, if it’s too close, we’ll have to leave — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… boom.  More than a mile, we’re alright.  Then another bolt — 1, 2, 3, 4, crack…  Uh oh, it’s getting closer, maybe we should go — but the rain was finally starting — a couple slides, then we’ll make a decision…  And I haven’t heard a crack of thunder since.  Good rain, good hill, good company.  Perfect tarping conditions.

Needless to say, fun was had by all.

Matt blogs….

Over the kitchen table tonight, I mentioned my TedMed talk had not even 4,000 views. Disappointing in the scheme of things, but still about 3,500 more people than I ever taught before.

My youngest son, just coming up to 16 years old, and lippy as hell, mentions he has a video with 22,000 views. And, as of today, he has.

I am trying to save the world from drug resistant parasites. He is trying to save the world from rare creatures. Evidently his problem, or his solution, is way more interesting.

Yesterday I went to a seminar on the health effects of air pollution. While it is common knowledge that living in a big city isn´t good for your health, I was amazed how much effect breathing in polluted air really has. These effects are not limited to respiratory distress, but are even more apparent by increased risk of cardiovascular disease and even affect brain development, not to mention they take 6 months of your life. Considering we traded in our lovely little house in the forest with an apartment along one of the busiest streets of Barcelona, these facts are rather frightening.

Then I learned there are some interesting individual and population group dilemma´s here. Of course, the best thing to reduce air pollution is to commute by bike. However, as an individual, biking increases your exposure to air pollution greatly. Even the environmentally friendly bus riders expose themselves to higher air pollution than the average car driver because of worse cabin filters in buses. So, this leaves me two options, either I start a revolution to ban cars altogether in the city (there´s really no need anyway) or I should opt for a car as well.

However, since I don´t think I have what it takes to start a revolution and the benefits of owning the car would be nulled by a long walk from scored parking space to work (breathing in all my carefully avoided air pollution), I´ll just go Dutch and grab my bike. Cause luckily, I was also told that the health benefits of biking counterbalance my breathing in of air pollution by a factor of 90. Still, a move to a house away from the city does not seem like a bad idea after all.

When I was a graduate student I spent 6 weeks visiting another lab trying and failing to get an assay to work.  Needless to say I was discouraged. A kind post-doc
wrote across my notebook, “Science is hard. If it was easy everyone would do it”.

Strawberry=1200 individual life histories of mosquitoes, Turtle=Lauren this week

At the moment, I appear to have bitten off more than I can chew.  Nothing is doing what I would expect it to.  Usually this is a good thing because it means I’m about to learn something new.  In this case however, nothing is replicating. Andrew made a joke about not coming back until things were replicating at the end of our last meeting (at least I’m hoping that it was a joke..).

I have several days of intensive data analysis ahead of me to try to figure it all out. I’m not excited, but I have been pleased this week to discover that I’ve grown up a little bit. I know I will figure this out.  I will sniff out the problem and yes, I may need to repeat everything, but that is what scientists do (figure it out, not design experiments that don’t replicate!). So bring on the SPSS, the cramp in my back which I inevitably get from sitting for too long at a computer, and the whiteboard sessions.  This is what I signed up for.

I was going to write about cannibalism this week, but then I remembered that my friend Kristin has already written an excellent blog post about cannibalism and kuru. Which leaves me with only two things to add.

The first is that the Science paper she mentions is a great teaching tool for an undergraduate evolutionary biology course. Particularly when teaching population genetics, which can be a tricky topic to introduce.

And the second is that I find hypothetical questions about cannibalism (e.g. if you have to eat someone, who would it be?) can be great conversation starters if introduced at the right time and in the right place.

But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, these two discussions should never intersect.

1. When I was a grad student, I wanted to grow up to be Dr Linda Partridge. After listening to The Life Scientific today, I still do. She is now Professor Dame Linda Partridge FRS.

2. EO Wilson’s new book sounds fantastic. I can’t wait to read it.

…for Silvie!

Many people enjoy the ‘Garfield’ comic strip; a comic about a lazy, sarcastic cat who loves lasagna and hates Mondays.  What’s not to like?  As Nina pointed out in a previous blog post, there aren’t that many truly new ideas left to have, but thank goodness Dan Walsh didn’t know that, or else he might not have ever asked himself, “What would ‘Garfield’ be like without Garfield?”  And with that simple question ‘Garfield-minus-Garfield’ was born.

The premise of ‘Garfield-minus-Garfield’ is straight-forward; remove Garfield and all references to him from an original ‘Garfield’ comic and see what happens.  With Garfield removed, the reader can focus more intently on Garfield’s owner Jon, who, as it turns out, is the more compelling character in the strip.  As an example, here’s the original strip.

In the above strip, the joke is that Garfield is lazy.  But when Garfield is removed, the whole perspective changes.  Instead, the strip becomes a view into Jon’s state of depression.

I’m also a big fan of another ‘Garfield’ spinoff called ‘Realfield’ (http://juannavarro.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/realfield-like-lasagna-too/).  In this comic, Garfield is replaced with a real cat.  Different, but also funny.

It has been pointed out that we should be following the journalistic exhortation to simplify, to reduce, to “kill ones darlings” when compiling our manuscripts. We must shape the message, spin the content to its best effect and grab the editor and referees attention in the first 300, 200, 100 words, in the first paragraph, in the title.

Undoubtedly this is good advice. We should be clear and concise. But it does make one wonder where such brevity, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum way, might lead.

To a recently discovered new journal dedicated to publishing via Twitter perhaps. As one might expect manuscripts submitted to JTwitBiol have to conform to the 140 character limit as do each of the referee’s and editor’s comments and decisions. As a test case a revamped biopesticide paper was duly submitted:

Fngs klls mlria. Intr: Malria bd Fngs Gd. M&M: An st, Bb, Spry, xp. Rslts:  Dth&Dstrctn P<0.001. Dsc: Prblm slvd Nbl Prz pls. Refs: Thng1, Thng2

Appropriately enough the comments from the referees came back quickly.

Rfree1: OMG IMHO ths m/s Totes Amaze. Hv no rsrvtns abt nythng, gr8 cncpt, wll dsgnd, wll wrttn, shld b pblshd.

Rfree2: AYFKMWTS? So bd I SCOON. IRL thr NFW ths wrks. Evn smpl BOTEC FUBAR. WOMT. TGIF.

Rfree3: TL;DR

The editor sealed the manuscripts fate.

Edtr: Thx 4 sbmtng wrk 2 JTwitBiol. Nftntly & dspte Ref3 mssng pnt, cnt rcncle hge dfrncs btwn rfees so mst REJECT m/s.

Absurd decision of course. Editor must be suffering fro Boanthropy. So it goes.

Even though I (like many others) often feel like I don’t know anything or have any skills, I am probably more frustrated by feeling that I don’t know anything important (i.e., at this point, relevant to my thesis). I do actually know a fair number of facts, though; I have always been apt to acquire them.

This is one reason why I always liked science classes. I loved memorizing things: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (I memorized that in sixth grade. Before “domain” was a thing.). But, even if everyone is a little crazy, not everyone is a little lyrebird, happy to chirp back new words.

I know that learning things by rote works. We chanted the cell theory together as a biology class in ninth grade, and I can still intone, “All cells come from preexisting cells.” But science has so much more than trivia to give to people who don’t want to be scientists. I worry that it’s more the way we teach science…and math, and most everything else for that matter, rather than individual variation in curiosity and voracity for understanding, which leads children to dislike school and, especially, science. Do you think that’s true?

As I said before, I need people to explain things to me. Especially as a child, I had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. I am totally into trees, but it was still really annoying to finally turn around and realize how much sense they can all make together. I guess what I’m advocating here is, instead of… tree taxonomy(?), forest ecology?

I spent this Memorial Day Weekend in Philadelphia, and besides copious amounts of wine and good company, my favorite part was visiting the Mutter Museum, operated by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. On par with the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, it contains a beautiful collection of anatomical specimens, medical oddities, and obsolete surgical instruments of the most heinous variety. One of the most impressive exhibits was the skull collection of Dr. Joseph Hyrtl, an anatomist and phrenologist from Vienna. This collection was amassed over his career and contains 139 specimens, including data such as age, gender and cause of death (here’s the whole catalog; you can even adopt one!)

I overheard a lot of comments while perusing the Hyrtl collection, most notably “why would anyone collect skulls, that is so creepy”. While I have to admit that keeping a basement full of body parts sounds more serial killer than it does pioneer scientist, the habit of collecting specimens (of all kinds) that was popularized among both career scientists and hobbyists alike in the Victorian era has greatly benefited the public today. I had the privilege to receive an educational grant in college to work as a curation assistant at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center in the Zoology department. This is a 97,000 square foot warehouse facility where all of the accessions are housed, most of them still waiting on identification and cataloging, which was my primary task during my time there. Admittedly, some of the accessions were clearly piles of junk that someone had collected that were donated after their passing, including jars of formaldehyde-preserved stomach contents from…some type of mammal? But we never, ever threw anything away; we don’t know what could possibly be useful later on, down to the smallest bone fragments. It was interesting to identify, fix and catalog everything from dragonfly specimens from eminent entomologists, to trophies donated by Teddy Roosevelt, to a collection of 5,000 mammal skins and skulls preserved by a hobbyist.

Every once in a while, curation enters the back of my mind as a possible job prospect, despite the fact that funding and opportunities are even more scarce than those in research science. Despite curation being more or less an attempt at organizing what we already know, the preservation and care of the past is invaluable to the future of the field of science in general.

We are frequently captivated by the accumulation of large numbers of individuals of a single (or multiple) species. Mass gatherings can be triggered by seasonal migrations, such as those exhibited by monarch butterflies, red crabs of Christmas Island in Southeast Asia or of dragonfly species that have been suggested to fly the utterly absurd distance from southern India to eastern Africa, managing a pit stop in the Maldive Islands. Other sources of impressive animal aggregations are a result of reproductive or intellectual coordination. The eruption of cicadas from their sleepy below-ground dwellings and the gathering of ruffians interested in the ecology and evolutionary biology of disease this past week, serve as two local examples of the mentioned phenomena.

Tightly packed individuals whether in swarms, herds or schools capture our imagination in a way that is absent when rarity, instead of abundance is the default condition, especially with regard to “uncharismatic” animals such as insects (entomologists feel free to argue away).  Generally, we also tend to pay less attention to animals that we observe frequently on a day-to-day basis. Aggregations of these animals often force us to pay greater attention to them.

Which leads me to squirrel migrations.

I recently learned that squirrel migrations (better described as sporadic mass movements, as they appear to have no discernible spatial or temporal pattern) have been a documented phenomenon, being described by early naturalists mostly during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. There are accounts of gray squirrels moving in great numbers through open grasslands, 4-5 miles from any forest, and even awkwardly swimming sometimes to fatal exhaustion in the Hudson, Ohio and Niagara rivers. Numbers were sufficient enough during these events that a single hunter was recognized of killing 160 animals in one day. Calculations based on historical accounts put the number of squirrels at 30,000 in a square mile. Why were they on the move? The dominant explanation seems to be one centered on over-population. Regardless, I’ll be looking at the furry critters on campus with less of a perfunctory gaze.

I saw a preview for a new movie coming out, which seems to take place in a future where the ultra-privileged who live in space while the desperately poor fight for scraps on the Earth below. I’m a sucker for sci-fi, but the part that grabbed my attention was a scene in which a young woman from the privileged set enters a device not unlike a tanning bed to get a health check-up. The tanning bed informs her that she has trace amounts of cancer cells and then–in less time than it takes to start up a computer–that it has eliminated all of the offending cells. The woman then exits the tanning bed to do whatever the space-elite do to fill the time when they’re not actively oppressing the poor.

A tanning bed that prevents cancer?

It would be great to eliminate the cancer cells while leaving the surrounding tissue intact, but the part of the technology I really want to see is the detection device. For starters, no magic bullet can be effective if we don’t know that we need to use it. But also all therapies that act against living things are a double-edged sword, meaning that they select for the traits we fear most (cells that are more drug-resistant, more aggressively cancerous) even as they reduce the chances for our targets to replicate and mutate into their nightmarish-counterparts.

I’m skeptical of the tanning bed though. Unless treatment is truly free of side-effects, I don’t see how any strategy can be effective if we don’t understand how big the problem is and how fast it is spreading. In other words, the cancer detector should require at least two time points of data to make a good estimate of risk and determine the optimal degree of treatment. Intervention is costly both in monetary terms and in the potential for collateral damage, and those costs must be weighed against the risks associated with doing nothing.

I believe that to be better at your job, that is to be a more efficient worker and to continue to love what your doing while your doing it, you need to build in some time to decompress and unplug from the daily stressors of our jobs.  I feel this is especially true for scientists in academia with flex schedules, which contrary to popular belief does not mean we can take as many vacations as we want when we want, but instead means we tend to work all of the time.  I often try to build in time off to do something I enjoy outside of work after a series of deadlines have been met or after a particularly busy point in work.  It serves as a reward for accomplishing said tasks and allows the brain to recover for the time when I return to work.  So, to practice what I preach, I am off to our Northern neighbor Canada for a long weekend to visit friends and to frankly, not think about work, as much as I love it.  Happy Memorial weekend!

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the week when we have our “stress” lab meeting, I have one of my most stressed out days ever. I think it must be, because — according to my response to Lauren’s post — the stress lab meeting didn’t itself stress me out. Rather, it’s probably the inordinate number of deadlines facing me as well as ridiculous obstacles to actually meeting them. I won’t bore you with the details, because my perceived busyness isn’t the point.

Is that my esophagus in your hand? May I have it back please?

I think an interesting follow up to the question of “what stresses you out?” is “what does your stress feel like?”. For me, it feels like someone has grabbed my esophagus and is twisting it with two hands in opposite directions. It’s a horrible sort of I can’t breathe / I might vomit combo feeling. Blech. Not pleasant.

My approaches for dealing with this esophagus-squashing stress have included:

1. ujjayi breathing…a relic from my more active yoga days. I have had limited success with this today.

2. ice cream…a relic from (I don’t know) childhood (?). This was delicious and did temporarily relieve some stress, but the effects wore off once I had scraped the last bit out of the bowl.

3. giving one of my best buddies a giant hug after not seeing her for 7 months. I haven’t actually done this one yet, since her train has yet to arrive. And, naturally, her train is late (but I’m trying to not let that stress me out!). I have a good feeling about this approach though.

If anyone has any other stress-relieving suggestions, I’d be up for hearing them because today’s most promising approach is, sadly, a bit hard to engineer.