I’ve been brewing many many batches of beer to much great reviews from the locals, who are very supportive and many of whom are well-connected to the greater community. Things are moving forward and I’m confident in securing in the necessary capital for starting up so I am in the process of shedding off responsibilities and transitioning to life as a brewmaster. There are way too many people to thank for all the help they tried to give me and the opportunities that I have been given. Obviously Bora and the Scientific American staff and blog community are great friends and I wish them all well. There is much introspection I could give, it is no secret that I’ve struggled with science as a career choice and am quite bitter about many things that have happened to me. But I am too worn out to go into this sort of detail and most people lack the interest and patience to follow along in my story. So, for now I will just say good bye and thanks for reading what I’ve written here. I hope it was interesting and entertaining and worth your time.

* I am closing comments as I do not like long good byes, but feel free to follow my brewery at its Facebook page and twitter @MisterhultBrygg. For those who may want to stay in touch, I am active on Google Plus and my personal twitter account @kzelnio as well.

My friend and colleague Dr. Carin Bondar has a new series out for EarthTouch TV, an internet environmental and science channel on Youtube and also on their own webpage: EarthTouch.tv. They have 21 series and it looks like how Discovery Channel and Animal Planet used to be when they just aired science and nature… but I digress. The best part is that they are made for the internet. Short, interesting, entertaining and to the point with only a short commercial in the beginning. Check out the first episode of Dr. Bondar’s Wild Sex series below and use your own judgement about appropriate age. It’s filled with double entendres but nothing obscene.

I think it’s an exciting way to present science. It’s fun, entertaining and filled with natural history. I think a teen and young adult audience would really like this series and has could have potential to reach audience segments that hard to reach for more traditional science communication on TV. The trick is to push is out there, but with EarthTouch as a YouTube “TV station” the viral potential is great. Sharing among social networks is super easy, you can embed on your blog or website (like I just did) and discuss or critique it, and the energy of the Carin and length of the program is suitable for our ever-evolving short attention spans.

These characteristics are what sets Wild Sex apart from the current crop or “me-cumentaries” – where the documentaries are about the presenter and their journey and less about the topic/animal/environment/issue. While the presentation and subject matter might remain mildly offensive to some nature documentary traditionalists and parents who might feel queasy whenever sex is mentioned around their children, those aren’t really the target audiences. I, for one, am looking forward to future episodes!

Screenshot from TV4's Kalla Fakta

Over here in socialist paradise (a.k.a. Sweden), the public reads the news and watches their television in horror. An investigative journalism team at TV4 has just aired a special on Kalla Fakta (Cold Facts) catching the director of the Parken Zoo in Eskilstuna in several lies over treatment of the animals and the fate of several rare and valuable endangered species in the zoo’s custody. It’s a sad, tragic, but important documentary. Although seemingly one-sided there is no disputing the video evidence (trigger warning for those sensitive to images of dead animals) and the contradicting stories from the Director herself (who has now been suspended over her “incompetent statements”). You can watch the program subtitled in English below. It’s 22 minutes but I feel it’s worth your time.

This tragedy brings back to light, though, the role of zoos in environmental education and as centers for conservation. While the situation at Parken seems to be extreme it is by no means an isolated event. Just days before the release of the Parken details, Öland’s Djurpark – also in Sweden – was in the spotlight with reports from former employees that animals that were beaten to death by staff, starved to death or not given the necessary treatments cause they couldn’t afford veterinary care of no longer had room for the animals. Additionally, the park’s guest workers were put in cramped quarters and fed with food donated to the park by local grocers intended for feeding the animals – all the while the zoo was claiming half of their monthly post-tax paychecks of 12,000 kronor ($1800) for food and lodging. When workers expressed they want to live somewhere else they in effect treated as resigning.

Parken’s and Öland’s actions are the result of bottom-line thinking, cutting corners to save as much money as possible at the expense of the animals in their care and, in the case of Öland’s Djurpark, at the expense of their foreign guest workers. They knowingly conducted operations that were illegal in the eyes of the law and immoral in the eyes of their supporters. Not only that, but they slaughtered species who populations are so low in the wild that the IUCN classified them as endangered. The best estimates for endangered tiger populations in 2010 were 4000 individuals, while Bongo populations in Africa are estimated to be declining more than 20% over 3 generations (about 21 years); moving their IUCN listing from near threatened to the edge of vulnerable.

Nearly every country has private and public zoos or wildlife parks/sanctuaries; many have dozens, such as the United States. How many situations where the portrayal of conservation at these places is maligned with the actual practice of conservation there? Keeping wild animals for any reason is a resource-intensive business and building a conservation and educational mission on top of the animal care adds more complexity. Both for-profit and non-profit zoos and animal parks face the difficult balance of generating interest and visitors to the zoo – i.e. with new species, exhibits and attractions – with maintaining their conservation mission and the welfare of the creatures in their care. This is undeniable, especially for publicly subsidized zoos. Breaking stories about animal neglect, abuse and flagrant misuse of conservation missions destroy public trust in the idea that zoos are places where people learn about animals from all over the world and carry out important work in the conservation of biodiversity.

Or maybe zoos are an outdated idea that is untenable in our current age? What do you think?

PBS has often been a target of conservatives as wasteful spending, many of whom feel PBS can survive on its own without government subsidy, and is often viewed as liberally biased. Whether one believes that the $450 million government subsidy to PBS is justifiable or not, this subsidy is merely 0.00012% of the federal budget. Additionally, PBS receives about 15% of its total operating funds from the government subsidy, while Sesame Street is nearly entirely paid for through corporate sponsorships and merchandising deals. In short, zeroing out PBS’ budget does little to balance the books either on paper or in practice.

Losing the government subsidy will not cause PBS to disappear off the map, but it will effect the number of stations that can operate. In particular, rural areas which tend to be higher in poverty receive up to 70% of their individual station funding from state and federal subsidies. Decreasing access to public television in areas of the country with fewer educational options could be very detrimental not just to families, but to schools which rely on PBS’ educational programming as a teaching aide in the classroom. When my son was in Kindergarten in a very rural school in North Carolina, teachers often used PBS kids programing in conjunction with their lessons to keep students’ interest and offer a diversity of ways of presenting information to them. PBS content is vital because it is not commercially tied, is created in consultation with educational experts and to federal standards, and in schools where budgets hang by threads the content is freely available.

If Romney were elected and kept his promise to stop the PBS subsidy, what would the television programming landscape for children look like? In addition to morning and afternoon children’s educational programming on PBS, children’s programming exists only on cable television stations like Disney Channels, Nickelodean and Nick Jr., Hub, Cartoon Network and some morning and afternoon programming on select religious TV channels. Of all the children’s channels mentioned only Nick Jr. and Disney Jr. offer dedicated educational programming. Other stations’ programming does not even come close the educational value of these 2 stations and PBS, existing only for “entertainment” value and not education. Many of the non-educational options depict violence, glamorize slapstick behavior and contain few situations that aide in children’s cognitive development.

In an interview with Soledad O’Brien, Reading Rainbow (PBS) host Levar Burton was “outraged” and saw the threats of Romney  ”as an attack on children who come from a disenfranchised, you know, background.” Low-income families in particular spend the most time watching television. If poor families cannot afford cable television it is likely their only option for quality content is PBS programming. And let’s be real, regardless of anyone’s opinions about television and childrearing and education, children WILL be watching some amount of television each week, if not each day. It is better that content be educational or aide in cognitive development than to be merely entertaining.

In a study of a group of children in Oklahoma Geist and Gibson (2000) divided 62 children into 3 treatments: one group watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood (a long-running educational PBS program), one group watched Power Rangers (a noneducational commercial network program) and a control group did not watch a TV program but engaged with instructional materials. They measured 3 simple variables: ability to attend to a task, time engaged in the task, and engagement in “rough and tumble play”. Even acknowledging the limitations of their “convenience sample” of 62 children, authors found statistical significances among the 3 groups. The “rangers” group had more difficulty sticking to tasks and spent less time on task than the control group. Qualitatively, only the “rangers” group engaged in a rough and tumble play style with kicking and punching emulating the characters of the Power Rangers show.

Regardless or socio-economic factors, though, educational programming has shown a string of benefits to young children and their families.  Children benefit from increased school readiness skills and families that watch Sesame Street and other educational offerings on PBS tend to watch it together more often than noneducational network programming (Wright et al. 2001). Time and again, it is shown that the relationship of watching television to early school readiness skills depends primarily on the content of the programs viewed. Removing quality content is detrimental to all audiences, but hits low-income and rural demographics the hardest. A educational television landscape in a post-PBS world might only be attainable to those who can afford cable or satellite TV access, and even then at the expense of being lambasted with advertising. A candidate for president who truly values education and prioritizes the basic needs of the least fortunate Americans would not be defunding a long-running, prominent educational institution who provides a high quality, high demand service at a comparatively low cost to the government where commercial sectors fail to fill this gap affordably.

Geist, Eugene A., & Gibson, Marty (2000). The Effect of Network and Public Television Programs on Four and Five Year Olds Ability to Attend to Educational Tasks. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 27 (4), 250-261
Wright JC, Huston AC, Murphy KC, St Peters M, Piñon M, Scantlin R, & Kotler J (2001). The relations of early television viewing to school readiness and vocabulary of children from low-income families: the early window project. Child development, 72 (5), 1347-66 PMID: 11700636

Open access works in a number of ways, but the most common are the author-pays model (referred to as gold open access) and the institutional repository model (part of what is referred to as green open access). The author-pays model has several issues associated with it, namely that the author(s) must secure funds to publish their work. This is often untenable no matter what country you work in or what your funding situation may be. For the repository system to work, institutions or individuals must set up and maintain – at their own expense – servers with an online database of their staff’s research results. Both remove costs from the reader, though. To summarize how costs are distributed:

• Traditional model – Publishers recover costs through subscriptions and toll-access fees from readers. Additionally, many authors must pay page charges or color figure fees. Institutions pay for subscriptions that is limited to on-premise use only by staff.
• Author-pays model – Authors pay publishers to peer review and publish papers in print and/or online. No cost to institutions or readers. Publishers decide a break even point between costs to operate and number of fees/articles they must collect from publishing papers.
• Repository model – Institutions or individuals (i.e. self-archiving on a personal website) bear the costs of setting up publicly accessible databases of staff’s research results. But, these articles are previously peer-reviewed and published following either of the above models. There are no costs to readers. Theoretically, publishers may lose money if readers choose the free article in the repository over the toll-access fee direct from their website should readers not have subscriptions or institutional access.

Clearly this is oversimplified, but I wish to illustrate the challenges facing researchers in countries – or institutions for that matter – which lack a substantial research funding infrastructure. Under the traditional model, researchers with little funding must seek out journals who offer free or low page charges for peer review and publishing – regardless of the importance, novelty or potential level of interest in their work. Lack to publishing funds also prevents them from even considering author-pays models, with the exception of the very few publishers that offer conditional fee waivers.

But publishing is only half of the research battle. The other half is access. All researchers need immediate updates from their colleagues’ work to stay on top of their fields and inform their own studies. Independent researchers and those at less fortunate institutions, which are steadily growing in number, cannot access articles behind paywalls. The open access movement holds these individuals as an example of the prime benefits of open access. It has become a moral rallying cry among established researchers, even recently prompting Genomics (an Elsevier journal) editor Dr. Winston Hide to resign citing, “No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.“  Yet, little examination is given to how efficiently they can even access free research results.

Some barriers to accessing literature from the internet in developing countries or rural areas include, but are not limited to, 1) computer access, 2) internet access and infrastructure, 3) the associated access fees and 4) the average population-level internet and computer learning curves. There is many indications that access to computers is on the rise all over the world as the internet penetrates further into formerly inaccessible (or, rather, unprofitable) areas. But even in areas with computer access, such as universities and libraries, they are finding it difficult to afford internet access fees. Likewise, developing countries have difficulty in attracting investment from telecommunications companies who are focused on the bottom line to upgrade their networks for affordable, widespread access – especially outside of metro areas.

One way in which open access publishers can play an integral role in improving access to research in developing countries, low-funding institutions, independent researchers and rural areas is to carefully plan their websites around offering a low bandwidth option to navigate and download webpages and files. With broadband and satellite access costs at least 2-3 times that in much of the developed world, researchers and institutions in developing countries face a delicate balance between the cost to access any given website and the importance and value of the information they will receive. While searching a literature database, such as PubMed or Google Scholar, researchers often spend an inordinate amount of time in search mode while the internet meter ticks away. Thus, bandwidth is an important factor in improving access to the developing world.

This is especially relevant in many African and Asian countries where mobile internet access is increasingly penetrating further into hard to access or less profitable markets than broadband cable/DSL. The International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications reported in 2003 (pdf):

“Bandwidth in developing countries is expensive. In a report for the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, Mike Jensen calculates that Makerere University paysabout $22,000/month for 1.5Mbps/768Kbps (in/out), Eduardo Mondlane pays $10,000/month for 1Mbps/384Kbps, while the University of Ghana pays $10,000/month for 1Mbps/512Kbps. These figuresindicate that African universities, outside of South Africa, are paying over $55,000/month for 4Mbps inbound and 2Mbps outbound. These figures are about 100 times more expensive than equivalent prices in North America or Europe.”

While costs might have come down during the last decade, mobile internet offers a more affordable, solution for a greater number of people. In fact, mobile access fees often cost less in developing countries, up to 60% the cost in developed countries. Yet, many retail mobile providers limit bandwidth with high fees for going over that limit. Downloading a 1 MB webpage to get to a 5 MB pdf file could be 6% of monthly bandwidth limit for 100 MB/month plan. As a researcher you might be downloading several html, pdf and data files each day. Even for a 500 MB/month plan (which is what I have on my android phone in Sweden), you can quickly approach overage fees.

So what is the solution? Repositories and literature search sites need to be designed for speed with less options and more information. Remove or limit sidebars and show the most highly optimized results with the most important or relevant bibliographic information to enable a researcher to efficiently scan the results to find what they are looking for. For publishers, open access publishers in particular, realize that every megabyte counts when access is limited. While you may be free, the internet isn’t. Offer a streamlined version of your site in the countries domain (e.g. plos.tz/biomedcentral.tz for plos.org/biomedcentral.com in Tanzania) or make a bandwidth-friendly version of your website available as an top-level option. Reduce image file resolution as much possible. Stop the damn pop-up windows for tables and figures (looking at you PLOS…). Downloading an html file should be easier, faster and less bandwidth than downloading a pdf file. Offer easy to use bookmarking services for readers – either via existing social media services or via an efficient built-in system – so that they can easily save and recover articles that are important to them without downloading further documents. Think about the user’s experience, reducing the number of clicks to get somewhere and the size of your files. There are no doubt a plethora of solutions to improve website design and function. Some further technical solutions for senior management, librarians and IT staff are outlined in the reported I linked to above.

Why should one care about making access in the developing world more equitable? While your colleagues abroad might be infrastructurally disadvantaged, they certainly are not intellectually disadvantaged. They need historical literature and up to date research results as much as anyone else does to advance the knowledgebase of society as a whole. Research questions and scientific issues in developing countries may be different in scope than those faced by some researchers in developed countries. For instance, a more common parasite or disease in one part of the world might create a demand for research there that could greatly aide researchers who live in areas where that parasite or disease is less common and less researched – and vice versa. Science and research is often focused on problem-solving and is always a global affair. This goes beyond idealistic and moralistic arguments for aiding access to the developing world. Society benefits with increased participation in – and hence, access to – research.

It also a recognition that bandwidth is a resource that needs to be managed and conserved. While some countries are bandwidth rich, others are bandwidth poor. Optimizing your website and publication files should take into account the lowest common denominator among user experience, not necessarily a sleek design and maximizing options. Information and its retrieval should be at the forefront of an open access publisher’s thought-process. Otherwise you can ditch the moralistic argument that it improves access to developing nations, when in fact it costs them thousands to just load your frontpage.

My Pale Ale off my back porch. Pale and caramel malts, loaded with Cascade hops, and fermented with an American Ale strain of Saccharomyces cervisiae.

If there is one thing I enjoy more than beer, it is more beer. In fact, more beer ranks up there highly along with brewing my beer. And if I brewing more beer on top of my stash of already homebrewed beer…. well, then you can assume I’m a VERY happy boy! Beer is a simple and elegant recipe: malted barley to give body and sweetness to the beer, hops flowers to balance the sweetness with bitterness, good water and a proper yeast strain. Despite the short ingredient list, there are hundreds of variations on the theme. Brewing is truly limited only by one’s imagination.

Malted barley is an amazing substance. Barley is a grass and as such is fairly nondescript. Farmers raise it to feed livestock and for use in other food products like cereals, breads and the like. What makes barley the most amazing substance on earth are its profile of highly fermentable sugars. Once these sugars are unlocked by the malting process it’s sunshine, unicorns, rainbows and puppies!

Malting (from barley’s predominant sugar maltose) is a neat trick that is gets the barley seed to start germinating and then abruptly shuts it down at the right time. When seeds germinate, specific enzymes start converting the starchy “germ” of the seed into fermentable sugars, which is what we want to make beer. So brewers trick barley seeds into germinating by soaking them in water for a few days until the primary leaf shoot grows to about 75% the length of the seed. Then, BAM! Germination gets shut down by heating the grain at 50-60F, drying it out. The trick is get the enzymes to convert starch into sugars before the plant utilizes them for growth. Playing around with temperatures brings out different characteristics from the grain such as one gets when caramelizing and roasting the malts.

The malt grist for my Amber Ale, contains 6 varieties (Pale, Amber, Pilsner, Dextrine, Caramel, Black), but are all one species!

Without malting, yeast have no sugar to ferment and hence no beer to be had. This might be one of the saddest thoughts in the world… Many yeasts break down simple sugars (6-carbon rings) all the way to single carbon molecules, like CO2. But not Saccharomyces, the brewer’s yeast, which breaks down the same sugars into 2-carbon molecules, such as ethanol. The ability of yeasts to ferment, though, goes back at least 200 million years ago as inferred by molecular phylogenetics. Geneticists have reconstructed enzymes based on inferred gene sequences, showing that while inefficient, the machinery exists to begin brewing at the end of the Cretaceous, when fruiting plants started to be more abundant. The evolution of fruit may very well have been the driver of evolution and diversification of yeasts. After several gene duplications of Alcohol Dehydrogenase – the enzyme that converts ethanol – around 100 million years later, brewer’s yeast added a crucial step to its metabolic strategy known as the make-accumulate-consume model.

Figure from Piskur et al. 2006, doi:10.1016/j.tig.2006.02.002.

Brewer’s yeast is able to accumulate ethanol because it has a novel adaptation, the ability to repress alcoholic fermentation when glucose is present. Saccharomyces will continue utilizing glucose, but breaking it down into ethanol, keeping it to the side until all the good stuff is gone and only then will it start to break down the alcohol it has accumulated. Other fermenting yeasts will inefficiently break down ethanol as a sole carbon source if it is there, but not accumulate it, or are unable to use ethanol as a sole carbon source, but as can use it inefficiently as an accessory source. This is what the graph from Piskur et al. (2006) is showing to the left. The top is Saccharomyces and the bottom is a relative Kluyveromyces which does not accumulate ethanol, though it can less efficiently use ethanol as a substrate. Once Kluyveromyces uses up all the glucose (green diamonds) it can no longer increase its biomass (blue triangles). The added benefit that ethanol accumulation and consumption (black squares) gives Saccharomyces enables the yeast to sustain its biomass at least 50% longer even though there is little to no discernible gain in biomass.

The real adaptation is not the ability to use alcohol as a metabolic substrate – that merely sustains the yeast’s population and doesn’t enable growth, just replacement. The unique adaptation that makes Saccharomyces so badass is regulation. It can repress alcoholic fermentation when glucose is high, accumulating ethanol for that inevitable time when the sugars are in too low of a concentration to be useful. Thus, it gets an edge from using that last-resort store of ethanol. It is this unique adaptation that brewers harness.

Once the yeast has converted sugars to ethanol, brewers stop fermentation or wait for the yeast to go dormant. Sometimes you can get a lot of off-flavors if you let your beer sit too long on the ‘trub’, which is the pile of cells and proteins that settle at the bottom. This is why many times, especially for heavier beers, brewers will transfer their sweet amber nectar to a secondary container for aging. Those off-flavors are the result of breaking down secondary products like amino acids and the ethanol which might result in some fouler or vinegary compounds, such as esters and aldehydes. So finding the right balance of time for the yeast to sit in the fermentor and build up ethanol is just as important as selecting the right malts and hops. While brewers like to think of themselves and the craft beer-makers, the original brewmasters have been practicing the art for over 200 million years!

Piskur J, Rozpedowska E, Polakova S, Merico A, & Compagno C (2006). How did Saccharomyces evolve to become a good brewer? Trends in genetics, 22 (4), 183-186 PMID: 16499989

For the beer geeks out there:

Bottled: Kronan’s Last Stand (Pale Ale 4.2%)

Primary Fermentor 1: Baltic Amber Ale

Primary Fermentor 2: Abyssal Coffee Stout

Secondary Fermentor: Mörtfors Porter

Mountainfit cover illustration by Diana Sudyka: http://thetinyaviary.blogspot.com.

A week before I was moving overseas to Sweden I caught the tailwinds of a retweet on twitter from someone I follow. The natural history writer and elegant essayist Meera Lee Sethi (Twitter) had just self-published an eBook about her summer experience as a volunteer at Lake Ånnsjön Bird Observatory. For five dollars I thought it would be a fun way to start reading some natural history about my new home country. As I read it in the week prior and the two weeks after my move, there was an astonishing synchonicity between our experiences of entering and learning about this strange new land!

Mountainfit: Fjällsommar, Fjällsjälv (“mountain summer, mountain self”) is a collection of essays woven together around Meera’s adventures in the forested mountains of Jämtland during the summer of 2011. Jämtland is a landlocked, northern highlands province of Sweden named for the Jamts, who lived in a region tossed back-and-forth between Norway and Sweden over 500 years ago. This struggle of identity is signified in their coat-of-arms: the moose caught between the wolf (Norway) and the eagle (Sweden). Their name is supposedly derived from an early root meaning persistent, or hard-working. It is clearly this trait that rubs off on the naturalists studying the area’s 250 reported birds.

Much more than a travel journal, Mountainfit captures moments in time witnessed by a keen observer of detail who can translate these rare instances into prose so moving, colorful and poetic that you cannot help to be entranced as you follow along the blissfully nonlinear path Meera meanders through her essays. From the noble gyrfalcons, whose rarity in northern Europe was aided by Victorian egg-collectors, to lemmings erupting out of the moss in a chorus of raucous squeaks; even the common hooded crow has their song sung.

While the furry, feathery and clothed cast of characters are fascinating in and of themselves, the true treasure of this book is the masterful layering of natural history, mythology and history, storytelling and ecology that Meeri has exemplified throughout. This is not a continuous book about majestic nature with chapters and linearity. It is several moments in time narrated through a well-read library of myth and history, filtered through ecological science, yet presented in a lyrical flow that binds it all together in a way that leaves you humbly mystified and satisfied. The extra effort to equate “good lemming years” to the swedish regiments of the 1788 Russo-Swedish War while explaining predator-prey-environment dynamics in a backdrop of the field station milieu… only to be transported to Chicago where all the memories of Swedish lemmings are triggered by the appearance of a snowy owl on the Lake Michigan ice. And this is only in one of the seventeen essays.

It’s brilliant, cinematic writing like Meera’s that gives me hope for nonfiction natural history literature. This is far removed from the flowery, excessively adjective-laden prose of megacharismaticfauna-hugging nature writing that pays as much homage to the author as to the experiences of which they are relaying. Meera takes her experiences and bottles them up, contemplates them and only after learning more about the circumstances, history and mythology surrounding her experiences are they ripe enough for her to display to the public for consumption. For instance, this passage explores the mythological underpinnings of predator and prey, as Meera discovers a gyrfalcon nest with three chicks inside it:

“In Iceland, a medieval legend sets the roots of this habit in a heartbreak. It tells us that the gyrfalcom and the ptarmigan began as brother and sister, playing together on the icy slopes. Not only were the two birds not at war, they loved each other deeply. But when the ptarmigan offended the Virgin Mary, she was cursed. Her punishment was to become “the greatest of faint-hearts:” the most defenseless among all birds, and the most persecuted.

There was one mercy for the ptarmigan. She would change color with the seasons, becoming snowy-white in winter and heather-brown in summer. But the cruelest blow was this: the curse transformed the gyrfalcon into the ptarmigan’s greatest enemy. Having forgotten their former kinship, he now preyed constantly on her helpless flesh. In an unsettling echo of the myth of Sigurd and Fafnir, the falcon was provided with one painful, recurring moment of anagorisis.

Every time a gyrfalcon hunted a ptarmigan, the curse provided, the memory of his sister would return – but only after he devoured her heart.[...] But afterward, he would always return to what had become an eternal chase.”

While bringing it home:

“One bird’s essential qualities made it perfectly suited to hunting, while the other’s left equally well suited – at least, from certain points of view – to a life of being hunted. Yet to explain the natural habits of a predator and its prey, the mythmakers created a brilliantly perverse tale. The origin of the hunt, this story implies, is a combination of sin and punishment.[...]

Dear ones, isn’t this how we perceive – or wish to – our most grievous crimes against the ones we love? Something in us longs to see them as involuntary acts, driven by accident rather than intent. And we are deeply moved, I think, by the idea of a creature caught in an endless cycle of blind brutality, punctuated by brief episodes of self-aware regret.

[...] The myth is shivery-fine and strange; but it has little to say about the gyrfalcon, and still less about the ptarmigan. It’s another mirror.

We are the ones who seek an explanation for rapaciousness; we are the ones who long for violence to be a curse. The gyr is just a gyr. It hunts to eat; it eats to live; it lives to breed. And on the day of the three chicks, a single short sentence was added – not to the myth, but to the story science is telling about this splendid bird on its own terms.”

But this collection not only explores the avifauna of the Swedish highlands in a mythological way, it also chronicles the goings on of the people working at the field station and the important monitoring work that she is participating in. Many of the essays include anecdotes about swedish culture. These were some of the bits I related to while entering this new, foreign land. Sharing my scandinavian baptism with Meera as though time stood still and we learned about the hospitality and quirks in a mutual experience.

Mountainfit started off as a Kickstarter and is only available through her website as an eBook and I hope you will find it five dollars much well spent as I have. There is much knowledge and pleasure to be gleaned from reading it and as a self-published work a great way to support a talented writer. The cover art was done by Diana Sudyka. I highly recommend it for birders visiting Scandinavia, but anyone interested in a novel approach to excellent natural history writing will enjoy the book.

Grantorpet, view north from barn, well-house on the right.

Grantorpet, view to south from main house. Left to right: Chicken coop, main barn, wood shed/cellar. (My son and I walking to barn to wait for bus to his first day of school!).

We are just in love with our new home. We are renting a farmette 35 km from the nearest town. We don’t live on a street or have a house number, but instead mail finds its way here via our house name: Grantorpet (meaning Spruce Cottage). Of course our mailbox is about 2-3 km northwest of where we live cause our home is part of a large farm that raises beautiful jersey cows and makes gourmet ice cream from their creamy milk. Of course if I want to actually *mail* a letter, its a 1 km hike to the south on one of Sweden’s national hiking trails, the 160 km Ostkustleden (East Coast Trail), which runs through our property to the nearby village of Mörtfors (mört is a type of carp fish, fors means rapids).

Mörtfors is a ridiculously idyllic village of about 80 people set on a small rapids linking the lakes Ramnebo and our lake, Mären. My wife’s brother lives near here as well and his family is well-integrated into the community. This was no small part a large reason for us moving here – aside from the beautiful home we found – but to be closer to her family to have a support network for us and our children while we adjust to Swedish society. We’ve come to know several people in Mörtfors and in a time of dying rural areas with aging populations, we’ve found a haven of younger families who are filled with the spirit of entrepreneurship and community. Of course, being a small village they knew all about us before we set foot in Grantorpet: “Ahh, you’re the americans in Grantorpet!” “Oh, you must be Johnny’s sister’s family”.

Mörtfors, this old mill (turned into home), forms the center of the village which straddles the rapids.

The house and property itself is old, though it has been remodeled and added on. I’m not sure how old, records I’ve found on the internet for people who lived at Grantorpet date to the 1800s, but the farm itself goes back to 1500s. So, to reiterate, we are renting a farmette composed of a large main house, log cabin shed, outhouse, well pump-house, chicken coop, small barn with a wood shed and stone cellar attached, and a large barn built for horses with a workshop and storage room attached. All for less than my wife and I paid (in USD) for our first studio apartment in Berkeley, CA 12 years ago. Score!

Oh, did I mention it is on a lake, which is also a nature reserve? With a national hiking trail and a 1km long dirt driveway off the main highway, and our neighbor is herd of adorable jersey cows? Not to brag or anything.

View of our meadow off our back porch, lake Mären (wife and dog too).

Backyard meadow, complete with cows!

Not to sound too idyllic, we still need to make a living somehow and living out in the forest has some distinct disadvantages, as you can imagine. We are situated between two larger towns on the Baltic coast: Västervik, 40 km to the north, and Oskarshamn, 35 km to the south. So getting supplies can take a half day since we combine trips and plan out we need very carefully. My wife has a sales job working with her sister’s company in Oskarshamn and I am still maintaining freelance consulting and science writing from home. In addition to I AM SCIENCE, I have a few other projects on my plate, but only enough guaranteed paid or paying work for the next 3 months. This is the life of an independent worker, as I think many readers can sympathize with.

Over the coming months I will be putting together a proposal for a science communications consulting company. Starting a business in Sweden is not very difficult and there is much support from government and outside agencies. My concern, which I’m looking into currently, is how to pay for the social services taxes as an entrepreneur. Income tax for my bracket (i.e. poor person) is actually very similar to US. But since I am my own employer I will likely need to pay for social services that is usually fulfilled by a traditional employer. This is one of the differences between working in the US and in a socialist system where you buy into healthcare and the social safety net. As I figure it all out, I’ll be sure to write about my experiences in this transition.

But it feels good as an entrepreneur and self-employed person to know, no matter what, that I will always be taken care of should I or my family fall ill. This is a luxury that has held me back from forming a proper business while I was working in the US and could not afford individual healthcare coverage for our family. Furthermore, thanks to subsidized child care my wife can return back to work after nearly six years away from the workforce to take care of our two children. Child care rates in the areas we’ve lived in the US were too high to afford the low-wage positions she could qualify for. And frankly, we’ve mostly lived rurally where any jobs – skilled labor or not – are difficult to come by. So this big change should have a dramatic result on our personal economy, along with the right to healthcare access.

As far as living out in the middle of the forest, it has its issues as well! It took over a month to get basic TV and internet access because they couldn’t find our home anywhere and had to wait a long time to send a technician out to flip the switch. Hence, the online disappearing act. Of course, it proved to be a blessing in disguise. It is amazing what you can accomplish when freed from the hypnotic rapture of the internet and social media! In addition to moving in and getting supplies and furniture, etc. I fixed up the chicken house and we got five gorgeous hens that have  giving us 3-5 eggs a day; cleaned up the barn; got a cheap used rowboat and fixed it up for the lake; took care of all immigration necessities; our son started school and finished his first year of kindergarten; started work on a home-brewery set up in the barn and brewed my first all-grain pale ale; and so on! Country life is no walk in the park, so to speak!

Swedish words of the day: Roddbåt (rohd boht)- row boat, Hönor (hun-or) – hens, Barnbidrag (barn-bid-rahg) – child allowance: every resident in Sweden regardless of income receives 1100kr per child (~$160 USD) every month directly deposited into their bank account until the child is 16 (and thereafter as long as the child is enrolled in high school).

Mörtfors on "Mörtfors Day", looking north (our home is about 20 minute row from this spot). Rubber duck race (we didn't win).

As a brief update on the status of the I AM SCIENCE kickstarter. I have contracted out artwork for the cover and am putting together an intro as we speak. I am also in talks with a book layout designer to help make it more visually appealing. I’m really excited about it and it is pulling together nicely. I’m happy to accept more stories, just use the contact above to get ahold of me if you have a wicked, twisted road to science you’d like to write about. As always, confidentiality and anonymity is gladly supplied.

The first day in Sweden was relaxing. The second day my father-in-law put us right to work! And we gladly worked with him right up until the day we moved out into our own farm (another post) for our first three weeks there. He told us “wood is money here”. Most of the houses are still run on wood-burning stoves and boilers. In fact, little has changed in hundreds of years in most Swedish countryside estates. While they may have the modern conveniences of electricity and phone lines, power outages occur enough in the winter that no one would dare ever part with a wood burning stove or fireplace.

Indeed, it seems every Swede I meet knows very well the intricacies of several designs of wood stoves. Apparently, the Ankarsrum Smålands Spisen No. 28 in our new place is of top-notch quality. Although, I was very impressed with my in-laws wood boiler. In order to give our kids a bath we had to start the boiler about an hour before and keep feeding the fire until the thermometer got to about 40C. Then we would have enough hot water for a bath. As a Midwest suburbanite transplant, I was amazed that you could live fairly comfortably without electric, oil or gas heating. Wood is good!

Wood is also free, the only cost being the work to get it into manageable sizes for burning, and the population density of the Swedish countryside is low enough to make little impact. The forestry industry is required to replant within three years a tree for a tree and I’m told it is checked by plane regularly to make sure they are complying. My father-in-law already had all of his wood stockpiled last summer for this upcoming winter. He had cut down 12 trees before we arrived to use for winter in 2013. Of course, since part of their home is run on wood burning, they use a little in the warmer months for making hot water when they need it. Thus, they need quite a bit wood. He estimates that wood burning saves them in excess of 6000 kronor of year (~$840) and he gets good exercise too. We gladly helped him move brush into piles and stack the cross-sectioned logs in neat little rows between rocks and trees.

But wood is mostly a source of inspiration for many Swedes, including those who must make the livelihood, or their life, by destroying it. The forest here is the children’s playground, the sportsmen’s gameland, the city dwellers’ place of zen, the country-dwellers’ way of life and all of Sweden appears to have some intimate connection with Skogs Liv, the “forest-life”. Even Peaches, our dog, seems to have come home again for the first time here. She races between trees spaced apart in such a way as to be nearly perfect for walking between. The dense undergrowth of her former North Carolinian home is replaced with grassy bogs and mossy stones.

Peaches ease into Swedish skogs liv was made possible with the help of Elsa, my in-laws loyal hund. They are very similar, about the same size, same temperament (submissive and cuddly), both trained very well and both very loyal to their families. They get along famously. Elsa knows the woods around Dunsjömåla exceptionally well. Since living there, my in-laws spend about 2+ hours walking with her in the forest. My father-in-law has marked probably hundreds of kilometers of paths with red or blue tape through the forest. Elsa will occasionally run off for several minutes in complete and utter freedom and always return to her family on the trail. Naturally, Peaches chases off after her and has gotten lost on more than one occasion, but always seems to find us. The record so far has been about 26 minutes. She came back with a couple scrapes on her face, mud up to her shoulders and completely drenched all over. Must have been a good time. Sometimes I like to think that Elsa tries to play jokes on Peaches and lead her away from the trail to ditch her somewhere in the forest.

Even the forest abides by the Swedish law of lagom. Not too much wildlife, just enough. We’ve seen a charging wild boar, pterodactyl-esque gray herons, swans, several deer, a moose, and a nearly unlimited variety of fascinating insects and birds. It is always just enough to keep you on alert around every corner, or over every ridge. Something just might be hiding there! I know my view of Sweden is skewed because we moved to an area known to be among the most beautiful in northern Europe, with excellent summer weather and far away from the hustle of Stockholm and Malmö, which have typical inner-city type problems. Yet perhaps the Swedish people are engrained with lagom from their youth because their environment seems to be, well… lagom.We here often the phrase “det löser sig“, meaning something along the lines of, “it’ll work out”.

Swedish words of the day: Träd (traed) – tree, Spis (speess)- stove, Fåglar (foh-glarr) – birds

*Note: Sadly, since we don’t have an internet connection yet I am unable to upload pictures. I’m working solely off mobile internet now and we are out in the forest too far from 3G towers, so for now we get generous download speeds on the 2G Edge network of up to 250kbps! For updates and mobile picture uploads of our new life on a swedish farmette, follow me, @kzelnio, and my wife, @SwedeMuses, on twitter!

Dunsjömåla, a typical Swedish villa in the middle of the forest.

Linda’s father lives in Småland, literally meaning “small lands” – not because things are tiny here, but it was historically made up of several smaller, independent lands. Småland is a very special place. Swedes tend to have a very idyllic perception of Småland. It is indeed dotted with tiny villages made up of white-trimmed red houses accompanied by barns, workshops and guest houses.

Or perhaps it is the botanical wanderings of Karl von Linné, who catalogued thousands of species in Sweden, who hailed from the Småland village of Älmhult. (Also the home of the founder of the swedish megachain IKEA.) Or perhaps it’s the inspirational stories of Sweden’s national hero, Astrid Lindgren, set within the Småland landscape where she grew up. Whatever the case may be, it lives up to expectations. You can’t throw a mossy, lichen-covered stone here without splashing in a flower-lined lake or stream. Vitsippor is in full effect here making it hard to not fall in love with Swedish Spring.

Despite being hit hard with emigration in the 19th century – Småland was the largest exporter of Swedes to the U.S., most notably Minnesota – 21st century Småland has managed to attract our family to it. It all started with Linda’s brother’s family. They left the bustling city life of Stockholm behind and headed to an area where they could make a name for themselves. He is now a well-known Swedish photographer and his wife a publisher and graphic designer. Their move to the deep forest was soon followed by Linda’s sister. Wanting to live closer to his family and grandchildren, their father left his successful job of over 20 years managing Stockholm’s water facility to eventually find and rejuvenate Dunsjömåla. His coworkers thought he was going crazy, or having a mid-life crisis.

Now we have moved our family here to try to make our life here in the up-and-coming coastal region of Småland, completing the circle . This extends from Västervik in the north to Kalmar in the south. Her family all huddles around Oskarshamn, which is right in the middle. This region seems to be in a battle with tradition, complacency and entrepreneurship. Many businesses have closed and moved to other areas of Sweden over the last decades and some towns, especially smaller ones, rely mostly on tourism to fill the fiscal void. But Kalmar has attracted a growing university (Linneaus Universität) and Västervik has marketed itself as a hip, entrepreneurial town while Oskarshamn is struggling with its identity.

Family is just one many reasons we emigrated from the U.S. Dunsjömåla, right now anyways, is the center of this for us. Its a lovely estate in the forest, accessible only by several kilometers of dirt road. It’s not an estate in the sense I think of estates in the U.S. – a stately mansion, or a farm – though it does have a barn and is about the right size of property (not land). But it is a set of buildings on a property in a very rural setting. These typically get their own name. In fact the address to get here is just the name of the estate, no street number… and no street.

Peaches, the American Dingo, enjoying the view on the dock at Dunsjömåla.

The name comes from “dun”, “sjö” and “måla” or “down lake place”; that is feather down, not the direction, by the way. Måla is a very specific place name to Småland, it directly translates to a “target”, like a destination, but måla also means to paint something. Like many words in many languages, the same word can have very different meanings depending on its context. This small lake has an outlet to a larger lake just a small row downstream. We’ve already explored the small, rocky island with a rowboat. Upstream leads to an old mill at a small waterfall with a few class 2 rapids. There are more than 5,000 lakes in Småland alone, so chances are you’ll live within walking distance to one. Of course, walking distance to a swede could be a few kilometers.

After leaving his job and purchasing Dunsjömåla, Linda’s father spent 8 months working on the property while looking for a new job. The labor of love really shows here. It is absolutely perfect. There are no small projects that still need to be worked on, just maintenance and the constant gathering of more wood to dry for next year’s winter. There is no water heater, if we want a warm shower we must start the wood burner early and patiently feed the fire until the temperature reaches about 40C. There should be enough hot water for a few “military showers” after that.

The workshop barn (the smaller of the two barns). My family is staying in the loft.

The main house itself, though, only has 1 bedroom so we sleep in a loft above the workshop barn. There is an insulated room with 2 beds, where the kids sleep. We sleep outside their door in a loft area where the only barrier between us and the forested world outside is about an inch of wood and some roof tiles. Yes, it’s cold but we got a cozy bed with thick down blankets, so it’s actually not too bad, much like camping. And besides, there is nothing as refreshing as waking up at 5am to full light and the morning chatter of dozens of bird species in ~0C freshly-breathed oxygen from the effectively infinite number of pines, oaks and birches.

Swedish words of the day: Skogen (skoog-en) – the forest, Våren (vor-en) – Spring, Logen (Lohg-en), barn.

* All photos by Linda Zelnio. Map created from wikipedia images.

Entrance to Dunsjömåla, means "bird life".

After 8 hours of driving to Virginia, 6 hours driving to Newark, 3 hours wait in the airport, 8 hours flight over the Atlantic and finally a 6 hour drive to the south, we are finally home again for the first time. Linda lived here her first 25 years before I sucked her into the United States for the next 12 of her life. But being out for so long, used to speaking English, starting a family in the US and all the various norms of living in America sort of put her in a nationalistic limbo. She is very proud to be Swedish (as most Swedes are), but loved a few things about the US and particularly, North Carolina. The most obvious being the glorious weather we are so used to having. Another being the wide variety of natural beauty throughout the US. We’ve sampled quite a bit these treasures and now regret not doing more.

All the beauty of America turned into a grotesque beast in recent years after struggling to raise a family here. Not that it is impossible, and we don’t mean to sound whiny, but when you know it is better somewhere else in the world for children and families – by nearly all available metrics even – it is very frustrating when you live in the “greatest nation on Earth(tm)” and one of the wealthiest, too. Why can’t America have similar standards as a less wealthy and much less powerful nation? I will most likely dive into these supposed benefits that I elude to in more detail once we start experiencing them for ourselves.

Coming here to live is, of course, a first for me the kids. There is no ‘again’ for us. But much has changed in over a decade since Linda was a resident here. Not quite sure what exactly, we’ll need to experience it for a while to put our finger on it. We’ve only been here twice together. The first time over winter in 2004, before we had children. The second time in summer of 2006 when my oldest was only 6-7 months old. Each time was magical and Linda’s family helped to make it very special for us.

For myself, I have a mentality that is not attached to place as much. I’ve felt at home in many places and tend to adjust easily. My family and close friends, though, see moving out of the United States as something more major than what it really is. How is different to live to 1000 miles away on the same continent than another 1 or 2 thousand miles away on another continent. Air travel is about the same and about as expensive. So, I don’t really understand when people who see us only one or two times a year are sad we are leaving the country. Travel is travel, and Americans don’t need a special visa to come visit Sweden. So, stop by and visit us when you are here! We’ll take care of you (once we get our own place though!).

After we settled in Dunsjömåla, which is the name of Linda’s parents’ property in the Fårbo area of Småland, we were immediately beset with öl (beer) and introduced Peaches (our dog) and our kids to their swedish grandparents and Elsa (their dog). Elsa was very skittish at first but after an hour or so, Elsa and Peaches have become fast friends and are nearly inseparable now. It was real special to see Peaches so happy and have a friend.

Morfar Conny and Mormor Anne, on the other hand, are anything but skittish! They visited us in Pennsylvania in Autumn of 2007 several months after our daughter was born, so they have met the kids as babies (oldest, ~2 years and youngest, 5 months). But, of course, the kids have no recollection of them. But it didn’t take them long now to understand how they are all connected to each other – that this is part of their family.

Swedish words of the day: Hem - home, igen (ee-yen)- again, familj (fam-eel) – family

The Swede and two halflings safely aboard the plane to Sweden.

Strangely, we arrived in Sweden without any major problems. It was as if when boarding the plane the world breathed a sigh of relief for us – if the world revolved around my family anyways. Our luck is pretty average, the typical 50/50 chance of either going shit-hits-the-fan or ending fairly well. This probability increases linearly with how people are in our traveling party, though. And exponentially when traveling with children, doubled when traveling by air! And already, days before leaving the country, our luck seemed to sour.

Tuesday evening we lost pressure in our bathrooms and the chain holding the toilet plunger to the handle was caught under the plunger. For several hours the toilet thought it must keep filling up with water, and well, when it has no where else to fill, it flows over… We didn’t know until we got the kids ready for bed around 8-9 at night, so it had been flowing steadily for a few hours and spilled into the storage space behind the bathroom, thankfully. One of the few times I’ve been happy my house isn’t entirely level. We sacrificed several rugs and fleece blankets to mop up the water. Come to think about it now, I think I left them hanging over the porch rails…. oh well.

Linda got a plumber the next day and apparently he fixed the pressure problem, but that same evening the problem remained (the chain under the plunger was obviously an easy fix, and a separate issue). So, basically, we said fuck it and left it in the hands of our realtor to coordinate with the plumber to get it fixed. We were leaving early the next morning so there was nothing more we could do. Fun times!

Other problems were more minor and typical of last minute crap that comes up when moving. We couldn’t fit everything in the luggage we had so throwing out old clothes and sneakily discarding stupid kid toys (shh! don’t tell them!). My trash container was overflowing and we ran out of trash bags so I left all our food in the cupboards and fridge. I slipped in a generous tip on the counter for the cleaning lady with a note to use, donate or discard ANYTHING in the house she could find. This included the 2 twin beds, queen mattress, laptop table, several empty plastic storage bins and FSM knows what else.

The house has been on the market since October and our local market seems almost dead. We’ve had 5 showings since then and lowered the price more than $20,000. We’ve resigned to taking a (big) loss on it. Sadly, my parents were enormously generous and helped us to make the down payment for our first house and I will not be able to recover all of their investment no matter what. The house is already listed for $19,000 less than we paid for it. Renting it out is hardly an option where we live and now we are mostly ashamed of the situation and just want to be rid of the burden.

On Wednesday I had to trade in our cheap, compact rental car for a larger SUV (no minivans or cargo vans were available in a 60-75 mile radius) to drive from Beaufort to the Newark airport in New Jersey. Taking our dog with us necessitated that we take a direct flight to Sweden and the only option for that in the US are with SAS airlines from either Newark or Chicago. My brother lives halfway in DC, so we chose Newark.

When I made the reservation with Avis about a week ago, they said they could reserve a Dodge Durango for me on that day, which would have been just big enough to fit 4 people, a ton of luggage and a large dog crate (with dog). Of course when I got there all they had was a Ford Escape. Not quite the same thing as a Durango and it looked like it would not even fit the crate, much less all the luggage! I was, of course, rather pissed off. The man at the counter explained that I reserved something in a certain class (the Escape was class F) and they were comparable. I tried to tell him that he was full of shit in slightly nicer words (the Durango happened to be in the LARGER class size S, by the way). So, even if his argument was true he wasn’t even right. He sympathized with me though and gave me a pretty deep discount and we reserved another cheap, compact car just in case we were forced to drive 2 cars to fit it all.

When I got home, we found the crate just fit snugly in the back of the Escape and we tried to fit the luggage around it all. The only way it would work with one car was to strap all the large luggages to the top of the car. I was not very happy about this since it was a long way, over 2 days, and it forecasted rain along the route. Nevertheless, I went to Ace hardware and bought some bungees and a tarp and we went to town on it. The smaller luggage went in the backseat and footwells and with the 4 us (2 kid seats) we fit in as snug as a bug! It was quite impressive and not too uncomfortable either. Thus, we canceled the second car and set out for Fairfax, Virginia, Thursday morning.

This is when is the travel gods smiled upon us and our luck improved greatly. As soon as we drove out of our driveway I could feel the change. We were leaving and would likely never be there again. Not that I don’t want to, but realistically I doubt that we would see our old home after this. It became the start of an adventure and the end of a stagnant life. We needed to live our life as if it were an adventure again, and not a chore. Just knowing that before us lies complete uncertainty makes our future feel bright. I have absolutely no clue what I’m going to do hereafter. I just hope my family and I have fun and never lose our sight on what’s truly important. I think this is more the swedish way. That life is to be lived and work or employment is a means to live life, not the life itself. I don’t know if Sweden is the cure, but it is part of the journey to figure out how I can live a good life, build a lovely home for my family and support it well.

Swedish word of the day: Lagom - just right, moderate

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Peaches, the Dixie Dingo (look it up) enjoying a typical blue Carolina sky day.

Today was a gorgeous day, no different from the majority of days here. It is no wonder why Captain Blackbeard would sail the Queen Anne’s Revenge between the barrier islands and pine savanna to call this place home.

Beaufort is a quaint fishing village of a few thousand folk west of Cape Lookout where the Outer Banks end and the Crystal Coast begins. It’s been the North Carolinian home for my family and I for 4 years, which in a town this size is long enough to get to know more than a few locals. The skies are carolina blue, with only a few wispy clouds, and gentle breezes sway the tall longleaf pines like a dancing hula girl.

I embraced southern living when we moved here after finishing my masters degree at Penn State. It’s one of the few places where I’ve felt I really belonged. When I visit my home states of Iowa and Illinois, I feel an odd nostalgia that everything has changed and there is no going back yet it still feels like home – like a desert oasis you know can’t be there. Arizona left a bitter taste in mouth while I attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences to follow a dream to work in music. A dream that bursted into flames like the busted up moving boxes burned in what seems like an annual offering to Saint Uhaul.

California, though, was something else. But it is hard to separate growing as a person with the experience of being a resident in the state. I went through several iterations of Kevin Zelnio in my 5 years there. I came to work with rockstars and left the state with a degree in Evolution and Ecology, a trip to the bottom of the ocean and a beautiful wife from Sweden.

When I got the offer to go to grad school in Pennsylvania it was a no-brainer for me since it was my only offer. I didn’t get into other grad schools, was denied from Teach for America corps and hadn’t yet begun to look for jobs yet. I enjoyed my master’s degree for the most part and felt really at home living in the forests and mountains of central Pennsylvania. We spent 4 years there and State College always has a special feel to it since both of our children were born at Mount Nittany Hospital.

Some people called rural Pennsylvania “Pennsyltucky”, and it is not far off. We definitely got more into a rural lifestyle involving local food and crafts, hole-in-the-wall diners and microbreweries out in the middle of nowhere, and appreciating the land for what it is. I think some of these characteristics paved the way for my appreciation of southern living.

Growing up in the midwest, I sort of unwittingly scoffed at the south via unfounded stereotypes seen through the lens of here-say and media. I always made sure to avoid it in my travels and was wary and nervous when I needed to go down that way and make a stop anywhere. It was stupid, but that’s what ignorant people do. Once I visited Beaufort for an interview at my former job, the Duke University Marine Lab, I instantly fell in love the ocean, the weather, the barrier islands, the coastal scrub and the wavering longleaf pines, which reminded me of the Eastern and Scots Pines in Pennsylvania. It just seemed right for a marine biologist to be on the coast!

Now, we are preparing for our move to Sweden this Thursday. Another chapter in my family’s and I long history of trekking around. After I lost my job at Duke and then started and subsequently quit a PhD at UNC Wilmington, I’ve felt lost and, frankly, scared. We bought a house here under the false assumption that we’d get more funding, something that my PI led my wife and I on to believe. Somehow it would be OK and I’d be certain to be employed at minimum three years. Of course, I was naive about how science funding works to believe this and we hedged our bets and bought a nice piece of property during the crash of 2008. It’s 1.4 acres on a tidal creek, enclosed by several more acres of Longleaf Pines with a 2400 square foot house (now all for sale!) – with just the perfect floorplan for a family.

While we were in Wilmington, when I attempted a PhD, we rented it out to what we thought was a decent man who just moved here from Iowa and was scouting out a place for his family. He turned out to be jackass who’s wife apparently ditched him (we’ll never know the true story), who then ditched the house and rental contract, left a mess and left us with several months to pay for the mortgage while paying rent. Not feeling my advisor at UNCW (who treated me as if I were 21 year old fresh out of college kid with no family and without a decade of professional experience in science), missing my family because I was working three jobs (I lectured at the university, was a research assistant and a freelance writer the semester I quit) and unable to keep up with school work, with the overbearing burden of debts and now unrealistic financial obligations because I couldn’t cover mortgage, rent, bills, and finally, with worthless university-mandated family health coverage that wouldn’t cover anything they said they covered on paper (seriously guys, nearly $2000 worth of shot and routine check-ups for 2 kids??).

I had to get out. This is not how my life, or anyone else’s for that matter, should be lived. Academics love to talk about sacrifice, how they gave up this and that for their career and research. Bullshit. Family comes first. I took on that responsibility and I’m not letting a dehumanizing and devaluing society take me down with it. I quit, moved back into my house and put it on the market.

Wilmington was a nice town to live in. Carolina and Kure Beaches were serene and there are so many things to see. My children adored the brilliant Children’s museum, the giant sloth at the Cape Fear Museum, the gorgeously laid-out Fort Fisher Aquarium. Downtown boardwalk on the Cape Fear River was a delight, bike rides around Greenfield lake were just perfect, a fantastic music scene and the best damn radio station in the country: 98.3 The Penguin. My boy made his first friends there. We were sad to leave but logistics and reason demanded we move back to Beaufort into the house we owned and go from there.

This was last Fall.

For years we’ve entertained the idea of moving to Sweden. But we did our best to follow the trajectory of potential careers for me since I was the “educated” one. So we moved and moved again wherever I could teach, tech or write like a science mercenary finding the next assignment impossible. It’s hard on a family and hard on the soul of a “family man”. Since I work freelance we decided that I could work anywhere.

Deciding to move to Sweden was a no-brainer, but it is still not an easy choice. About the time we made the decision to go and started the paperwork for permanent residency there, I started getting tempting offers and opportunities for employment. As we have gotten closer to our exit date they haven’t let up. It’s painful to turn down so many potential opportunities, especially when you are blindly moving overseas with nothing really lined up. It always works this way. Last time I was looking a for job, nothing for 8 months then I accept an offer and BAM! 3 more offers in the following few weeks. Yet, I know the salaries are barely livable for a family of four in the areas we would live (DC, San Francisco and New York City).

My wife and I are doing this for our kids, though. Well, mostly for the kids anyways. The benefits far outweigh the costs. Subsidized health care (it’s not really free, we’ll pay a small amount, but it is universal coverage), subsidized day care, no-tuition schools and college, a fairer tax system (and my rate will only be slightly more than what I pay now, a price I’m happy to pay considering the social benefits) are just a few. The unquantifiable benefits are many though. These are personal but center around the support network we can expect from Linda’s family, the idyllic rural coastal scandinavian lifestyle that I hope to write much about here, and comfort of not having to worry about how we can pay for another $50,000+ medical bill if my kid gets pneumonia again. (For the record, CHIP program helped out a lot but certainly did not cover it all, your donations were extremely generous and kind and my family will never forget your help in a tough time for us.)

Staying behind results in little to no healthcare for us unless I manage to find a job with benefits, which is much more difficult to find these days. If you don’t believe me, quit your job and get yourself freshly on the market again. It results in further isolation from family and no support network, constant moving and de facto poverty. Less tangible results for my kids are growing up in a country where corporations feed them pure crap in schools, obesity reigns supreme, girls are devalued and boys are hyper-masculinized. I know these are stereotypes and not certain fate, but we’ve been around the block long enough and connected the dots so we can make these decisions for our family.

And that is what it is all about. We are able to make this decision. Even the most libertarian among you can’t deny we are free to move to society that caters more to our own ideals. But most people cannot make this decision and this saddens me. I love my country and don’t really want to leave. I’ve lived all over the place, travelled to the majority of the states, and it is a beautiful and diverse country with amazing people in it that have touched my life personally and indirectly. But the politics of this country have poisoned the tone, tempo and mode of the people who live here. Comedian Rob Delany wrote today in a wonderful piece on Levon Helm’s passing and America, regarding the song about the Civil War “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“:

This all makes me think of the civil war taking in our country today. To be accurate, it’s a civil cold war or sorts, though I believe it exacts a toll on our nation’s soul that is far steeper than the more famous and studied cold war that took place between the United States and the Soviet Union. I’m talking about the acrimony that our government and media, and the corporations that support them, stir up between regular folks like you and me. It’s there every day, but it reaches a fever pitch during our poisonous and ever-lengthening election seasons. We’re told by CNN or FOX News that you can either be a Democrat or a Republican; half of us need to be one and half of us need to be the other and we must define ourselves by our desire to crush, subvert or absorb the other one. An “us and them” mentality is foisted upon us. It doesn’t matter what side you’re one, as long as you pick one. It is critical to the success of this illusion that we remain trapped in that struggle, actually hating each other, while our highways and railroads fall apart, health care costs skyrocket, the national average body mass index balloons, and schools shuffle toward bankruptcy.

It is INSANITY to believe that what FIFTY PERCENT of Americans want is bad, wrong, or destructive to the country and its citizens at large. If that were true, the country wouldn’t be here anymore, or it would resemble a Cormac McCarthy novel, and it wouldn’t be All the Pretty Horses.

Anyways, these are my thoughts and my opinions. You are welcome to disagree with them, but you are not welcome to criticize my decisions and life. I’ll be chronicling my struggles, the move and integration into the Swedish social democracy and how it makes me feel as well as opinions I have about the scientific, environmental, cultural and political differences between the US and Sweden. Finally, I’ll be doing my damned best to bring a little slice of the South into the south of Sweden!

I plan on bringing a proper Carolinian pig pickin' to the land of the Vikings.

Color in males and females: Color functions as signal for male fighting ability. Colorful males are bigger and win more fights, giving them access to more females. But males pass their genes for color not only to their sons, but also to their daughters, even though colorful females are easier for predators to see.

On the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formenterra live a small, unassuming lizard. Yet this lizard is embedded into local culture and folklore so much as to appear on homes, books, art, clothing, and businesses throughout these Mediterranean islands. Despite their ubiquitous nature, little is known about the “Ibiza wall lizard”, which may have one of the largest ranges of coloration of any known lizard species and, even more rarer, are the islands primary seed dispersers.

My colleague Neil Losin, a PhD candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, and his partner Dr. Nate Dappen, a photographer and filmaker as well as an evolutionary ecologist himself (both are partners in the brilliant science media production company Day’s Edge Productions), have partnered with Spanish biologist Valentin Perez-Mellado of the University of Salamanca to produce an homage to these lizards combining the folklore and natural history with their spectacular photography. The Symbol: Wall Lizards of the Pityusic Archipelago is a kickstarter effort to bring such a work to light, aiming to educate and inspire the people who share the islands with these evolutionary wonders.

While the Kickstarter project for The Symbol was funded a few days ago. With less than a week left, Neil and Nate are seeking an additional push of funding to make The Symbol into an interactive iPad app complete with their unique, gorgeous short films and to reach a much broader audience. They were kind enough to answer a few questions of mine in an interview:

Kevin Zelnio: If you had just walked into an elevator with the head of a foundation that funds evolution and ecology projects, what is your 30 second pitch for The Symbol?

Nate Dappen: Ibiza is the party capital of the world, and along with its spectacular sister island Formentera, welcomes over 2 million tourists a year. The official symbol of the islands is the Ibiza Wall Lizard – an endemic species with [the] highest color diversity of any reptile, and one of the only plant-pollinating, seed-dispersing reptiles in the world. Lizards appear in paintings, sculptures, and magazines all over the islands. It’s almost impossible to visit the islands and not buy something with a lizard painted or printed on it! But despite their iconic status, there’s no where to learn more about these incredible lizards. Our book, The Symbol, will be a beautiful, multilingual coffee table book about this species, and it’ll bring the biology, folklore and conservation of this species to everyone.

Neil Losin: I think that took longer than 30 seconds. Just pretend I pressed the “emergency stop” button so Nate could finish our elevator pitch!

KZ: What does crowd funding this project mean to you? Does it have significance in a special away apart from traditional ways of funding science or conservation projects?

Neil: We considered our options carefully before deciding to crowd fund this project. We had never tried crowd funding for a project before – we were waiting for just the right project. In the early stages of developing our ideas for The Symbol, we decided that this was an idea that we could get people excited about! And that’s the key – unlike more traditional approaches to funding, where you only have to convince a handful of “peers” that your project has merit, crowd funding means that you’ve got to get a lot of people on your side. Sure, your best friends and family are probably going to chip in no matter how cockamamie your idea is. But for an ambitious project, you’re going to need more support than your unconditional fans can give you!

Nate: In other words, non-specialists need to understand why what you’re doing is important if you want to get your project funded. You don’t have the luxury of a 15-page grant proposal to explain why your project is necessary – you have a 3- or 4-minute video pitch! I think the key is distilling the message into something your potential backers don’t just understand – they also believe it themselves.

KZ: What has been the response from any people in Spain about your project? (good or bad)

Nate: So far, not many people in Spain know about our book. Based on their past responses to my research, though, I think they’ll love it. When I was conducting my Ph.D. research on the islands, people were fascinated by what they heard. Everyone who lives in Ibiza and Formentera – and everyone who visits the islands – runs across these lizards. They’re hard to miss; they are beautiful and surprisingly curious. It’s common to fall asleep on the beach and wake up to lizards ambushing your bags in search of food! But despite how ubiquitous the lizards are, people don’t know much about them and don’t have an easy way to learn more. Over the last few years, I’ve given a televised talk about my research, I’ve been profiled in a few local papers, and I was interviewed on the radio twice. I think this enthusiasm will grow when people realize that they will have access to all of this cool information in the form of a beautifully photographed book.

KZ: You are trying to raise extra funds to do more awesome things and really give back to the Spanish community on Ibiza and Formentera. Have you visited schools there? What does The Symbol mean to the people who live there and how do you plan to craft the book to an effective conservation tool to the local community?

Neil: Well, we’re thrilled that our campaign has gotten such an enthusiastic response so far, and this success has inspired us to try taking the project beyond the book. In the final week of our campaign, we’re trying to reach a new funding goal so we can expand the project in some cool ways. For one, we want to get the book translated into Catalan, the language of the islands, and provide copies of the book to all the primary schools on the islands. I would love to see our book inspiring kids to care about their local natural heritage!

Nate and I are coming into this island community as outsiders (me even more so than Nate, since he’s worked on the islands for three summers), so it’s important that we don’t come across like “Hey, you should care about these lizards in your midst because we’re telling you they’re important.” That’s not our intent, and it won’t work. Instead, we want to make these lizards so darn cool that you can’t help but care about them. I mean, the diversity of color from island to island is spectacular. They pollinate plants and disperse their seeds – also unique for a reptile. Locals are already proud of their lizards; Nate tells me they even have a special name for them – Sargantanas. They know that the lizards are special, but don’t have all the details. Nate and Valentín’s research paints a clear picture: these lizards are AWESOME. And these islands are the only place in the world where they live. If we can communicate that, I think we’ve done well!

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This is a very cool project with generous rewards for the backers. I, for one, already placed my donation and am looking forward to seeing the book with my own eyes. For more information about The Symbol, go to their Kickstarter page and help them in their final push to make the project a smashing success!

Species concepts were first defined based on morphological traits. Linneaus, being limited by technology at the time, used the “eyeball method” to study things – meaning he looked at them and described what he saw. This is formalized as the morphological or typological species concept (Cracraft, 2000; Mayr, 1996), and many biologists are just fine with this. It looks different, ergo it is and any distinguishing characters that could be observed, counted and measured were enough to define new species.

Characters are delimited by the practicing taxonomist and thus not all-inclusive of the whole organism. Morphological characters are typically those most easily observed, although the level of observation (i.e. from external features to cellular features) can have large effects on species identification and definition. For instance, Winston (1999) describes a case where closer observation of a western Atlantic species of the hermit crab hitch-hiking hydroid Hydractinia echinata, typically found off the coasts of Europe, resulted in the description of two additional species based on previously “hidden”, or non-scrutinized, morphological and ecological characters (Buss and Yund, 1989). Similar case are all too common. The closer we peer, the more we find.

The typological species concept idealized a species into an individual that represented a character or suite of characters that differentiated it from all other individuals. Thus, followers of this concept were forced to ignore population level variation. This plasticity of traits causes confusion and obscures the nature of a species particular adaptations. An extreme, but really fascinating, example comes from deep-sea hydrothermal vents off the coast of the Pacific northwest. A large polychaete tubeworm, Ridgeia piscesae, was originally described as two species due to two very unique morphotypes (see image below). Hydrothermal vent tubeworms are known to harbor symbiotic bacteria which use hydrogen sulfide as a chemical energy source, which is readily abundant coming out of the vents.

Ridgeia piscesae, from Carney et al. 2007. a) generalized body form, b) short-fat morphotype, c) long-skinny morphotype.

Despite living within a stone throw of each other, populations of the “short-fat” and “long-skinny” tubeworm have completely different phenotypes. It was a few years later that with a suite of nuclear and mitochondrial genetic markers that it was realized that the two morphotypes were genetically indistinguishable. This phenotypic plasticity is the result of differential gene expression related to which environment the larvae settle in (Carney et al. 2007): active black smoker chimneys, which are characterized by higher hydrothermal flow, higher temperatures and greater sulfide concentrations or diffuse-flow hydrothermal fields. Even though the morphology is so different they were combined into one species.

Mayr (1942) brought the species concept from the individual level to the population level by defining species as discrete populations of individuals that are reproductively isolated, or unable to. A problem with this view of species is that data on inter-breeding are typically not known and museum specimens are often collected with disregard to such data (Wheeler, 1999). Mallet (1995) even went so as to call reproductive isolation a useless concept because it cannot be tested. Others have countered that all species concepts are inherently untestable by experimentation or observation (Coyne and Orr, 2004). Claims of biological species are often typological species in practice.

Mallet (1995) defined the genotypic cluster species concept to refute some of the pitfalls of the biological species concept and incorporate additional knowledge from genetics in terms of ‘identifiable genotypic clusters’ with no appreciable heterozygotes. Coyne and Orr (2004) argued that the genotypic clustering species concept focuses on identification of species and not the origin of species, is not conservative enough, and will over-recognize species in sympatry compared to the biological species concept. Furthermore, they argue that since the genotypic clustering concept is non-hierarchical, it doesn’t reflect the hierarchical nature of evolution and confuses polymorphic forms and Batesian mimics without introducing a reproductive criterion (Coyne and Orr, 2004).

While the biological species concept emphasizes isolating mechanisms which separate members of a species, the recognition (Patterson, 1985) and cohesion (Templeton, 1989) species concepts emphasize keeping members of a species cluster intact. The recognition species concept focuses on a shared fertilization system between individuals. Thus, it can only consider barriers to fertilization as modes of speciation. Coyne et al. (1988) considered this to be a subset of the biological species concept. Templeton (1989), on the other hand, contended that the advantage of the cohesion species concept was its emphasis on mechanisms that enforced gene flow between populations. This made it superior to the biological species concept in dealing with asexual and hybridized sympatric clusters that maintained their identities. Harrison (1998) brought a particular valid criticism to the approach of cohesion: “… life cycles and habitat associations have not been molded by selection for the purpose of ‘cohesion’.” (pg. 25). That is to say that selection appears to be a non-cohesive force by definition.

There are other concepts as well, Mayden (1997) lists 22-24 different conceptualizations and philosopher of science John Wilkins* lists 26. The above concepts view the species as the end-point of evolution, without considering the historical nature of the process of evolution. Hennig (1966) recognized this fact and argued for a temporal component to systematic theory which he termed phylogenetic systematics. Though many subsequent authors agree with Hennig in the use of a phylogenetic concept of species, several authors disagree on the particulars. This has led to differences in interpretation of what a species is and how species are related to one another. The Hennigian species concept incorporated the interbreeding model of a biological species concept, but with a historical component. This was modified by Willmann (1986) to specifically state that species are reproductively isolated and originate via a stem species branching off into two new species. The stem species, by definition, ceases to exist by way of either extinction of speciation. The latter point is important to proponents of this species concept because with dissolution of the stem species, monophyly (a species and all of its descendants) can be maintained.

Other authors have other interpretations of what a phylogenetic species concept is. The main concepts differ between whether species are viewed as irreducible clusters that are diagnostically distinct from other clusters (Wheeler and Nixon, 1990), as exclusive monophyletic units (de Queiroz and Donoghue, 1988), or as a group of organisms whose genes have more recently coalesced with each other relative to organisms outside that group and containing no exclusive group within it (Baum and Donoghue, 1995). At first glance, the species concept proposed by Baum and Donoghue (1995) appears to most accurately reflect evolutionary history. Upon closer inspection, it is nearly impossible to have complete knowledge of the evolutionary history of all genes in all the organisms in an analysis.

In practice, purveyors or this species concept have often used one or a few loci in delimiting species (Coyne and Orr, 2004). Shaw (2001) relaxed this extreme assumption to “greater than 50%”, meaning that a species is delimited if most of the genes have coalesced. While operationally useful, this definition may be just as arbitrary as using diagnostic morphological characters. Describing species as exclusive monophyletic units seeks to overcome such arbitrariness and potentially has the greatest power of all species concepts discussed here to represent a true phylogeny. But it is known that phylogenies based upon genes do not necessary reflect a species true phylogeny, which may never be known with certainty (Avise and Wollenberg, 1997).

Proponents of the evolutionary species concept claim theirs can be mos universally applied relative to all others. Wiley (1978) purported that a species concept must satisfy five criteria: universal validity, allow for testable hypotheses, include valid special case species definitions, specify what types of species origins are possible or not possible, and be “capable of dealing with species as spatial, temporal, genetic, epigenetic, ecological, physiological, phenetic, and behavioral entities” (pg. 18). Modifying an earlier concept from Simpson (1961), Wiley states: “A species is a single lineage of ancestral descendant populations of organisms which maintains its identity from other such lineages and which has its own evolutionary tendencies and historical fate.” Wiley’s modification removed the need for species to be changing, as originally defined by Simpson (1961). The criticisms levied against the evolutionary species concept appear to be more about lack of operational criteria to delimit species spatio-temporally (Wheeler and Meier, 2000).

An additional outcome of the species concept debate is the view that only populations are real and that species are artifacts (Brooks and McLennan, 1999). Darwin (1859) believed that species were arbitrary constructs of the taxonomist for convenience, while Mayr believed that species were real entities (Mayr, 1996). Levin (1979) championed the view that species are the empirical units of evolution and ecology, while evolutionary species concept supporters argued that if monophyletic groups are real then so are species (Wiley and Mayden, 2000b). Other interpretations span the range between arbitrary constructs and representing real natural entities. Furthermore, it seems as if every taxonomist is trying to find that one perfect species concept that works for all scenarios and types of organisms (Hey, 2001; Hey, 2006; Wheeler and Meier, 2000).

Several authors have advocated for pluralism, or the use of multiple species concepts (Mayden, 1997; Mayden, 1999). Different situations or questions may call for using different species concepts. Hey (2006) cautions against this though, stating it doesn’t help to settle anything regarding the species debate. Fitzhugh (2006) treads close to a pluralistic view species in his advocacy for a “requirement of total evidence” approach to systematics. This requirement suggests that any evidence relevant to the species question needs to be considered. Total evidence could include morphological character information, genetic characters, behavioral traits and more. While perhaps not setting out to satisfy multiple species concepts, the requirement for total evidence may do just that along the way.

As with many biologists studying biodiversity and other taxonomists, I feel unsatisfied by the current plethora of species concepts. Those attempting to be generally applied, such as the phylogenetic, Hennigian and evolutionary species concepts, tend to inflate biodiversity by elevating subspecies, or perhaps even distinct populations to species status. I’m unsure whether this inflation is due to the flexibility in the definitions, viewing species as lineages or clusters, or the taxonomic practice of the practitioners.

Those attempting to restrict the definition or discount evolutionary processes, like the biological species concept, tend to underestimate biodiversity. Additionally, the biological, recognition and cohesive species concepts cannot satisfactorily deal with asexual organisms and are unable to be applied broadly within only the animal kingdom. While reproductive isolation may be an important criterion for speciation to occur, other mechanisms are known such as hybridization, recombination, horizontal gene transfer (can occur between a eukaryote and prokaryote as shown in recent research: see Hotopp et al., 2007) to name but a few. Reproductive isolation may also be a product of speciation and not a causal mechanism (Mishler and Donoghue, 1982; Wiley and Mayden, 2000a).

As do the proponents of the evolutionary species concepts, I believe that species are real, are individuals and ancestral species do not need to become extinct during a speciation event. I view the act of formally describing a species as formulating a hypothesis about that species’ unique suite of characters and the evolutionary history of the retention, loss or modification of those characters over time. I believe the evolutionary species comes closest to my views of what species are. I agree that species are entities of organisms that maintain its identity throughout time and space from other entities. This is a key factor to species being operationally and pragmatically useful. I understand this might not sit well with philosophers and some other evolutionary biologists. Some of the phylogenetic species concepts recognize too many species, whereas some of reproductive isolationist concepts ignore asexual and allopatric species. The latter is unacceptable and the former may give a misleading foundation for other areas of study (i.e. biodiversity ecology) to test hypotheses on.

* Though I haven’t read the book, John Wilkins is an authority on species concepts and recently published Species: A History of an Idea, which promises to be informative and interesting!

References:

Avise, J. C., and K. Wollenberg. 1997. Phylogenetics and the origin of species. PNAS 94:7748-7755.

Baum, D. A., and M. J. Donoghue. 1995. Choosing among alternative phylogenetic species concepts. Systematic Botany 20:560-573.

Brooks, D. R., and D. A. McLennan. 1999. Species: turning a conundrum into a research program. Journal of Nematology 31:117-133.

Buss, L. W., and P. O. Yund. 1989. A sibling species group of Hydractinia in the north-eastern United States. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK 69:857-874.

Carney, S.L., J.F. Flores, K.M. Orobona,D.A. Butterfield, C.R. Fisher, S.W. Schaeffer. 2007. Environmental differences in hemoglobin gene expression in the hydrothermal vent tubeworm, Ridgeia piscesae. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part B 146:326–337.

Coyne, J. A., and H. A. Orr. 2004. Speciation. Sinauer Associates, Inc., Sunderland.

Coyne, J. A., H. A. Orr, and D. J. Futuyma. 1988. Do we need a new species concept? Systematic Zoology 37:190-200.

Cracraft, J. 2000. Species concepts in theoretical and applied biology: a systematic debate with consequences. Pages 3-14 in Species Concept and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate (Q. D. Wheeler, and R. Meier, eds.). Colombia University Press, New York.

Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 1st edition. J. Murray, London.

de Queiroz, K., and M. J. Donoghue. 1988. Phylogenetic systematics and the species problem. Cladistics 4:317-338.

Fitzhugh, K. 2006. The ‘requirement of total evidence’ and its role in phylogenetic inference. Biology & Philosophy, 21:309-351.

Harrison, R. G. 1998. Linking evolutionary pattern and process: the relevance of species concepts for the study of speciation. Pages 19-31 in Endless Forms: Species and Speciation (D. J. Howard, and S. H. Berlocher, eds.). Oxford University Press, New York.

Hennig, W. 1966. Phylogenetic Systematics. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Hey, J. 2001. Genes, Categories, and Species. Oxford University Press, New York.

Hey, J. 2006. On the failure of modern species concepts. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 21:447-450.

Hotopp, J. C. D., M. E. Clark, D. C. S. G. Oliveira, J. M. Foster, P. Fischer, M. C. M. Torres, J. D. Giebel, N. Kumar, N. Ishmael, S. Wang, J. Ingram, R. V. Nene, J. Shepard, J. Tomkins, S. Richards, D. J. Spiro, E. Ghedin, B. E. Slatko, H. Tettelin, and J. H. Werren. 2007. Widespread Lateral Gene Transfer from Intracellular Bacteria to Multicellular Eukaryotes. Science 317:1753-1756.

Levin, D. A. 1979. The nature of plant species. Science 204:381-384.

Mallet, J. 1995. A species definition for the modern synthesis. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10:294-299.

Mayden, R. L. 1997. A hierarchy of species concepts: the denouement of the species problemin The Units of Biodiversity – Species in Practice Special Volume 54 (M. F. Claridge, H. A. Dawah, and M. R. Wilson, eds.). Systematics Association.

Mayden, R. L. 1999. Consilience and a hierarchy of species concepts: advance toward closure on the species debate. Journal of Nematology 31:95-116.

Mayr, E. 1942. Systematics and the Origin of Species. Colombia University Press, New York.

Mayr, E. 1996. What is a species, and what is not? Philosophy of Science 63:262-277.

Mishler, B. D., and M. J. Donoghue. 1982. Species concepts: a case for pluralism. Systematic Zoology 31:491-503.

Patterson, H. E. H. 1985. The recognition concept of speciesin Species and Speciation (E. S. Vrba, ed.) Transvaal Museum Monograph No. 4, Pretoria.

Shaw, K. L. 2001. The genealogical view of speciation. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 14:880-882.

Simpson, G. G. 1961. Principles of Animal Taxonomy. Colombia University Press, New York.

Templeton, A. R. 1989. The meaning of species and speciation: a genetic perspectivein Speciation and Its Consequences (D. Otte, and E. J.A., eds.). Sinauer Associates, Sunderland.

Wheeler, Q. D. 1999. Why the phylogenetic species concept? – Elementary. Journal of Nematology 31:134-141.

Wheeler, Q. D., and R. Meier (eds) 2000. Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate. Colombia University Press, New York.

Wheeler, Q. D., and K. C. Nixon. 1990. Another way of looking at the species problem: a reply to de Quieroz and Donoghue. Cladistics 6:77-81.

Wiley, E. O. 1978. The evolutionary species concept reconsidered. Systematic Zoology 27:17-26.

Wiley, E. O., and R. L. Mayden. 2000a. A critique from the evolutionary species concept perspective. Pages 146-158 in Species Concepts ad Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate (Q. D. Wheeler, and R. Meier, eds.). Colombia University Press, New York

Wiley, E. O., and R. L. Mayden. 2000b. The evolutionary species concept. Pages 70-89 in Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate (Q. D. Wheeler, and R. Meier, eds.). Colombia University Press, New York.

Willmann, R. 1986. Reproductive isolation and the limits of species in time. Cladistics 2:356-358.

Winston, J. E. 1999. Describing Species: Practical Taxonomic Procedure for Biologists. Colombia University Press, New York.

Sorry about the dust and cobwebs! I’m in the middle of a move to a new country. Moving my family to Sweden has taken it’s toll on my “free time.” People have been very interested about the move, why I’m doing, how it’s going, what I’ll do there, etc. etc. So I plan on writing about that in the future. I have a post nearly written about species concepts, though, so I’ll give to you this folk musician’s interpretation of the origin of species to tie you over.

In a bid to call attention to the decades old problem of Joseph Kony, a horrible man who steals children and brainwashes them into serving in his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the nonprofit group Invisible Children has created a new campaign to keep political pressure on Congress to maintain a US military presence in Uganda to hunt Kony down and bring him to justice. They are marketing this campaign as Kony 2012 with the intent on “making him famous” so that everyone knows who he is and put pressure on their Congress member to keep US support for the hunt. There is no doubt that in the eye of the international community Kony is a bad man. He is wanted for war crimes and the atrocities are very real and documented.

The campaign has produced a glossy promotional video (below) that will bring tears to your eyes – it did to mine. It stirs up a lot emotions, exhibits the founder’s passion and includes many cues and dog whistles for Generations X, Y and the Millennials. Its intent is to stir up your support. I had only heard of Invisible Children in passing prior to this and was not familiar with their efforts to encourage military intervention by the United States in a sovereign nation.

KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

I won’t go into the details of the justifications and criticisms, that has been done very well elsewhere. Kony 2012 raises numerous red flags for me personally, such as accepting financial support from religious right extremist groups that espouse hate towards homosexuals (including American backers of the “Kill the Gays Law” in Uganda) and support of creationism. Also, nearly one-third of their funds actually makes it to Africa, to which they retort they are an advocacy organization not necessarily an intervention or aid group – even as they advocate for military intervention. By nonprofit standards this is a poor ratio of use of donor funds to expenses.

But what I really want to talk about in this post is related to my interest in communications: “slacktavism”. In the upcoming reference handbook Environmental Leadership, to be published this Summer by SAGE Publications, my colleagues and I cowrote a chapter about “digital environmentalism”. You can download a preprint pdf from my personal site, scroll to the bottom. I’ll share the following excerpt about slacktivism:

“The accessibility of blog and social media platforms makes it easy to become superficially involved in the environmental movement (Shulman 2009). For instance, Facebook allow people to “like” a topic without requiring any additional commitment. While that person may feel they are lending support to the topic, this can artificially increase the number of people who appear to be involved in an issue (Golden 1998; Furlong 2004). This armchair activism, known informally as “slacktivism”, can be defined as “people who support a cause by performing simple measures [and] are not truly engaged or devoted to making a change” (UNAIDS 2010).

Slacktivism is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is difficult to assess how important environmental issues really are to individuals who join online communities. On the other hand, ease of integration is important for environmental movements. When entrance into an online community has fewer barriers, individual participation tends to be much stronger (Thackeray & Hunter 2010). This means that the mechanisms that make it easy for individuals to join groups without any additional personal involvement are the same mechanisms that are necessary to recruit the most active members. An environmental movement can utilize metadata from slacktivists to evaluate general interest in their organization or issue, improve their online image, and refine targets for marketing their messages.

[later in the chapter] The speed and flexibility of blogging and social media allows digital environmentalists to draw attention to and discuss a plethora of environmental concerns, drawing from the expertise of scientists, policy makers, and on-the-ground activists within their networks. While the ease of use may lead to what many refer to as slacktivism, the overall increase in network size makes up for a less engaged membership. Even an apathetic nod to an environmental movement lends momentum that resonates throughout one’s personal network, supporting the cause and helping to find additional leaders. These factors make blogging and social media effective tools for any movement.”

Slacktivism has two sides to the coin: it artificially inflates numbers in a movement but makes that initial entry into a movement much easier. “Liking” something on facebook or signing an online petition may lead to more direct involvement in an issue at a later time. With Kony 2012, targeting the college-bound youth is a no-brainer. The great majority will “buy in” to the movement with the $30 action kit and likely won’t do much with it or just share Kony 2012 paraphernalia on all their social networking sites. But the barrier to entry was so low that the numbers seemingly involved could literally explode, which they did. Just viewing and sharing their video above, as I have now, has inflated their perceived importance greatly. They can now boast an impressive 70 million views. This makes it more irresistible to potential members, not wanting to be left behind.

The (multi)million dollar question is what does this mean to achieving the campaign’s stated goals. They raised enough money in a week to cover them for a few years if used wisely. In fact, nearly doubling their previous income of $9 million that was achieved over several years. Normally, without the influx of slacktivists, a group or campaign would have high quality investors (meaning more highly involved or dedicated), that would keep watchful eyes on the actions of the group and utilization of donor funds. But the mentality of slacktivists borders more on association than participation. The role of watchmen has thus far befallen on Kony 2012′s critics, except the information gleaned thus far has been with the view of hindsight. Much more importantly will be to carefully watch the expenditures as they unfold. What is not clear to me is what role slackitivists play post-fundraising.

UPDATE: I was alerted to a very interesting post on Kony 2012 and slacktivism at the Technosociology blog. If you are interested in this topic, her post is well worth the read and gets further into sociology of slacktivism than I can. Here is an excerpt:

So, not only are these people not slacking, they are acting symbolically in spheres that previously had higher barriers to entry. Symbolic action is not a magic wand–and its consequences depend on how it interacts with other kinds of power, including institutional power. Symbolic action and symbolic power, however, are not mere “epiphenomenon” of other kinds of power—as if they were a shadow, or an afterthought.

On the contrary, narrative and symbolic action are central forces in human societies. We are a highly-symbolic, group-oriented species and signaling our preferences –to others– is a key dimension of human action. “Public” is a meta-concept; it’s not just about what you know internally, but what you express and what others know that you believe and that you know that others know… …. Hence, the public sphere is formed not just through people’s silently held beliefs, but through overt signaling of ideology and narratives-and this signalling increasingly takes place online.

The stunning response is what motivated me to apply for Kickstarter funding in order to weave together the stories of scientists – of whom represent an enormous diversity of backgrounds and pathways – into a freely available resource that I hope inspires those who think they can’t do science and give hope to those who are really struggling in their journey. Clearly, the community agreed and in just over 24 hours after I opened up the virtual doors, my bare bones funding goal $3,500 was exceeded. After the euphoria wore off, I then put out a call to try and raise $10,000 for this project. Again, the response has been overwhelming and we about 57% of the way there!

When I asked for $3,500, that was what I needed to devote either a month full time, or 2 months part time to this project to get out quickly. But it really represented a minimum to get it done. It would pay for my time (detracted from other paying freelance gigs) and a little leftover to pay for hard copies for backers and send a few books out to school libraries in inner cities. The ultimate goal was always to produce a readable, well-enough-designed e-book that could be available on the Kindle, iPad, Nook systems as well as a pdf for anyone. But it is apparent to me that many of the people who really need to read these stories of nontraditional pathways into a science career do not have access to some or all of these technologies. Therefore, I feel it is imperative to seed as many struggling schools as possible with a hard copy of I AM SCIENCE in their libraries for kids to uncover and teachers and guidance counselors to point students to.

With $10,000, we can do a lot of seeding and I can hire some artists to make the project more engaging and exciting. Some artists are able to volunteer their efforts for the project since it is not intended to make me rich by any stretch of  the imagination. But, I strongly feel that creativity should be compensated, even if only a little bit, and especially if that is how people are trying to make their living. Therefore, I hope to be able to some of these funds to compensate one or two artists for designing the cover and bringing these stories to life in some accessible way. That can’t happen unless we reach our goal.

With 9 days left to go, we’ve raised nearly $5,700 and that will go a LONG ways, but with your help we can go even longer! I hope you can find a few dollars so that we can hopefully make a difference in the lives of more high schoolers from inner cities, rural communities and native American reservations. And if you have a story that you’d like to tell, I would love to hear from you. I can maintain complete anonymity or pseudonymity throughout if you wish. Either submit a blog post or tumblr entry to me personally or through Twitter with the #IamScience hashtag, or send me an email at kzelnio at gmail. You read other stories at the I AM SCIENCE Tumblr where I am keeping track of interesting tweets, news, stories and blog/tumblr submissions.

Behold! The Sieve!

Behold the sieve.

It is a marine biologist’s best friend, saving hours of sorting and enabling us to quantify ecosystems. In fact, you can get these miracle workers at McMaster-Carr, the field biologists’ version of died-and-gone-to-heaven, for a mere $40-50. Take good care of these puppies and they will last through several generations of graduate student! I prefer the 500 micron mesh size myself, but usually on top of the 64, because it filters out all those damn limpets (Scheißeschnecke!!).

Limpets always foul things up, and in hydrothermal vent ecosystems, there are A LOT of limpets. In 2002, Governar and colleagues found up to nearly 100,000 of these half-centimeter bastards per square meter in tubeworm clumps at the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which is off of Washington state. Sorting tens of thousands of limpets can be quite dreary and when you find something that is not a limpet, it is often a moment of silent joy.

The sieve size I use at the bottom, though, is the most important. It is my cut off. Essentially, I am saying I’ll ignore anything that can fall through this size hole. Ideally, this should be as low as possible, but I’m often limited by what sieve size my colleagues have used in past studies. This is important because our results need to be compared to each other. Any methodological misstep makes broad comparisons about pattern and process less tangible and lessens the context the study is placed within. Thus, interpretations are also limited by sieve.

Gage and colleagues published an important methodological paper in 2002 describing the influence of sieve size on characterizing a deep sea community. The graph to the left, from this paper, clearly shows that biomass, numbers of individuals and numbers of species significantly increase for 2 independent box-core samples based on sieve mesh size. About 20 more species were recovered by winnowing down from 500 micron to 250 micron mesh. Twenty species is not a laughing matter, especially when it makes up nearly 20% of your sample. That could easily make the difference in deciding if your treatments have a significant effect, or not.

In 2009 paper, Pavithran and colleagues took it a step further and asked if it mattered what type of animal was being shaken down the sieve gauntlet. Using a replicated transect of box-cores in the Indian Ocean they looked at the effect a 200 micron difference in mesh size (between 500 and 300 microns) had in characterizing 7 very different animal groups that live in marine sediments: nematodes, polychaete worms, tanaids (a type of crustacean), a family of copepods, isopods, bivalves and nemertines (another worm-like animal).

The authors found the greatest difference in biomass occurred among polychaetes, up to 90% reduction of biomass using the 500 micron mesh, followed by 78% reduction of nematode biomass. But a reduction in biomass doesn’t necessarily mean a reduction in species present between mesh sizes. After all, it could be smaller individuals of a couple predominant species that is retained on the smaller mesh. This was not the case, though, in Pavithran’s study. The smaller mesh retained 66 species, while the larger mesh only 40. Additionally, there were nearly twice as many individuals on the smaller mesh sieve. Overall, they saw a loss of 43% of the species from a simple methodology choice alone.

What does this mean for interpretation? As mentioned above, one of the important things in designing a study is make sure your work will be comparable to the work of others. But if other researchers have been ignoring a certain size fraction of the animal community, should you continue to ignore it too? Meiobenthologists would respond very vocally with a NO! In fact, they would argue that the majority of benthic studies are just plain wrong, or at best misleading, since they have ignored a potentially important component of the seafloor. Some of the world’s best nutrient recyclers are in that under 200 micron size class. Potentially half of deep sea species could have been thrown overboard during the last 50 years of intensive deep-sea research! The fact remains, though, there wouldn’t have been enough taxonomists to describe them all, especially the among the handful of meiobenthologists.

References

Gage, J., Hughes, D., Gonzalez Vecino, J. (2002). Sieve size influence in estimating biomass, abundance and diversity in samples of deep-sea macrobenthos. Marine Ecology Progress Series 225, 97-107. DOI:10.3354/meps225097

Govenar, B, Bergquist, D.C., Urcuyo,I.A., Eckner, J.T., Fisher, C.R. (2002). Three Ridgeia piscesae assemblages from a single Juan de Fuca sulphide edifice: structurally different and functionally similar. Cahiers Biologie Marine 43, 247-252

Pavithran, S., Ingole, B., Nanajkar, M., Goltekar, R. (2009). Importance of sieve size in deep-sea macrobenthic studies. Marine Biology Research 5 (4), 391-398. DOI: 10.1080/17451000802441285

* This post was originally published at Deep Sea News.

Darwin-Wedgewood Crest

***This post was a brief write up of a Darwin Day presentation I gave at Duke Marine Lab in 2010.***

Barnacles held an immense fascination for Darwin. It was through some rather chance events that he ended up being the world expert on this fascinating group. He created 4 volumes of masterpieces devoted to all available living and fossil barnacles. I hope to show that indeed his work with the barnacle did indeed contribute to solidifying his thoughts on transmutation and improving his understanding of what will eventually become his greatest contribution to science.

Erasmus Darwin

Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus (at right) was an eccentric physician noted for racey poetry and the author of Zoonomia in 1794, a text that presaged the evolutionary works of even Lamarck. Erasmus’ eccentricism appeared to permeate his whole life. Ex omnia conchis – all from shells – was transcribed everywhere according to Rebecca Stott, author of Darwin and the Barnacle. Curiously, the crest of the Darwin-Wedgewood family (right) bears 3 shells. Erasmus’ inspiration must have stemmed from a family history of love for the natural environment. Though Charles Darwin never would have known his grandfather – Erasmus died in 1802, seven years before Charles was born – the family crest and ex omnia conchis surely foreshadowed his legacy.

Darwin started speculating on species during the Beagle voyage, but many of his ideas were solidified in the years after the expedition and after much consultation with a wide variety of taxonomic experts. He was very close to publishing his theory of evolution by the 1840s and was keenly aware of the abuse given to Lamarck’s theories. In 1844, Robert Chambers anonymously published a book titled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation which was written in a style, and priced, for the lay person. It became very popular and laid his own theory for evolution built upon Lamarckian ideas. Vestiges purported a linear chain of transmutation culminating in man – more specifically, a white English man.

While popular with the laity, the academics and clergy who mentored Charles, and whose approval he often sought, were up in arms about the book and its rampant attacks against Natural Theology, the prevailing modus operandi in the natural history community of the time. It was because of this that botanist John Hooker, a friend and confidant, wrote Darwin after reading a draft of his “big species paper”:

“Do not think I meant to insinuate that you could not be a judge from not having worked out species, for your having collected with judgement is working out species: what I meant I still maintain, that to be able to handle the subject at all, one must have handled hundreds of species with a view to distinguishing them & that over a great part,—or brought from a great many parts,—of the globe.” – Hooker in a letter to Darwin 14 September, 1845

This frightened Charles, as he was not inclined to disappoint or scientifically alienate himself from his beloved colleagues. While it is arguable that Hooker’s letter set back Darwin’s publication of his ideas, it encouraged him to intimately study several larger aspects of morphology that would inevitably aide him in cementing his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Mr. Arthrobalanus (=Cryptophialus).

Darwin had been working on a problematic barnacle collected during the Beagle voyage since 1835 he  called “Mr. Arthrobalanus” (left). He noticed “[t]he thick shell of some of the individuals of the Concholepas Peruviana [sic] is completely drilled by the cavities formed by this animal” (Zoology Notes). In essence, Charles discovered the first burrowing barnacle! A rare find indeed and one that would intoxicate him with crustaceous ecstasy. He intended to describe this small, parasitic barnacle rather quickly, but “was led, for the sake of comparison, to examine the internal parts of as many genera as I could procure.” Beginning in 1846, barnacles would consume his family’s life for the following 8 years resulting in 4 volumes of living and fossil barnacles of all known types from around the world during that time. Charles’ son Francis would famously ask of another child, “where does you father do his barnacles?”

It was not until 1830 that it was realized barnacles were crustaceans. Since they were shelled creatures, naturalists had considered them mollusks akin to mussels, snails and limpets. John Thompson followed the embryology and metamorphosis of barnacles and determined by their developmental characteristics that they were actually closely aligned to the crustaceans. Mollusks weren’t considered a metamorphosing species to Victorian naturalists.

The basic concept that Darwin wrapped his barnacle synthesis around – and even more so later in his Origin - was Richard Owen’s homology concept, meaning that characters were derived from shared ancestry. Owen was a powerful colleague and former mentor of sorts to Charles. Darwin had much respect for him and tried to work within Owen’s “archetype” framework, which was initially developed with vertebrates in mind. The archetype was a theoretical ancestor, a blueprint in the mind of the ‘creator’. Owen did not necessarily believe it existed but nonetheless thought it was a useful construct from which to understand his homology framework. Darwin, working within the archetype framework for barnacles, was able to systematically classify everything and place Cirripedia correctly as a subclass of the Crustacea, confirming Thompson’s earlier embryological observations.

One of the more interesting challenges to Darwin’s classification of barnacles was the issue of small “complimentary males”, as he called them. Not only did these dwarf males attach to the female, but some species had hermaphrodites with attached dwarf males as well! Because Charles was working within Owen’s homology paradigm, he viewed hermaphroditism as a major character in his barnacle classification and made some interesting, though erroneous, inferences. In his Victorian worldview, Darwin naturally saw the condition of having separate sexes as the most ‘highly evolved’ state, while rampant hermaphroditism must surely be the basal condition. But these curious parasitic dwarf males must be a transitional state between a hermaphroditic ancestor and the more ‘dignified’ separation of sexes.

“These parasites, I now can show, are supplemental males, the male organs in the hermaphrodite being unusually small, though perfect & containing zoosperms: so we have almost a polygamous animal, simple females alone being wanting. I never sh^d. have made this out, had not my species theory convinced me, that an hermaphrodite species must pass into a bisexual species by insensibly small stages, & here we have it, for the male organs in the hermaphrodite are beginning to fail, & independent males ready formed.” – Letter to J.D. Hooker May 10, 1848

Hooker was absolutely correct in suggesting to Darwin that he become an expert of a species prior to openly speculating on the subject. His eight years of focused, in-depth taxonomic study made Darwin keenly aware of the variation existing in nature. The choice of taxa enabled him to view strange morphology and reproductive strategies that may not have been as obvious as it was among barnacles. More importantly, his approach using homology helped to formulate three central components to the Origin: 1) shared ancestry of parts in related organisms, 2) loss of useless organs (i.e. abdominal segments and swimmerets in barnacles) and 3) transformation in function of homologous organs (i.e. thoracic limbs for walking into cirri for feeding).

Though Charles, like systemacists even today, had difficulty drawing the line between what is and what is not a species he was one of the first taxonomists to recognize the role of variation in studying species. Eight years spent studying variation and homology did indeed make him an expert in the “species question”. It confirmed his transmutationist views, gave him credibility in the face of Vestiges and the much contested views of Lamarck, and resulted in an award from his colleagues at the British Association for his extensive monographic work. These elements were important in securing the “political capital” needed once he was ready to unveil his tome on the origin of species by natural selection.

For more about Darwin and the barnacle years I highly recommend Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle. Darwin’s Study of the Cirripedia by Marsha Richmond was an invaluable resource for preparing for this talk.

* This post was previously published at Deep Sea News, 2010.

I’d like to tell y’all a little tale of a little shrimp from a little hydrothermal vent in a big ocean. You see, once upon a time I was a *real* marine biologist and got to go on lots of research cruises. Those were glorious days when I sailed out from exotic ports, drank the local flavors, backpacked around south Pacific islands and jammed with the crew up on top deck of research vessels under endless starry skies. The thrill of discovering something new always enticed me and I especially paid close attention to all the critters that were brought up from the depths. Years of observations and identifications has indeed twisted my mind so much that I dream about species. I seem to go about my daily routine as if it were being read from a dichotomous key (this may not be true).

I didn’t choose to find a new species of vent shrimp – it chose me. It was my first cruise for gathering material specifically for my masters thesis investigating how communities at deep-sea hydrothermal vents were structured. I was taking quantitative samples of mussel and snail beds for studying the role of foundation species in the vent community. Alvinocaridid shrimp are conspicuous members of these strange deep-sea environments and are found nearly worldwide. There are currently seven recognized genera. Alvinocaris lusca was the first to be described by the late Drs. Austin Williams and Fenner Chace Jr. in 1982 and this genus contains the most species, with 11 recognized species as of time of publication (2009). Alvinocaris literally means “Alvin’s shrimp”. Alvin is the name of the submersible that was used when the first hydrothermal vents were studied (lusca means “blinded”, referring to it’s degenerate, fused eyes), also made famous for being used to study the wreck of the Titanic.

This was an excellent species to learn taxonomy on. The characters were clear and unambiguous, few related species described to compare with, and my coauthor was a superb mentor who taught me many time-saving tricks while carefully coaching me to be a thorough, honest, and integrative scientist. The pieces really fell together with this species. The actual description of a species is very straight-forward and formulaic. The terminology has been in place for years. All that is needed is to fill in the blanks for your species and note any other distinguishing characteristics. Many taxonomists stop with the description and might add a paragraph of natural history notes. Naturally, I wanted to do more.

I felt it was important to understand the evolutionary context of this species. Thankfully, Dr. Tim Shank provided a comprehensive phylogeny of the shrimp family so GenBank was already populated with mitochondrial COI sequences. We sequenced a few individuals of our species, but the result wasn’t very clear. It appeared to be more basal to the genus, but statistical support wasn’t strong for its branch. In fact, COI appeared unreliable for clearing up the deeper relationships – a common problem with this molecule. A major multigene phylogeny is in the works by other colleagues that should clear up all the details in this important shrimp family.

Map of known hydrothermal vent study sites, produced by Dr. Maria Baker of the ChEss programme (2010).

Why is this group of shrimp so important anyways? It turns out that all Alvinocaridids (that’s family level for those keeping track) only live at chemosynthetic ecosystems, such as vents and methane seeps. The evolutionary history of this family should track their dispersal across the interconnected mid-ocean ridge system (see map above). Their endemicity to deep sea chemosynthetic environments makes them useful organisms to trace patterns of the historical dispersa of vent animals. In ecology, the unit of measurement is often the ‘species’, which is why it is important to describe and catalogue the distributions of all of Earth’s species. A more accurate prediction of historical processes can be determined as we add data to the tree of life.

My contribution will hopefully be useful to people working in vent biogeography and shrimp phylogenetics. To facilitate accurate identification of members of this shrimp family, I updated a dichotomous key of all 22 species that make up this happy crustaceous family.

The shrimp itself is really neat. A nice long, serrated rostrum adorns its head mimicking an 80s punk rocker loitering outside CBGB’s. The distinctive character that sets it apart from other Alvinocaris is a distinct notch in the middle of the tail, garnished with a nice set of spikes to puts Needleman to shame. My favorite part of writing this paper was making the line drawings. I took several detailed pictures under a dissecting microscope, mosaicked them together and traced the outlines in Adobe Illustrator, like below.

The 4th Pereopod (leg). High resolution, high magnification photos mosaicked together to form a sharp tracing image.

This is corroborated by actually looking at it under the scope to make sure I got every little hair and spine! The photos are great, especially for someone like me that lacks any drawing ability whatsoever, but can be misleading because you may be out of focus for very fine details. This is why I corroborate my line drawing with the actual specimen under the microscope. Its very important to get the details right in a species description, drawings such as these below may be critical for a worker to compare their sample with the species’ definition. The end result is a shrimp turned into art (in my humble opinion anyways!).

Alvinocaris komaii whole and line drawings of its body parts. Mouth parts (left, bottom) include from bottom Mandible, Maxillae 1 & 2, Maxillipeds 1-3. Pereopods (legs, bottom) 1-5 left to right, detail of the third pereopod given. An example of a Pleopod is given (right, middle), inset is the appendix masculina, or shrimp penis. The telson (right, top) the central part with the notch in the end, flanked by uropods.

Alvinocaris komaii is named after Dr. Tomoyuki Komai of the Natural History Museum and Institute, Chiba, Japan. It is a great honor to name a species after him. His extensive contributions have set the standard in descriptions of species in the family Alvinocarididae. Very thorough and accurate with detailed drawings and natural history observations. As he is nearing retirement, I was shocked to learn that he had not been yet honored by a specific epithet. It is appropriate then that a younger generation follow in his footsteps, but add on the techniques that we have “grown up” with,  such as phylogenetics.  There will always be a place for morphological systematics because species need a very specific definition if it is to be of use in evolutionary and ecological studies. The addition of genetics gives the individual being described a defined ‘barcode’ as well as a set of unique morphological characteristics appended to it, ensuring less ambiguity for future workers.

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Zelnio, K., & Hourdez, S. (2009). A New Species of Alvinocaris (Crustacea: Decapoda: Caridea: Alvinocarididae) from Hydrothermal Vents at The Lau Basin, Southwest Pacific, and a Key to The Species of Alvinocarididae Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 122 (1), 52-71 DOI: 10.2988/07-28.1

*This post was originally posted in 2009 at Deep Sea News.

I’m at Carteret General Hospital on North Carolina’s scenic Crystal Coast, where I live. My beautiful, precious 6 year old son was admitted this past Tuesday for Pneumonia. It started 6 days before on a Wednesday. He asked his kindergarten teacher if he could lay down. Odd behavior for such an outgoing kid, one of the class favorites who even at 6 already seems quite the ladies man with 2 Lilies, a Tanzania, and an Ellie running up to him each day when I drop him off for school. Along with 2 Charleses, these friends are just the ones we hear about! When I picked up him from school he was clearly exhausted and went to bed early without his dinner.

On Thursday we kept him home as he was obviously feverish and had flu like symptoms. He was getting worse, but then he tricked me on Sunday. He was looking a little better and was more responsive. We played for while, building bugs and monsters from blocks and putty, and chatting about how we should be getting the second season DVDs of Star Wars: The Clone Wars in the mail the next day. But that Monday [EDITED: Thanks to my wife for the clarification] night was horrible and he started vomiting every time we tried to give him medicine or liquids. He wasn’t eating and his fever was getting pretty high, up to 103. I drugged him the best I could with kid’s OTC meds and on Monday my wife and I attended to his needs however we could.

We should have taken him to the Urgent Care right then and there. But we didn’t.

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My poor decision-making capabilities in this regard was influenced by my lack of experience with any major disease (I have an immune system of steel, fortified by coffee and whisky), and our lack of insurance. My family includes four of the 49.1 million uninsured people in the United States. I’ve comforted myself that we couldn’t afford private insurance, which we can’t, but at least we were all relatively healthy and never seemed to have problems.

That was until my eldest started kindergarten this Fall. Now he is frequently at home for a few days with colds or mild flus. Still it’s nothing that popsicles, Dimetapp and a bunch of TLC can’t take care of. I work from home as a consultant and writer, so it didn’t bother me too much if and when I get infected, plus I am there to help my family when they fall ill.

But recently my mindset has become affected by our position. I tell my kids not to do things that I certainly enjoyed doing as a kid, like don’t climb high on trees, run a little slower on the trail, watch out for roots and stones! It’s not just the usual parental concern either. I’m consciously thinking “oh my god, I cannot afford to fix them if they get broke!”.

This is the luxury gap between the between the 20% of nonelderly americans who are uninsured and the rest. The luxury is, of course, being able to just walk into a doctor’s office and see them at the appropriate times. It is easy to discount this minority since most are at or near the poverty line. But many of the uninsured are like myself and just can’t seem to make the numbers work for a family of four each month by adding on private individual (i.e. non-group discounted) health insurance. Especially when you factor in the myriad other insurances we already pay: renter’s or home, wind and hail, flood, car, life, etc. It’s not that we are irresponsible, but the numbers. just. don’t. work.

When I started my family 6 years ago, I was on a path to a career in research and teaching. We had amazing health insurance through my institution and my wife and children-to-be were generously covered, no-questions-asked by the state of Pennsylvania during, and a year after, the pregnancies. We never saw a bill. After I got “real jobs” upon completing my Masters degree, I entered a grey zone of contract teaching and research employment at universities. With a decent, regular salary we were ineligible for state aid, yet didn’t make enough to afford extra costs. Furthermore, the quality of the insurance kept lowering until I wasn’t even sure what I was paying for – even as the premium costs were rising.

It reached rock bottom last Spring when we attempted to actually use our insurance  that I bought for $1400 every six months while a contract lecturer and beginning PhD student at a North Carolinian university. My boy was starting Kindergarten and needed to be current on his vaccines. Of course, both kids needed to be current, so we took them in one-by-one, got their shots and check-ups, handed over the insurance information, paid our co-pay and went on our way. Never thinking about it, assuming that insurance would do the job we paid them to do.

Exactly 6 months later we received bills, after I no longer had insurance (I had to leave my phd for variety of reasons), and addressed to our kids’ names and not mine, the policy holder, for substantial amounts. Apparently, my daughter owed over $400 and my son owed over $1600 to the doctor office, which was the net left over after the insurance contributed about $200 for each visit.

Naturally, I was dumbfounded. I already paid $1400, which I had to ask my department head for an advance to cover their own insurance (there were no monthly payment plans offered by the way), but they only covered about 20% of the medical bills? Ironically, as an uninsured I would have been able to get a discounted rate and probably pay less than the amount I actually owed after the insurance company gave their dues.

I still don’t understand it and they are unwilling to work with me. Hence, the bills have gone to a collection agency. I’m refusing to pay for the time being and my kids, at 4 and 6, have their first negative credit rating. Presumably, anyways, since the idiots never fixed the billing information.

This burn, though, has contributed to a deep mistrust in the insurance industry, further feeding my indignations about acquiring individual care – of course we couldn’t afford the monthly premiums anyways so the point is moot.

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By Tuesday we weren’t left with any choice. My son had just gotten out of a bath and though he wasn’t cold, his hand and his feet were blue. I’d never seen it like that before. My wife laid it down and we were going to the Urgent Care. We all got dressed and heading over there early. He was miserable, crying in pain cause he couldn’t get enough oxygen. We were scared that we might have waited too long. Hyperventilations were eking their way out.

At Urgent Care, it is first-come first-served. We waited, about 3rd in line, while my son writhed in his mother’s lap. My daughter, being too young, fooled around and chattered, clueless to the gravity of the situation. He whispered to his mother that he couldn’t breathe. In a desperate voice she urged me to tell the receptionist. I got up and pathetically explained, “excuse me, but my son is having trouble breathing. He says he can’t breathe.” The receptionist must have seen the scare in my eyes and she hastily called back to nurses to go into the waiting room and check on us. It was apparent that we weren’t exaggerating and we will be forever grateful that they took our plea seriously.

After an initial screening by the nurses and the doctor on-call, who first diagnosed the pneumonia based on symptoms and lung sounds, they sent us across the street to the Emergency Room. But, in fact, it was my wife who first recognized all the symptoms and was our little wonder boy’s advocate. She had pneumonia 12 years ago and nearly wasted away from it. It took years to recover her strength and more of her lung capacity. She made that diagnosis and I didn’t want to believe it, because I knew a hospital visit was going to financially crush us. I never said it, I can’t guarantee I even was thinking it at the time. But that is part of the mindset when you are uninsured. You don’t need to consciously think about it, the nagging dollar bill is waved in front of your eyes every time a health concern surfaces.

The x-rays confirmed our fears, he had a very large mass of pneumonia in his right lung. Right in the area he was trying to tell me earlier was hurting him. Right in the area that I so foolishly shrugged off as “probably just sore from all the coughing”. Subsequent tests showed the culprit, Streptococcus pneumoniae, was in his blood cultures as well. So this microbial nemesis, who felled thousands of our ancestors only a hundred years ago – so much so that by 1918 it surpassed Tuberculosis as the leading cause of death until the wide use of antibiotics – has infected the blood stream of my beloved son.

The symptoms of pneumonia have changed little as described by the famous medical scholar Hippocrates, who wrote in the 4th century BCE: “If the fever be acute, and if there be pains on either side, or in both, and if expiration be if cough be present, and the sputa expectorated be of a blond or livid color, or likewise thin, frothy, and florid, or having any other character different from the common.[...]” It does not sounds pleasant, nor is it.

By a stroke of luck, the strain he is battling off is one of the weaker strains, easily killed by Amoxicillin, an affordable antibiotic. Under the close supervision of an extraordinary group of nurses and pediatricians, the Amazing Elliot has made a wonderful recovery and will hopefully go home tomorrow morning. He couldn’t be happier. He woke up this morning sad with tears welling up in his eyes. He must have drawn about a dozen pictures of himself outside with his dog Peaches under the sun. Being in a hospital, even for a handful of days, is wearisome and he’s had enough. Especially since he feels good right now and sick of the beeping sensors and tangled tubes, sick of having me fetch to jug for him when he has to pee – which seems to happen hourly thanks to the constant IV drip.

My son outside in the sunshine, with his dog Peaches and the get well balloons his Uncle Ryan sent him. Drawn on my Kindle Fire doodle app.

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The mindset of being uninsured is not , well… reassuring. It causes you to take risks that your peers do not need to take. It creates a perpetual fear that anything you do will eat up your life savings or kill you. Indeed, it has for us on one occasion. Nearly a decade ago when my wife was in constant pain for over a day, and after she could not take it anymore, I rushed her to emergency room. They had no clue, it was a worthless visit. They just looked at us dumbfounded and tried to get her to take antibacterials and be on her way. They even did unnecessary x-rays.

All of that was of course billed to us. We had saved up for 4 years to visit her family in Sweden. Every last cent, about $4000 was wiped clean. Apparently the practice of fleecing the uninsured was a commonplace action at this central Californian hospital and we were part of class action lawsuit against them. So many people were involved and the lawyers’ fees so high that we barely recovered anything from it.

Despite my mistrust of the insurance industry, its not like I wouldn’t jump at the chance to grab affordable coverage. But the coverage I am offered as a self-employed citizen scales with how much I’m willing to pay. For a lot of money, my family can be 80%+ covered. Like I said before, these numbers just don’t work. Though our expenditures are low, I don’t make enough money. For less money we can be covered for emergency situations. But how do I know they will keep their end of the bargain? Even if I get scraped out of a $1000, it’s sadly not enough to fight over in court given the costs involved in that battle.

Being uninsured is an entrapment. And you know it’s a trap but you have no choice but to proceed, which means you sometimes proceed overcautiously. This is why the mindset is different. It’s not overprotection of the children as much as it is the overprotection of the family unit – keeping us and our lifestyle intact.

Most of the uninsured in this country aren’t lazy, freeloading hobos who don’t wanna work. They span a wide variety of demographics. As a 30 something, white male with advanced college degree who works full time as a self-employed consultant and writer are you surprised that I cannot afford health insurance for my family? In fact, the majority of uninsured are in my age range and are full or part time workers earning incomes above 100% the federal poverty level. The fact of the matter for many of the uninsured is that employment-sponsored coverage has been in decline due to the escalating costs of health care. Employers can’t remain competitive and pay double the costs they were paying a decade ago for insuring their workers. An October 2011 report from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured found that

“Job-based coverage has been gradually declining since 2000, even during years when the economy was stronger and growth in health insurance premiums was slowing.  From 2007 to 2010, the percentage of the nonelderly population with employer-sponsored coverage declined by approximately 5%.[...] Even when workers can afford coverage for themselves, the cost of health insurance for their families is often prohibitive. Employees in firms with many low-wage workers are typically asked to contribute a larger share of the insurance premium than employees of firms with fewer low-wage workers (38% vs. 27% of the premium costs for family coverage). Declines in dependent coverage accounted for more than half of the recent decline in employer-sponsored insurance.”

Uninsured people look just like everyone else. They might look like they can easily afford the premiums and in fact might earn salaries similar to yours. But every family’s situations and employment-based coverage options are unique and this goes far beyond stereotypes of the “working poor”. My son could have suffocated from his pneumonia had we not sucked it up and rushed him to the hospital on Tuesday morning. If we were able to see a doctor a day earlier, he perhaps could have been treated at home as an outpatient with antibiotics. I don’t know what our final bill will be when we leave tomorrow morning, right now I don’t care. All I know is my son got better under the supervision of a wonderful team of nurses and pediatricians. My community has income-based charity care which will hopefully reduce our bill to a much more manageable sum. All minor details when the stakes are as high as your children’s lives. Plus, we can sleep in beds without motors.

**Graphs in this post are from the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured’s report The Uninsured: A Primer, Key Facts About Americans Without Health Insurance, October 2011. Pdf available for download here.

Below is a guest post from my colleague Dr. Michael S. Rosenberg (msr at asu dot edu) who is an associate professor at Arizona State University. I think he has an interesting perspective in this discussion that can contribute to broader questions of redefining academia. The opinions expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily represent those of the university.

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Like many scientists, I’ve been thinking about the proposed “Research Works Act” (RWA) and its threat to public access of publicly paid for research. Many others have already written about this much more eloquently than I am likely to, but I want to share some thoughts on some of the proposed solutions/fallout that may occur because of this act (regardless of whether it passes or not).¹

For a number of years, a number of open access advocates have been calling for a boycott of pay-to-read (closed-access) journals, and such calls have (rightfully) increased since the RWA was proposed (e.g., Michael Eisen in a recent NY Times opinion piece). This mimics a similar, but less vocal, call for boycotting reviewing for-profit journals in favor of non-profit journals. There are numerous arguments made for this second boycott, but one of the most common boils down to the question of why should you donate your time as a reviewer to help a business earn a profit, when they are not paying or rewarding you in any way for your time. The for-profit/non-profit distinction is somewhat independent from the open-access/closed-access models. If one considers these, we essentially have a 2×2 grid of possibilities (the journals listed are simply examples):

 

(Note: there is a third option in the open/closed access axis, which is journals which have an option for open-access, meaning some articles are open and some are closed, depending on whether the researcher had the money/willingness to pay for open-access. Since most articles published in these journals end up as closed-access (a completely off-the-cuff and data-free assessment by myself), it’s unclear to me if having the option for open-access relieves them of the guilt-by-association with fully closed-access journals).

It is very clear that all of us socialist, anti-capitalist, liberal, East coast, elite, ivory tower scientists would prefer the open-access/non-profit journals (such as PLoS) and would reject the for-profit/closed-access journals, if given a choice (although to be realistic, how many would reject Science and Nature if given an opportunity?). Whether most people would generally prefer open-access/for-profit over closed-access/non-profit is an interesting question, but not the point of where I’m heading.

When one thinks about boycotting a journal, as far as I can tell, there are three primary ways one can do so: (1) refuse to review for the journal; (2) refuse to publish in the journal; (3) refuse to subscribe to the journal. I’m going to ignore the third, because most journals that we, as scientists, access are subscribed to by our university library, making a boycott less of an individualized decision.² The first two have more interesting issues.

Let’s start with reviewing. As has been pointed out by many, reviewing is a process that is generally uncompensated, but is absolutely essential for all journals to function. Reviewers are donating their time for no benefit other than service to the scientific community, and reviewing is an expectation of the job, thus someone who never did reviews would be looked on unfavorably when administrative decisions such as hiring, promotion, tenure, or raises are made. While it may be relatively easy to refuse to review for all for-profit journals, cutting off non-profit journals which are closed-access becomes somewhat more difficult because many of these are part of the centerpiece of societies which you may heavily support.

I have recently become an associate editor for a society-based journal which I believe is quite important, but the journal is not full open-access (it has the additional-pay option) and is currently published through a contract with a for-profit publisher (the specific publisher potentially changes every few years when contracts are renewed). Is this open or closed access? Do I view this as a for-profit company or a non-profit society? Is the semi-closed access nature enough to override support for an extremely important society? I’ve heard nothing from the society about the RWA (unlike the pro-RWA stand taken by the ESA group and the anti-RWA stand taken by the International Society for Computational Biology) (I’m rather certain the publisher supports it). Where should one draw the line? At this point I see no good reason to boycott the society journal, although I’d prefer to see them contract with a different publisher when the next contract comes due.

The most difficult issue is the second one listed, refusing to publish in a journal. There simply aren’t that many quality open access journals (I do not count the Bentham Open spam/scam journals, and you shouldn’t either), and they do not necessarily cover a wide enough range of topics. But “what about PLoS ONE?” you ask, which will publish almost anything on any field if it is judged sound science. Well, that sounds great in theory. Except that PLoS ONE does not publish reviews. Or commentary. Or opinions. In fact, I am not aware of any open-access outlet for these sorts of works, and one cannot simply claim that reviews are not important, while commentary and opinions can simply be posted on blogs. Reviews can be critically important works, and the vast majority of blogs are completely ignored; even the popular ones are (usually) not viewed as scholarly output when it comes to administrative overview. Maybe the solution is for PLoS ONE to open its door a bit, or maybe there needs to be a new journal called something like PLoS Reviews. Sometimes where you chose to publish is not about prestige, but about reaching the right target audience. In many cases open-access journals for that audience simply do not exist. At this time, I simply cannot limit all of my submissions to PLoS or BMC journals (the two primary open-access publishers that I am aware of) and expect my career to continue to move forward.

In the end, this is one of the biggest problems with the call for boycott (the biggest one is simply getting enough people to sign on and stick to it). No matter how well intentioned we are, currently there simply are not enough valid options to cover all of our publishing needs if the closed-access (and to a lesser extent, for-profit) journals are ignored. In some sense it is a shame; if anything was ever going to get enough scientists riled up to truly make a formidable boycott of closed-access journals, the RWA is that event. But it is not clear to me that there are enough valid open-access alternatives to support the very scientists who would be on the front-line of the boycott. It’s sort of like calling for a boycott of the local cable company when you live an area with poor satellite and antenna reception. It sounds great in principle, and who doesn’t hate their cable company, but for some people, the only alternative is no television at all (many may view this as a good thing, but that’s an entirely separate issue).

Personally, I’d love to support only open-access non-profit journals. But are they ready to support me in return?³

¹As an aside, even though I agree with them, I’m vaguely amused at the arguments that the act double-charges the American public for access to research they’ve paid for…how is this any different than the fact the government gives money to both businesses and universities to conduct research that they can patent and charge the public to use. Is access to an article describing publicly-funded research more valuable than access to a drug developed through publicly-funded research? If the government invested in the research, shouldn’t they get a cut of the profit (and thereby reducing the tax-burden/deficit) the way any private investor would?

²The primary reason non-profit, closed-access journals are worried about open-access is that they are generally society journals and their operational funding comes almost entirely from societal membership fees, which often include a subscription to the society journal. There are any number of reasons a young scientist may join a society, but in the pre-PDF-on-the-internet days, one of the big motivations was access to the journal (having to share an important paper journal at the library was not always convenient). The journal subscription could be viewed as the gateway drug to get graduate students hooked onto the society proper. With most journals now available on the internet, young scientists (in the United States, at least) often have access to closed-access journals through their university library, allowing them to download PDF’s they are interested in for no cost to themselves. The main motivation that many had for joining a society has been removed. A number of the societies which I’m familiar with (although not all) have seen a regular decrease in new memberships from young scientists over the last 5-10 years, and the societies blame (whether rightly or wrongly) internet dissemination of the journals as a major factor (even closed-access dissemination). The societies which are not seeing this decline presumably provide a perceived benefit beyond the journal which is still attractive to young scientists; perhaps access to research awards or honors, important scientific advocacy, etc. Rather than clamoring against open-access, the societies which are suffering should focus on providing better services and opportunities to their members in order to keep the society membership high and entice young scientists to join.

³For the record, I believe about 12-15% of my peer-reviewed journal publications have been published in an open-access journal or were published as open-access for an extra fee. If one looks at just the last six years, the number goes up to about 33%.

NCSE is best know for fighting creationism in schools and provided crucial assistance during the landmark Dover Trial and battles over intelligent design legislation throughout several states. Now, they are turning their attention to climate change denial – a wholly other beast! See this brief video below.

The fight over evolution and intelligent design/creationism was essentially a legal one hinging on a loose definition of religion entering public school classrooms. Naturally, there is much more to it than that, but i want to make a point that the climate change denial fight is not necessarily a legal battle much like the the religious infiltration of ID was. This makes it a much more difficult fight! It is mostly an education campaign, not a legal campaign. Curiously, though, the tactics of climate change deniers are all too familiar! They have borrowed and mirrored many of the strategies (and in fact, people) from ID proponents.

I’ve long been a supporter of NCSE when I could afford membership. I think it’s time to make that small financial sacrifice once again to support their noble efforts at improving the standards of science education in America. If you think this is about single issues, like teaching evolution or climate change in grade school, then you are dead wrong. This is about the deceitful infiltration of an anti-science politico-cultural agenda into the most vulnerable sector of society, our nations publicly-funded schools. The country can regain its prominence as a science beacon in the world once again, but it takes organisations like NCSE to help and ordinary citizens like you and I to care.

UPDATE: Steve Mirksy has a podcast interview with Eugenie Scott about this new initiative from NCSE right here on Scientific American! Some really great points made by Eugenie by about parallels between evolution and climate change denialism.

*Earth photo credit: Modified from a NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli