Even though I’m nominally an expert in crustaceans, I’m embarrassed by how little I know about them. If I was walking down a beach and saw this little guy, I would recognize it as Emerita – which I should, since they were one of the species in my doctoral thesis! – but I would be completely oblivious to this being a new species.
I might, and I stress might, clue into to the colour. The blue patch at the front around the eyes is something that is different than in other mole crabs, but it’s still quite subtle.
Of course, I’m unlikely to spot this walking down a beach, since its name, Emerita taiwanensis, indicates where it’s from: Taiwan. They’ve been found only at two locations, and only once from one of those two.
This green crab (Carcinas maenas) can be found in the waters around Ireland. Unfortunately,it’s been distributed around the world, and is no one of the world’s worst invasive species.
However, Ireland also has its own problems with unwelcome visitors. My most recent paper looks at this.
If St. Patrick were alive today, his job should be casting out alien crayfish, not snakes.
Scientist on Fire has a two-body problem. Anyone else have advice?
The Department of Biology at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley has put out the call for two tenure-track assistant professor positions!
Applications close 23 March 2015.
If you have questions about the institution, department, and so on, you can find all my pertinent contact information on my home page.
I’ve been trying to teach my biology students about the importance of narrative in presentations. As part of their task, I’ve been using two parts of the techniques elaborated in the book Connection: Hollywood Storytelling Meets Critical Thinking (reviewed here).
Summarize your talk in a single thematic word.
Summarize your talk in a single, “And... but... therefore” sentence.
Students are finding this a much harder task than I expected. I was particularly surprised by how many of them stumbled over drilling down their talk to just one word.
It would be like someone asked to write a single word for last year’s movie Guardians of the Galaxy, and saying, “spaceships.” Or worse, “galaxies.” Sure, there are spaceships in the movie, but that isn’t the theme of the story.
“Teamwork” or “family” or “trauma” might be better.
This literal take on their topics carries through the main presentation. Over and over again, students get focused on the minutia. They spend an enormous amount of time on minor points. When presenting a singe scientific paper, a large number of students spend a lot of time on methods, up to and including which institutional board did the ethics review for the experiments.
And when I thought about my own work, I didn’t have an answer.
It’s a well known thing in psychology that when things go wrong, we blame external influences. (But when things go right, we credit ourselves.) And it’s increasingly easy to say, “I can’t have a manuscript worth sending to Nature because grants are hard to get these days, my teaching load is too heavy, the best students won’t apply to my program, we don’t have a doctoral program...” and on and on and on.
And I still don’t have an answer.
Myself, I have the ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition.
Why will you not have ambition? Why?
Have the greatest ambition possible.
You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it.
You want to make the most fantastic art of movie? Try.
If you fail, it’s not important. We need to try.
This is a baby crab, therefore young.
This is also a reconstruction of a 150 million year old fossil, therefore old. Huag and colleagues show this is the oldest baby crab in the fossil record (150 million years!). That it’s the oldest may not be as impressive when you consider that it’s only the second baby crab in the fossil record ever found. So it had a fifty-fifty chance to be oldest!
For more on this discovery, read here. I’d like to direct you to the original paper, but despite Nature Communications being an “open access journal now,” not all of its papers are open access - including this one. Sigh.
There are papers you write for your self.
There are papers you write for your colleagues.
I wrote my latest paper for civil servants.
When I describe the situation native European crayfish, the phrase I almost always use is, “horror show.” It was just so obvious to me after I went to the International Association for Astacology conference in 2010 (blogged here). Between introduced crayfish species and crayfish plague, things for native European crayfish species are bad.
Ireland has been an exception. There’s only one native species, the white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes, pictured above). And those Irish crayfish populations are in pretty good shape, relatively speaking, mainly because there aren’t any exotic invasive crayfish species in Ireland.
Ireland and Marmorkrebs – a cloning species that needs only one to start a population, and carries crayfish plague – would be a spectacularly bad combination.
I wanted to get this into a journal because documenting occurrences like this is important for policy and enforcement purposes. Ireland is ostensibly doing everything right. Importing crayfish into Ireland is already illegal. Ireland has public awareness campaigns about crayfish. And yet people are still selling Marmorkrebs publicly.
I hoped that for anyone who had some power to do something about Ireland’s crayfish, a scientific article in a peer reviewed journal might have more clout than a blog post.
After I decided that I wanted to publish this in a journal, it was not smooth sailing. Finding a home for this article was not easy, because it’s not exactly a traditional biology article.
While my article was being reviewed, I panicked again. A scientific society newsletter article scooped mine: it also reported Marmorkrebs were for sale in Ireland. I thought, “There goes my paper’s reason for uniqueness.” But there were enough differences that I thought my paper would still have something new and important to report. More importantly, a couple of sentences in the middle of a society newsletter was still not part of the mainstream literature. Because one goal was to make sure that the sale of exotic crayfish in Ireland was not overlooked, I still believed a paper was necessary.
And I found a third case of Marmorkrebs for sale in Ireland at the page proofs stage. Adding things at this late stage is always tricky, but the editor was cooperative and it went in, so the article became at least a little more substantive than what I initially submitted.
The final challenge was institutional rather than editorial or scientific. I was hoping to have this paper out at the end of 2014, but the article processing fees did not get paid in time. Sigh. Paying a bill should be routine, not be something to celebrate. But I did celebrate when it was paid, so my article wasn’t pushed back a second time.
Now that the article is out, I hope that it will make a few people aware that Ireland has a great resource in its crayfish. And maybe it will act as a slight nudge to stop non-native crayfish, like Marmorkrebs, from getting loose in Ireland’s rivers and lakes and streams.
Top crayfish picture from here.
A new paper by Kim and Christy (2015) gets ace graphic treatment in a BBC summary.
Kim TW, Christy JH. 2015. A mechanism for visual orientation may facilitate courtship in a fiddler crab. Animal Behaviour 101: 61-66.
With language like that, you’d think the author was talking about a terrorist attack, Biblical plague, or a new Twilight book.
Texas House Bill 1196 [and] Senate Bill 499... would require schools to “place the average or median grade, as applicable, immediately to the right of the student’s individual grade” on official transcripts.
I like this idea. Letter grades alone are not all that informative. I am often asked to write recommendation letters for students, and one of the things I often try to do is to give the reviewer a sense of where that student stood relative to the rest of the class. A student might have an A but be in the bottom half of the class, or might have a B but be in the top ten percent of a class.
At the least, the larger culture would be alerted to those schools and majors that have maintained standards and those that have not.
The transcript described can’t inform “the larger culture” about universities and majors. All it does is provide information about the classes one student took. An employer, review committee, parent, or even the student still has no way of knowing how one major or one university stacks up to any other.
More seriously, the “larger culture” has deep, preconceived notions about “standards.” And people will tell their own narratives that fit their preconceived ideas.
Highly selective admission leads to better candidates.
Guess what schools don’t have to admit “warm bodies?” The elite schools get plenty of top notch applicants.
Higher profile or elite schools have wealthier alumni, and more resources, so that may lead to slightly stronger portfolios, giving grads an advantage.
Top-tier schools have more resources for research support.
Under a meritocracy, the observed placement rates would imply that faculty with doctorates from the top 10 units are inherently two to six times more productive than faculty with doctorates from the third 10 units. The magnitude of these differences makes a pure meritocracy seem implausible, suggesting the influence of nonmeritocratic factors like social status.
So showing people the averages on transcripts seems unlikely to inform the “larger culture” about grade inflation in any meaningful way. And students at less prestigious institutions will continue to be shortchanged.
The only way that you can demonstrate rigor across majors and institutions is by taking a bunch of students, and giving them all the same, standardized assessments. Sound familiar? It’s an approach that is rampant in K-12. It’s also an approach that has been widely criticized for not taking into account external influences like poverty and other socioeconomic factors. Do you expect a university that enrolls lots of first generation minority students from an economically disadvantaged background to have the same outcomes as a university that mostly enrolls majority students raised by professional parents?
What do “standards” and “rigor” mean to those two populations? I’m not sure they will mean the same thing, or that they should.
That’s got to be a little simplistic. While institutions have all that data, computing it, and then putting it on transcripts is probably a trivial thing, because transcripts are still stuck in the ninetheeth century. You would have to add columns, explanations, change all the typesetting, and so on. That means every university in Texas would have to retool their transcripts from scratch.
The Molecular Ecologist has a some nifty survey results about how scientists pick which journal to publish in. Surprise! That intangible perfume of “prestige” and Impact Factor are two of the three biggest factors.
Bethany Brookshire introduces the lovely word parthenogenesis.
DrugMonkey asks readers in graduate programs about their entry requirements.
I make a cameo in an important post on scientists paying expenses out of pocket.