Science – Page 30 – Southern Fried Science

Collecting organisms to save their species

April 21, 2014April 21, 2014 Guest Writer 3 Comments

Dr.Prosanta Chakrabarty is an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University and an ichthyologist and evolutionary biologist. He is also Curator of Fishes at LSU’s Museum of Natural Science. You can learn more about him from his website www.prosanta.net and follow him on Twitter @LSU_FISH.

A recent piece in Science (Minteer et al. 2014) titled “Avoiding (Re)extinction” advocated avoiding collecting specimens for the sake of confirming the existence of a species. In lieu of killing and collecting the animal the authors suggest using “high-resolution photography, audio recording, and nonlethal sampling.” As a natural history curator of fishes I found this to be a pretty bad idea.

My PhD students (Bill Ludt and Caleb McMahan) in Costa Rica collecting specimens for their thesis projects. These guys better not just come back with pictures.

I don’t like killing animals, I was a strict vegetarian for 10 years (now I just eat sustainable seafood – hey, I live in Louisiana). I certainly wouldn’t want to endanger a species by over collecting it. I know of no scientific collectors who kill rare animals just so he or she can say they have it in their collections. We collect for a few simple reasons: because specimens are not available otherwise via loan, or additional specimens are needed for a comparative study, or because we need vouchers as evidence of the existence of the taxon.

I’ve collected rare species in the past, particularly some of the cavefishes I work on. For one of these species, Typhleotris mararybe, we collected the only two specimens we or anyone ever saw. We were in a very remote part of Madagascar and we were only allowed to collect two specimens from any given locality. I knew these individuals were part of a species new to science as soon as I looked at them. Did removing two samples place this species at risk of extinction? Guessing the population was much larger than what we found just at the surface, I would suppose not. What were we to do? Not collect them and just take pictures? We wouldn’t have been able to do the necessary comparative descriptive analysis to actually prove their novelty required by the ICZN (International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature). We collected these specimens so that we could formally describe this new and fantastic new species so that the world can be aware of their existence and so that measures can be put in place to conserve them and study them further.

Distracted by abstracts: Tips for writing a good abstract for a scientific conference

April 7, 2014September 2, 2014 Chris Parsons 4 Comments

Blogging, Science

Dr. Chris Parsons has been involved in whale and dolphin research for over two decades and has been involved in research projects in every continent except Antarctica. Dr. Parsons is an Associate Professor at George Mason University as well as the undergraduate coordinator for their environmental science program. He’s a member of the scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), has been involved in organizing the International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC) (the world’s largest academic marine conservation conference) and is currently the Conference Chair and a Governor of the Society for Conservation Biology. In addition, Dr. Parsons has published over 100 scientific papers and book chapters and has written a textbook on marine mammal biology & conservation.

I have just read and reviewed through close to 100 scientific abstracts for a conference, and my main conclusion is that ” ‘abstract’ – this does not mean what you think it means!”

An abstract is supposed to be a concise summary of your entire paper or study. Basically a written version of the 30 second “elevator pitch”. In these days of information overload there is so much emphasis on publishing, and so many journals willing to accommodate, the number of articles in scientific fields has increased rapidly. As a result, academics are increasingly reading no further than the abstract, and often only reading the title. To test this I looked at some of my papers where the website they were hosted by kindly provided statistics on abstract page views and actual download rates. The download rates were approximately only 10% that of the abstract views across the papers (and I am naively hopeful that at least some of a downloaded paper will be read). The figures were similar for other articles, so it wasn’t just my papers. So 90% of people who see your work probably won’t go beyond your abstract. This makes it vitally important that all the information you want to convey about your work is in the abstract.

However, in a frighteningly high proportion of abstracts the key results and conclusions of studies are not even mentioned. One of the abstracts I read in this latest batch noted that the methods, results and the conclusions of the study “would be discussed”. As an abstract this is useless. Too frequently place holder abstracts are submitted to conferences, with the assumption that results will magically appear before the meeting. But if you don’t manage to get that analysis done, you’ll be giving a presentation that will be lacking, will embarrassing you and damage your career. Moreover, a lot more people will see your abstract than will actually get to your presentation, so professional opinions may be made on you by the quality of your abstract rather than the final presentation. Plus abstract books are physical entities, whether electronic or hard copy, and will be around a lot longer than your 10 minute presentation. So for your professional image and also for the sake of communicating your study it is in your interests to produce a good abstract.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions on abstract structure.

Deep sea sharks: Do they survive?

April 2, 2014 Guest Writer

Conservation, Science

Brendan Talwar is a graduate student at the Florida State University Coastal & Marine Lab studying Ecology and Evolution. Hispast experiences in diverse marine ecosystems have led to his current research interests in deep sea fisheries management. His thesis work will take place in the Gulf of Mexico and Exuma Sound while working closely with collaborators at the Cape Eleuthera Institute and The Island School, where he will use this project to teach an Applied Research course.

Imagine it is a crisp, sunny, warm spring day and you’re out on the flats hoping a trout rips your topwater minnow to pieces. Out of a deep pocket fringed by oyster bars, a fish erupts from the mirrored surface and engulfs your bait. You win the fight, measure and bag the yellow-mouthed speckled trout, and repeat.

An hour later, you snag an undersized mackerel near the gills and reel it in for a few photos before throwing it back under the assumption that it will survive, grow, and eventually reproduce. You keep fishing and hope for the best, but find yourself wondering if it truly survived until the end of the day. What if it didn’t? Well, you didn’t mean to catch the fish. You didn’t mean for it to experience a fight-or-flight response, for its blood pH to drop, or for its lactic acid to build up. You were targeting 15” trout, and catching the mackerel was an accident. If the fish didn’t survive, then your daily catch represents a greater impact on local fish populations than the simple number you took home for supper.

How to protect yourself from Zombie Dolphins without violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act

April 1, 2014March 31, 2014 Andrew Thaler 3 Comments

Science

They rise from the deep with gnashing teeth and hissing blowholes. They stagger through the shallows, hunting for human flesh, piercing the air with their high pitched moan. They are dead but not dead. They are Zombie Dolphins.

And you can’t fight them, because they are protected.

No, harassing a shark for fun is not ethically equivalent to scientific research that helps conserve a species

March 26, 2014March 27, 2014 David Shiffman 18 Comments

Blogging, Conservation, Science

Last month, I wrote an article for Scientific American that I shouldn’t have had to write. In it, I argued that riding, poking, prodding or otherwise harassing a free-swimming large predatory animal for fun is a bad idea. I do mean “argued;” believe it or not, there are people who strongly disagree with me. In my article, I was very general and diplomatic, and I took pains to avoid naming names.

However, my article was at least partially inspired by the disrespectful, potentially dangerous, and very public behavior of one person: the editor of Shark Diver magazine, Eli Martinez. Eli recently wrote an article for Medium, in which he stated that: “Look, I have no problem with touching sharks and I do not have any problem with other people touching sharks.” He also notes that ” I just think riding sharks is disrespectful to the animals .” He has also shared the following photos (and many, many more like them) on his Facebook page, photos showing behavior he does not seem to consider disrespectful.

Help track fire restoration with this innovative Citizen Science project!

March 24, 2014March 24, 2014 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Conservation, Science

Last year, over 3,000 acres of Mount Diablo State Park were scorched by the Morgan Wildfire. The fire, likely started by target shooters, caused 75 homes to be evacuated and left the park closed to visitors for weeks. The park is now open and the massive fire scar is beginning to heal.

Nerds for Nature, URS, and the Mount Diablo Park service have teamed up to promote wildfire education and harness the enthusiasm of the park’s visitors to monitor fire recovery. Throughout the park, a series of signs will inform hikers about the Morgan Fire and direct them to a fixed bracket where they can line of their smart phone, take a picture, and tweet it to the MorganFire hashtags (#morganfire01, #morganfire02, #morganfire03, #morganfire04, depending on location). As the area recovers, those picture will be pooled to create a long-term documentation of change.

This is an incredibly innovative use of citizen scientist and I’d love to see more recovery projects adopt this model. The next time your hiking in Mount Diablo, keep an eye for the Fire Brackets. Amy and I were out there this weekend, contributing to wildfire recovery monitoring.

The science of shark control (and what it means for the Western Australia cull)

March 17, 2014 Guest Writer

Blogging, Conservation, Science

Prof Colin Simpfendorfer is the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture at James Cook University. He has more than 25 years of experience in researching sharks, and has published extensively in the scientific literature on shark biology, ecology, fisheries and conservation. He is a graduate of James Cook University where he undertook both his undergraduate and postgraduate training. After completing his PhD he worked on shark fisheries at the Western Australian Fisheries Department before moving to Florida to work at the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory. He returned to JCU in 2007 to lead the Fishing and Fisheries Research Unit, where he has helped build a research group focused on improving our understanding of sharks and how best to conserve and manage their populations.

Call it a shark cull, shark control or bather protection, for decades governments have been trying to reduce the risk of humans being killed by sharks – by killing sharks. New South Wales, Queensland, KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), Hawaii, Dunedin (New Zealand), Hong Kong, Somalia (during the US military intervention) and now Western Australia have, or had, shark control programs to reduce the risk of human-shark interactions.

Western Australia’s new program has sparked huge controversy, with many calling for the government to stop and pursue alternatives.There have been a range of claims that there is no science to support shark control. Many of these have been based on the effects of removing large predatory sharks on ocean ecosystems or that there is no evidence that shark culls reduce the risk of attack.Both of these are valid scientific considerations and need to be taken into account. However, neither addresses whether there is some scientific basis to shark control programs.

So here I would like consider whether there is a scientific basis to shark control programs. To do this I’ll look first at the theory, and then if there is evidence to support it based on analysis of data from the programs in KwaZulu-Natal and Queensland.

10 times more fish in the sea? Context matters.

March 11, 2014March 12, 2014 Andrew Thaler 3 Comments

Science

Earlier this year, a research team from Spain released a surprising new estimate of mesopelagic fish biomass that is 10 times greater than previous estimates. This new study raises the total estimated biomass of mesopelagic fish from 1 billion tons to 10 billion tons, accounting for 95% of all fish biomass. The news media ran with dozens of variations on the “plenty of fish in the sea” trope, suggesting that the global fisheries may be more abundant and reversing the doom-and-gloom message of fisheries decline.

This is not correct.

The fish in question are small, mid-water species like myctophids and cyclothones, fish that are incredibly important for ocean ecosystems, but commercially non-viable. The reason they were missed in previous studies is that these small, agile fish avoid nets; This new study uses SONAR and other acoustic tools to measure biomass. So while there is a huge, untapped fish stock in the mid-water world, it is not a commercial fishery.

Let’s put things in perspective.

Want to participate in a day of shark field research? Donate to my SciFund project!

February 12, 2014 David Shiffman

Blogging, Science

After one week, my SciFund project is more than 70% funded! Thanks to the 50 people who have donated so far! I’m making lots of progress, but I still need your help to make sure the project gets completely funded. Any donation helps, but larger donations have rewards, including getting to join me for a … Read More “Want to participate in a day of shark field research? Donate to my SciFund project!” »