Southern Fried Science

Shark MOOC: There’s a big shark party, and you’re invited!

February 26, 2016February 26, 2016 Guest Writer

William E Bemis is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell and lead faculty member for the edX MOOC Sharks! Global Biodiversity, Biology, and Conservation. He studied at Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Chicago before serving 20 years as Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2005 to 2013, he served as Kingsbury Director of Shoals Marine Laboratory at Cornell. Bemis conducts research in comparative vertebrate anatomy, trains research students, and teaches courses in vertebrate anatomy and evolution.

How do you get thousands of people interested in basic biological concepts? By teaching a course on some of the most fascinating animals on Earth – sharks and their relatives.
This is a particularly exciting time to be a shark scientist. An explosion of new research methods and technologies are leading to a surprising world of discovery. Our new course, free and open to anyone in the world, explores discoveries in many areas, including:

Pushing back against technological puritanism in ocean conservation.

February 22, 2016February 22, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Conservation

By now, you’ve almost certainly seen this photograph, making the viral rounds, of a Franciscana dolphin in South America, attached to headlines like the following: Endangered baby dolphin dies after swimmers pass it around for selfies, A Baby Dolphin Died Because Tourists Wanted Selfies With Her, A selfie mob in Argentina may have killed a dolphin.

seflie

I hate these news stories, but not for the reasons you might think.

These stories represent a kind of technological puritanism in ocean outreach, where we draw weirdly unfounded conclusions about the way humans relate to their tools to somehow absolve us of social responsibility. It’s not people mistreating a dolphin, it’s a selfie-crazed mob. We chuckle and move on, because we don’t take aggressive selfies. We’re better than that.

This is not correct.

New book by Doc Gruber raises money for shark research

February 16, 2016February 16, 2016 David Shiffman

Blogging

After a week of teasers, the Bimini Biological Field Station (“Shark Lab”) has finally unveiled the secret of #SharkDocSharkLab. It’s a book written by Sonny “Doc” Gruber, the founder of Shark Lab (and the first President of the American Elasmobranch Society, and an overall legendary figure in the world of shark research)! “Shark Doc, Shark Lab” … Read More “New book by Doc Gruber raises money for shark research” »

Six ways the new Old Spice ad violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act

February 15, 2016February 16, 2016 Andrew Thaler 9 Comments

Education

This is art. Maybe. Probably. Old Spice has taken it upon themselves to ask the all-important question: How many different violations of the Marine Mammal Protection act can we demonstrate in a single minute and fifteen second commercial? As it turns out, quite a few.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hteeecX1oQ

The Marine Mammal Protection Act expressly forbids the “taking” of marine mammals, a “take” being defined as:

“To harass, hunt, capture, collect, or kill, or attempt to harass, hunt, capture, collect, or kill any marine mammal. This includes, without limitation, any of the following:

the collection of dead animals, or parts thereof

the restraint or detention of a marine mammal, no matter how temporary

tagging a marine mammal

the negligent or intentional operation of an aircraft or vessel

the doing of any other negligent or intentional act which results in disturbing or molesting a marine mammal

feeding or attempting to feed a marine mammal in the wild.”

Source.

Broadly, this include any actions that may interfere with a marine mammal’s behavior or cause it undue stress. Fines can be… severe.

Fun Science FRIEDay – The Universe Sings a Song, and Humans Can Finally Listen

February 12, 2016February 12, 2016 Kersey Sturdivant

Science

(Photo Credit: Underwood & Underwood / Corbis / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic)

The interwebs have been going crazy the past few days with the recent announcement that scientists have for the first time detected gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. In terms of scientific advancement, to quote Joe Biden, “This is a big fucking deal!” Bigger than the discovery of the subatomic Higgs boson particle (i.e., the god particle), and it has been suggested this discovery is comparable only to “Galileo taking up the telescope and looking at the planets.” – Penn State physics theorist Abhay Ashtekar

Photo credit: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory

How I prepare a peer review

February 11, 2016February 10, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Academic life

Over the last couple of months the question of how to write a peer review came up quite a few times, and a couple of my colleagues even asked me directly to help them prepare for their first peer reviews. Preparing solid, critical peer review is an essential component of being a good citizen in the scientific community. I generally do about two for every paper I submit. I thought it might be helpful to provide a brief overview of how I personally prepare a peer review, primarily for marine science and conservation journals geared towards population genetic studies. I’d like to think that this advice is broadly applicable to any scientific peer review.

Step 1. Read the paper. It might seem silly to start with this but a lot of people dive into their peer reviews before they’ve even read the submitted paper in its entirety. You start thinking about how you’ll review it as soon as you get a request from the editor with the title and authors. When you get a paper to review, you immediately start reading it with a critical eye. Think about when you read a paper for pleasure or because you are interested in the content. You’re generally not looking for the fine details or nitpicking word choice, you’re looking for the ideas in the paper. You’re trying to understand what the paper is about and you’re trying to understand what the authors concluded with paper. So before you even begin with your peer review just read the paper as if it were any of a dozen other scientific papers that slide across your desk every week..

Step 2. Write down what you think the paper is about. Do this in broad terms, not so much focused on the methodology but rather the ideas behind the methodology, the motivation for the study, the questions the authors want to answer. Use this as a framework to hang the rest of your review on because you’re not just looking for technical precision but to make sure that the study itself is relevant to the broader themes of the paper.

Ocean Kickstarter of the Month: Whale Science Double Feature

February 10, 2016 Andrew Thaler

Science

Comprehensive Conservation of Southern Resident Killer Whales in the Modern Ocean

Southern Resident Killer Whales are endangered; only 85 remain. In today’s modern ocean they face many threats simultaneously. A holistic approach to addressing the cumulative impacts of all threats is needed. However, data are sparse, making it difficult to identify which threat(s) is causing the most harm. We are developing a new, comprehensive way to assess threats by having experts fill data gaps. With your help, we can pinpoint which protective actions will help Southern Residents recover.

Whale snot and blubber: Tools used to better understand basic physiology in free ranging cetaceans

Baseline indices for steroid hormone levels in humpback whales do not exist, and current monitoring techniques are invasive. Hormones can advise in management, and help in understanding climate change related population shifts. We want to test if whale snot is reliable in collecting sufficient data without disturbing them. By analyzing hormone levels in both blubber and snot, we can establish hormone level baselines from blubber, and see whether less invasive snot-collecting is just as telling.

We haven’t featured Experiment yet in this Ocean Kickstarter series. Experiment is a crowdfunding platform exclusively for scientific research. It helps practicing scientists connect with a community funding base. Because of its narrow focus, Experiment is a little bit different. There are no rewards, instead you get access to updates about the project as it progresses. There is an elevated focus on budget, and, because it’s more akin to a philanthropic donation, rather than an investment, there is often fund-matching from NGOs and larger foundations.

Since last month’s recommendation won’t launch for another 25 years, this month I’ve picked two excellent projects to support.

What is it about mercury? Thinking about chemicals in the public discourse

February 9, 2016February 9, 2016 Bluegrass Blue Crab 1 Comment

Education, Science

All of the revelations about the lead in the water system of Flint, Michigan have made residents and curious neighbors alike wonder ‘haven’t we solved the lead problem’? There are thousands of well-established scientific studies; the sources and even many of the solutions are well-understood and frequently implemented. Not to say the problem’s gone, but we’ve wrapped are heads around it. So how is it possible that a new lead problem has surprisingly reared its ugly head? And more importantly, what does that mean for exposure to chemicals for which we’ve barely scratched the scientific surface?

The world of fisheries has its analog – mercury. We’ve all heard the recommendations for pregnant women and small children to avoid tilefish, swordfish, mackerel, and shark. We understand that it bioaccumulates in the food chain – and that as humans not exactly at the bottom, we’re susceptible. The dynamics of methylmercury (the poison variety) and elemental mercury are fairly well mapped out and we can identify areas of potential hazard where more methylmercury is likely to be naturally created. We’ve also stopped doing things like spraying mercury-based pesticides and covering our landscape and foodscape with the toxin. Kids have even stopped playing with ‘quicksilver’, it’s been removed from dental fillings and vaccines, and you should get rid of that mercury-based thermometer. Yet, if you scanned most people’s hair (the way we measure these things), there would be mercury present. And there’s still a host of ways they might have been exposed. But the better question is – if there’s still mercury in your body, what else is floating around in your system? And why do we focus on only the best-understood pathway of chemical exposure?

Modern Mercury Exposures

Playing against the slaughter rule

February 8, 2016August 11, 2016 Andrew Thaler 1 Comment

Blogging

My middle school baseball team was bad. Really bad. Ball droppingly, bat throwingly, pitch ditchingly bad. It was a good inning if four of our batters made it to the plate. A great inning if the other team didn’t rotate through it’s entire line-up, twice. Our MVP was the kid who caught a ball. And if you think this is going to be one of those articles about how one tough player (me?) turned a bunch of scrappy underdogs into winners, it is not. I played right field, and not particularly well. We lost, often.

In peewee sports, at least in the US, there’s something called a “slaughter rule”. The slaughter rule ends the game if a team is losing by more than a certain number of points. In our case, it took something like a 20 run difference to trigger a slaughter. The slaughter rule exists so that outmatched teams don’t have to slog through 7 innings of a brutal losing streak, racking up demoralizing 112 to zero defeats. Once, we got slaughtered in the first inning.

Were it not for the slaughter rule, I would probably still be out somewhere in right field, wondering if maybe I should sign up for the Latin team next year.

Fun Science FRIEDay – Bionic Eye

February 5, 2016February 9, 2016 Kersey Sturdivant

Science, Uncategorized

Every year modern medicine brings more and more surprises. It really does seem that the limitations of man’s achievements are solely limited to our creative ability to dream what is possible. This week we bring you the bionic eye. As part of an ongoing trial at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital surgeons implanted a micro electric chip into a patients eye restoring part of her sight.