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

Of course, scientists are as much to blame. We buy into this crappy system, convince ourselves it works and refuse to consider alternative models cause such out-of-the-box thinking, while occasionally praised among scientists, is not rewarded by the system of tenure and promotion in academia. The paper becomes the final product, a measurable unit whose value is not in the contents it holds and the progress it promises, but whose value is characterized by unscientific traits such as the title of the journal that contains it and a useless metric with artificial flavoring that has a value in and of itself that is wholly irreproducible. The paper is NOT the final product. Science doesn’t end at publication, it continues.

As H.R. 3699 was clearly a bill written to increase the profits of the publishing industry, it came as no surprise to me to find the Copyright Alliance’s glowing support cross my eyeballs tonight. It goes a little further than the vaporous AAP release in supporting the Research Works Act and denigrates scientific integrity, insults the government and taxpayers, and wades knee-high into irrelevant points. Below is their text with my comments in bold:

“The Copyright Alliance praises U.S. Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) for their bipartisan introduction of H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act. The proposal would overturn an unprecedented federal government taking of copyrights from certain authors and researchers.”

WRONG. Authors and researchers voluntarily give up their profits as required by most for-profit publishers once a paper is accepted for publication. The government is not taking away copyrights, the publishers make scientists sign it over. Many open access publications, though, allow authors to retain copyright and utilize Creative Commons licensing.

“Providing a federal grant to fund a research project should not enable the federal government to commandeer and freely distribute a subsequently published private sector peer-reviewed article. But a 2008 mandate at the National Institutes of Health requires just that – disregarding the significant value added by the private-sector publisher whose activities are not funded by the government.”

WRONG. Funding agencies have every right to impose restrictions on their funds. It’s their money, their rules. In fact, I can’t recall ever signing a contract that DIDN’T have some conditions on it. Using language like “commandeer” and “freely distribute” is misleading. What if the money were from a private foundation instead of the government? On the other hand, publishing companies are free to disagree with the policy and not publish government funded research because of this requirement. It is also free to charge higher fees to offset this. That is their decision as profit-driven vehicles. But it does not have a right to tell the funder how recipients should spend their money. From the moment a researcher gets a grant accepted up to the moment they send off a manuscript  for review, publishers have nothing to do with a funder’s money.

Additionally, the NIH mandate does nothing to “disregard” private-sector’s added value. It was a major concession to private industry to allow open access after one year, recognizing that it does add value by administrating, editing, printing and distributing the work, in addition to managing the peer review process. During the first year of a publication’s life is when access requests would be strongest anyways. In fact, during the few years that the NIH policy has been in place, profits of at least one major academic publisher haven’t changed in at least decade from 30-40% operating profit margin.

“This is counterproductive for several reasons: it is not fair to other investors in the research, if there are any;”

Irrelevant. As I mentioned above, each funder has every right to put conditions on their money. Receiving money is a privilege won by submitting proposals, and if there are multiple funding sources for a research work with conflicting requirements it is between the researcher and funder to work out – not the publisher. This is creating a problem that doesn’t exist.

“it arbitrarily limits the value of the copyright in the article for the author and publisher, and harms the publisher’s investments in ensuring a quality publication; and, it results in reduced incentives for both these groups to publish peer-reviewed articles explaining the nature and results of government-funded research in a manner that ultimately harms society when the investment in publication dries up due to lack of ability to recover their costs.

Misleading. Author’s copyright is often irrelevant cause it is typically signed over to the publisher. But, yes publisher’s investments are harmed because they can no longer continue earning a profit after 12 months. Yet, they can still charge for access to the article at their own website. They are merely required to deposit a copy of the research work in a public repository, like PubMedCentral.

The quality of the publication lies in the content of the article not the processing, editing, and distribution. I do not include peer review because it is done for free by other researchers. The quality of peer review varies no matter how “prestigious” you think your publication is. This is shown time and again through the process of retraction. I fail to see how there will ever be “reduced incentives” for publishing peer-reviewed literature. It is a process borne out of the scientific method, not the publishing industry. It will exist in some form regardless of publishing company-written legislation, as shown by the immense popularity of the PLoS One journal’s method of pre-publication peer review for technical accuracy and post-publication peer review for impact, technicalities or anything else for that matter.

Finally, the ultimate irony of the last sentence is that the Copyright Alliance fails to understand what “ultimately harms society” is lack of access to the research works themselves! That last statement shows how little they actually are aware of emerging internet technologies. Let’s say worst case scenario is that there is NO MORE MONEY EVER for publishing research results. Its Armageddon for the publishing industry and they all folded because of overblown government restrictions on their 30+% profit margins. What is preventing researchers from posting their results to publicly available online repositories like say… their personal webpages, or arxiv, or PLoS (which conveniently offers full or partial fee wavers if you do not have funds to cover publishing costs while managing to be profitable after only seven years)? The message is not the medium, folks.

This is just typical copyright lobby and publishing industry fear-mongering. So long as people buy into the Impact Factor scam they will always have business, but they aren’t satisfied there. They’ve watched PLoS and BMC grow and know how popular and successful they’ve become. They know the way of the future is open access so they are now trying at every turn to force the government’s legislative hand to skew the rules so that they can continues embezzling government funds through the guise of research works publication.

“This reversal of centuries of copyright law occurred without input from the affected communities, and without benefit of oversight by congressional committees with expertise and responsibility for copyright laws and enforcement.

This bipartisan bill ensures that privately-funded research works that describe or interpret federal research and are intended for public publishing will receive that treatment, and preserves the rights of research funders and publishers.”

Copyright law is not reversed! Copyright law remains as it ever has. If for-profit publishers’ do not like the demands placed by government funders, which are enacted in the interest of its constituents, they are free to jack up the costs or refuse government funded research works. Then they can sit back and see if the market forces like this or not and we will finally see how researchers value artificial prestige over broad, efficient dissemination. Like any industry, innovate or die.

Another ill-conceived press release in support of this damaging piece of legislation filled with misleading statements and half-truths designed to provide talking points and ammo to sympathetic congress members who have their pockets lined by publishing company lobbyists. Let’s not let them embezzle our payroll wages under the guise of providing artificial services that can by provided by other, more forward-thinking institutions who believe in providing taxpayer access to their paid-for deliverables and lack such revolting disdain for our government acting in its citizens’ interests. Follow up with the chatter on Research Works Act HR 36999 over at John Dupuis’ blog, who has archived all the reports, news and opinion concerning this issue and write your congressman and implore them to support their constituents’ access to material they have rightfully paid for.

Scientists’ idealism is honorable, and genuinely heartfelt. Few other groups of people really do want the change the world in such a positive, progressive manner. Yet, in a twist of irony, few other groups who prize evidence and free thought systematically follow dogmatic traditions that are directly in conflict with their idealistic world view. Why are some of the smartest people in the country allowing publishing companies to fleece them, their institutions and libraries, the federal government and the american taxpayers of their money?

Sadly, what is occurring is not illegal, but to the average person it might sound like a fine line between fee-for-service and embezzlement of taxpayer money. Scientists, at least those receiving federal and state grants, are awarded taxpayer’s money based on merit of proposals by a groups of their peers. This money is managed through academic institutions and when it comes time to publish these results in the peer-reviewed literature, fees are paid out to private, profit-driven publishing companies. The publishing companies provide editorial assistance and the peer review process and once accepted, print it out or make the works available online and ship copies to subscribers. There is nothing wrong about providing fees for service, but these publishing companies then charge the same academic and federal institutions and the taxpayers who provided the initial funds for the research to access the information that they paid for.

Herein lies the paradox. Consider an investment broker who takes clients’ money offshore evading the United States tax system and then charges their clients fees to access their own money and to merely look at their portfolio or balance. Not a perfect analogy, and not entirely illegal perhaps, but it smells just as funny. This is why there are groups of people, not only scientists, that insist on open access of publication results and data for taxpayer-funded research. Who else wants access to research besides scientists? Non-profit groups with strapped budgets, advocacy groups for patient rights, teachers and students at grade schools or even non-research universities, journalists and writers working on news stories or books, etc. – all are participants of the knowledge ecosystem along with the researchers. Many are indeed taxpaying United States citizens who have actually helped to fund the research they desperately need access to.

In 2008, the National Institutes of Health recognized the irony and proclaimed that all federally-funded research publications be made openly accessible. They even provide a repository (PubMedCentral) and a gave researchers (and publishing companies) a generous leeway up to 12 months post-publication to accomplish this. The publishing companies still had a year to make money off the research and taxpayers would eventually get to read relevant research results after an arguably reasonable period.

Not satisfied with this compromise, though, the American Association of Publisher’s, has been fighting back and curiously appear to have secured a few members of Congress in their back pocket. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduce HR3699, the “Research Works Act“, into Congress just before Christmas. And it not a tenuous link that Maloney and Issa both  received donations from major publishing companies in 2011 and ended year introducing this short, and potentially misleading, bit of text intended “to ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.” It reads as follows:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

As with any legislation, language is always very important. As Dr. Michael Eisen pointed out on his personal blog, “this bill would not only end the NIH’s Public Access Policy, but it would forbid any effort on the part of any agency to ensure taxpayer access to work funded by the federal government.” Additionally, the part about the “private-sector” refers to any non-governmental research. In this manner, universities would be regarded more as independent contractor and their research works would thus be non-governmental and part of the “private sector”.

Speaking of language, the text of the AAP’s press release commending the legislation is mind-bogglingly superfluous! Is there really rogue peer review out there that needs protecting against? Where Tom Allen, president and CEO and AAP notes, “The professional and scholarly publishing community thanks Representatives Issa and Maloney for supporting their significant investments that fund innovations and enable the essential peer-review process maintaining the high standards of U.S. scientific research.” It is disingenuous at best to connect the free, open dissemination of publicly-funded research works with standards of peer review and innovation. If anything, the taint of profit-driven shenanigans causes a detriment to the credibility of research and peer review.

The AAP even goes so far as to boldly state “Journal articles are widely available in major academic centers, public libraries, universities, interlibrary loan programs and online databases. Many academic, professional and business organizations provide staffs and members with access to such content.” Being widely available is not the same thing as being widely accessible! If you offer something on the internet, by definition it is widely available. This blog is widely available since internet connections exist in most countries around the world. But locking research works behind paywalls makes them widely inaccessible and not just geographically either as anyone without the means (poor people -which are historically minorities; cash-strapped nonprofits, teachers and students; etc.) is effectively barred from knowledge that they financially contributed to, in a collective sense, through tax payments.

So, we are where I started this conversation, why do the some of the smartest people in country allowing this to happen? I think Danah Boyd put it best in a pointed rant on saving ideas, not the publishing industry

But what pisses me off to no end is that the same Marxist academics who pooh-pooh corporations justify their own commitment to this blood-sucking process with one word: tenure. Not like that is the end of the self-justifications. Even once scholars get tenure, they continue down the same path – even when not publishing with students – by telling themselves it’s for promotion or because grants require it or because of any other status-seeking process.

With the rise of at least two prominent open access publishing companies, Public Library of Science and BioMedCentral, with an assortment of general and niche topic science publications, there is little excuse to support this institutionalized fleecing. In fact, as the blog for the Association of College and Research Libraries notes, there are several ways we can be break out of the vicious cycle, produce noteworthy publications in popular, highly-accessed and openly available journals. The fact of the matter remains that the large, profit-driven scientific publishing companies are touting an unsustainable and outdated model and failing to innovate their own industry. Instead, they are pumping thousands of dollars into politicians to enact legislation making it more difficult for individuals and institutions to access research works. In fact, we’ve seen the initial dying throws of the industry as it spews out dozens of new, highly-specialized journals to target ever more niche audiences.

There is one thing that we all need to do, though. If you have ever supported science, if you rely on research works for your advocacy group or non-profit (medical, environmental, etc.), if you are scientist who understands how precious every research dollar is, or even if you are a taxpayer concerned about publishing companies double-dipping (remember, many public universities’ libraries are publicly-funded to some extent!) you need to get off you ass and get involved right now! The Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP) puts out calls for comments on science and technology related legislation. Guess who answered the call? Private publishing companies. Guess who did not answer the call? Scientists.

In fact, since no scientists commented on 2 recent calls and the deadlines were extended. One, Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research, unfortunately just passed (was extended to January 12!). I do not think that should stop you from making a comment though, perhaps to your elected representatives. The other, Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research, is still accepting comments through January 12. If you are unhappy with something, it is incumbent upon you to do your part to change things. I hope readers will join me in contacting representatives Maloney and Issa and sharing why we think limiting access to taxpayer-funded research is a bad idea for our nation.

————————————————————————————–

UPDATE: Jonathan Eisen just published a post about a highly disturbing letter from the Ecological Society of America to the White House OSTP in regard to Open Access publishing. He lays it out thoroughly so I won’t rehash it here, but definitely worth a read!

In my opinion, the problem is two-fold. Connecting people to the benefits of conservation – why it is in THEIR interest – and marketing the concept to industry and government. Both of these involve how we communicate these concepts to the public. At the core of this is how do people respond to messaging strategies. Wallace J. Nichols wrote a wonderful essay on Oceanophilia in 2009 where he urged that we need to more strongly grasp the neurological basis for conservation in order to really take a foothold on this issue.

“Economists, marketers and politicians recognize that deep-seated, inscrutable emotions, not rationality, are what rule human behavior. Aided by cognitive neuroscientists, these fields have begun to understand how our deepest, most primordial emotions drive virtually every decision we make, from what we buy to the candidates we elect.  To my way of thinking, if the lessons of cognitive neuroscience can be used for the crass purposes of influencing what people buy and how they vote, why not use such knowledge for ocean conservation?  I believe we can.  And, I believe we should.”

Ecosystem services are very real economic outcome from biodiversity conservation, but difficult to define and relate. The variety of benefits we receive extends not only to our personal well being (e.g. clean water, food, medicines, recreation), but also to protecting our property and infrastructure (e.g. coastal and soil reinforcement, storm buffer, flood prevention). These values are not easily calculable, though. Some services are obvious, such as food, raw materials, erosion prevention and soil formation. Others are less obvious, such as nutrient cycling, climate regulation, and genetic resources. Over a decade ago, Constanza and colleagues (1997) attempted to evaluate the worth of various ecosystem service categories by extensively reviewing the literature and their market value. While it is a very rough approximation, they estimated we receive about $33.3 trillion (in 1994 dollars) worth of services from the environment. A breakdown, courtesy of the World Resources Institute, is provided below to get a sense of the contributions.

This is clearly a vital component of the everyday components of modern human living. One of the major findings of the extensive Millenium Assessment report in 2003 was that “although many individuals benefit from the actions and activities that lead to biodiversity loss and ecosystem change, the costs borne by society of such changes is often higher.” In other words, the costs associated with human alterations to ecosystems are often high enough or irreversible such that the monetary impact is greater than benefit that we would receive. In the United States alone, the ecosystem services in Constanza and colleagues (1997) were valued at nearly twice the 1994 US gross national product of $18 trillion. This new way of thinking was revolutionary because we could communicate easily in the language of money – a language that most people can grasp. Or, at least, it should have been.

While the science was speaking to economics and ecology, the communication hasn’t changed in decades. Environmentalists often use a sort of awe and scare tactic. Lush, flowery edens with cascading waterfalls give way to barren, smoggy wastelands with dramatic narration, “What happens when this all goes away?”  The idea is that the viewer hopefully is shocked into submission and goes off and does something to save the planet. Most likely donate money to a cause or sign a petition to stop proposed environmentally harmful practices.

How can the sciences of economics and ecology merge to produce an appropriate message that people can relate to about protecting ecosystems and preserving biodiversity? Obviously, there is no easy answer and messages resonate differently with different types of people.  Negative messaging tells us that we out of control and there is something wrong with us and we can only be better if do X. Conversely, positive messaging empowers us, puts the decision-making control in our hands without telling us that we will be negatively impacted unless do X. Each communication strategy has its audience and can be context-dependent, but in many studies of health-changing behavior positive messaging tends to get better results.

But crafting a message for someone without understanding their social environment can be misleading. Many people will behave in ways that harm them, even if they know better, just because it is what the rest of their world is doing and they don’t want to stand out. Blanton and colleagues (2001) call this deviance-regulation. How people regulate themselves tends to be based more on perceived social consequences of conforming. To illustrate this, let me highlight one of the tests in the Blanton paper. They asked individuals how likely they are to get a flu shot (scale of 1 to 7, highest being most likely) after reading articles that framed the issue positively (getting the shot is a considerate and responsible thing to do) or negatively (people who do not get shots are selfish, careless, and irresponsible). Another article that was read set the stage for the normative behavior in the population as either healthy (most got the shot) or unhealthy (only a few got the shot).

As you can see, people reacted more strongly to the deviant message frame. That is, when the behavior was the norm, negative messaging garnered a stronger response. On the other hand, when behavior was not the norm positive messaging garnered the stronger response. The message is placed in the context of what the rest of the target population’s social environment is doing. This is a powerful concept for understanding why negative message campaigns are not always working in biodiversity protection. Take for instance the following video trailer for the feature-length documentary, The Call of Life. It evokes a world in peril entirely caused by human activities. Though it appears well-produced and features many respected and well-known scientific individuals, it is classic environmentalist negative messaging.

Who is the audience of this film? Is it intended for the fence-sitting public? If we understand their message in the context of deviance-regulation, this film would do well in a population that was supportive of biodiversity loss protection. Unfortunately, that is not the case in the United States. People tend to be split on environmental issues down political lines (with notable exceptions, of course) and this country is more or less split fairly evenly along the political spectrum. So, this message will resonate with half of the population, except that is in the half that already lives in a world where they supportive about biodiversity loss prevention. In other words, they are preaching to the choir.

Environmental messages need to break through the communication barrier to the other half of the population that doesn’t know that they care about the environment. Since they are not supportive of the issue, negative messaging does not easily sway them. And this is where I believe ecosystem services valuation can play a much stronger role. Those who are unsupportive of biodiversity loss issues are more than likely to be supportive of saving money and property, uncovering new medical advances or more efficiently and safely gathering raw materials. This is positive messaging. By changing your behavior – going against the norm – they view themselves trendsetters, improving their lives.

Blanton, H., Stuart, A., & Van den Eijnden, R. (2001). An Introduction to Deviance-Regulation Theory: The Effect of Behavioral Norms on Message Framing Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27 (7), 848-858 DOI: 10.1177/0146167201277007

Costanza, R., d’Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farber, S., Grasso, M., Hannon, B., Limburg, K., Naeem, S., O’Neill, R., Paruelo, J., Raskin, R., Sutton, P., & van den Belt, M. (1997). The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital Nature, 387 (6630), 253-260 DOI: 10.1038/387253a0

Jenolan Caves, Australia. CC licensed image courtesy of flickr user avlxyz.

While the deep-sea may be the final frontier for marine biologists, caves remain one of the most elusive frontiers on (or rather, under) the land. Some caves extend dozens of miles below the ground in endless, sinuous networks all but cut off from the grassy hills and tree-lined horizons above. It’s not an easy environment to access and many explorers have perished attempting to map these subterranean labyrinths. Yet, for the last couple decades in particular, investigations keep finding astonishing communities of invertebrates inhabiting caves and existing nowhere else.

Nestled in Australia’s stunning Blue Mountain range is the 350 million year old Jenolan Caves Karst Conservation Reserve. Here, the base of the invertebrate community consists of decaying leaf litter. Historically, eucalyptus trees, which are native to the area, contributed most to the leaf litter pool. Over the years, introduced trees – like European sycamore brought in to stabilize steep, rocky slopes and North American Monterey pine planted for the timber industry – have naturalized around the cave opening.

To understand what effects the differences in leaf little composition have on cave communities, Hills and colleagues measured the rate of leaf litter decay and invertebrate diversity among the 3 leaf litter pools in “twilight” areas (i.e. nearer to cave openings) and “deep” areas (i.e. where the cave is always dark). The most rapidly decayed leaves were of the introduced Sycamore, which suggests their leaves release more carbon and nutrients into the cave ecosystem. Additionally, there was no difference in leaf decay rate between “twilight” and “deep” leaf litter, so it appears it doesn’t matter how close the litter is to above-ground features like light, rain and wind.

~Interlude~

Before discussing the rest of study, stand up and stretch, take a deep breathe and now sit back in your chair and relax… Close your eyes and envision a cave. Its dark, moist, there is only one small opening. All that remains of it is a singularity of daylight. It gets smaller as you glide further away. For thousands of years this cave has been fed organic matter from whatever vegetation surrounds it. Trees like the eucalyptus abound among the limestone hills, shedding off their leaves which casually drift on a wisp of wind towards the opening of the cave. Each day, over millennia, leaves are settling onto the stoop of Jenolan’s house and many are welcomed in by the forces of wind and gravity. Insects and arachnids feast on the leaves while the fungi and bacteria work their juices to break each product of sunlight into ever smaller pieces.

~End Interlude~

It is not difficult to imagine how generations of organisms become better adapted to consuming the food that is available to it if that food source doesn’t change over time. More efficient break-down of the plant matter, resistance to bitter tannins, adjusting body size and metabolism to food availability  - all strategies to adapt to food supply. Fast forward to our current century and globalism has rapidly introduced new organisms to every corner of the planet at an unprecedented pace. Are the invertebrate communities more diverse and abundant on the native vegetation that it may be better adapted towards?

The abundance and species diversity are much greater for the introduced european Sycamore than either the pine or Eucalyptus (see graphs below), especially in the “twilight” zone. This may be because sycamore leaves have higher specific leaf area (SLA) than both pine and eucalyptus. A low SLA is associated with long-lived leaves containing many structural and defensive compounds. These trees, like pines and eucalyptus, invest heavily to guard against plant-eaters whereas the broad-leafed sycamore does not invest as heavily against herbivory, so leaves break down more quickly. This faster release of nutrient may be part of the reason sycamore leaves have a more abundant and diverse community.

So what would happen if sycamore were to completely supplant eucalyptus? As a higher nutrient leaf that more quickly releases carbon, it should be better for the spineless society down under, right? One problem is that Sycamore is a deciduous tree. This means nutrient pulses to the caves occur seasonally. Since it’s leaves break down so quickly, it is a short lived pulse compared to the structurally-strengthened Pine and Eucalyptus, both of which keeps their leaves year-round. Since caves are below-ground they tend to be protected from seasonal variability and are relatively stable environments in terms of climate. Cave invertebrate communities need a more constant or stable supply of leaf litter to be sustained. As the authors propose,

“The short-term influx of energy provided by sycamore litter could be detrimental to subterranean invertebrate diversity in the long term. We would expect to see invertebrate species predisposed to utilizing sycamore derived energy dominating subterranean invertebrate communities and perhaps out-competing other invertebrate species, thereby reducing invertebrate diversity.”

Paradoxically, in an environment shaped by constancy over time and space, nutrient pulses may reduce diversity over time. If this is only a seasonal phenomenon, complete species replacement would be unlikely given that established invertebrates may utilize multiple plant sources over the year and persist over the long-term. There will always be a staple of of the community that are more generalist and can inhabit the caves under strenuous circumstances. But, in sort of a temporal intermediate disturbance hypothesis sort of way, one can envision the rapid change disrupting the system as a whole and having cascading effects throughout the cave ecosystem. Regardless, the moral remains: indifference towards species natural adaptions results in far-reaching and unforeseeable shifts to their ecology and evolution.

HILLS, N., HOSE, G., CANTLAY, A., & MURRAY, B. (2008). Cave invertebrate assemblages differ between native and exotic leaf litter Austral Ecology, 33 (3), 271-277 DOI: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.2007.01814.x

Phidippus princeps, a jumping spider. Click image to see them in motion! Image still by Thomas Shahan.

As we carve out our domains for home, business or farm among the landscape, we give little thought to our eco-engineering on the previous denizens we “annexed” the land from. It is no secret that our practices are intentionally destructive. But, still, many of us are compelled to preserve what little shreds of biodiversity remain.

In the midst of the cutting and gutting, we really need to know what the appropriate ways to maintain population connectivity are. Continuous stands of forests are becoming in shorter supply. Why does population connectivity matter? Take for example a sinking cruise ship in a warm, tropical location with 5 families aboard. Each family climbs into their own life raft and floats away to nearby deserted islands. Resigned to their predicament, they settle in for the long haul and make their lives anew in this tropical “paradise”.

Some islands are close enough for the families to visit one another, while others are father apart. Of course, these are jellyfish and shark infested waters and swimming across channels comes at your own risk! Since swimming out in the open makes you very vulnerable, so only the islands that are closest together are ever able to make contact with each other.

For colonizes to thrive they must grow. Assuming there is no immigration from outside this groups of islands, they only way to grow is if all the islanders mate and reproduce with each other. Otherwise, their family line and backstories will die out with them and, well, we are biologically programmed to not push the self-destruct button! (To an extent…). Population geneticists hold that populations that outcross (mate outside their population) are much better off than populations that inbreed (mating only within a single population). This is because mating within the same group over several generations tends to fix genetic traits that are harmful. By mating outside your population, you have a better chance of masking or even purging harmful genetic traits from your family line. And, let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to want to purge grandpa’s unibrow and hairy ear canal from subsequent generations of their family!

This, of course, holds true for animals and plants. Connecting populations is a fundamental concept in conservation science. While we fragment the world around us into ever smaller pieces, if our goal is to preserve species then we must make sure they can find each other. But one problem not taken into account for many conservation ecologists is the mere fact that communities evolve together. A stand of forest has a long history of interactions between plants, insects, mammals, birds and all the myriad sorts of microfauna and fungi . These historical interactions are encoded within their genetic make-up as unique events which affected their individual demographies.

Remove enough species and the ecosystem collapses. Public domain via Jorge Barrios.

Think of it this way, take an ominously-leaning tower of Jenga. While you may remove several pieces and it still stands strong, the stability of the tower is more threatened with each removal and gets dangerously close to collapse. Eventually, all redundancy in the system is lost and with any further removal all could end in catastrophe.

Adding corridors to fragmented landscapes is not the same as adding pieces (species) to the Jenga tower, but much like placing your palm on the unbalanced edge to hold up the tower, corridors strengthen ecological redundancy. The larger the habitat, the more individuals that can be supported and hence more genetic diversity spread out among the populations or subpopulations. Corridors connect isolated patches and in effect make a specie potential habitat potentially larger. In theory, we should be able to construct corridors to connect isolated populations so there can be movement and gene flow between groups. For large mammals and far-flying birds these problems can be overcome by size and ability. But, most of life is not as such!

Take, for instance, the adorable jumping spider (above), Phidippus princeps (Salticidae). To understand how this spider moves across a fragmented landscape, Baker (2007) manipulated corridors connecting patches of an old growth field of clover and alfalfa. Patches were either all unconnected, all connected, or partly connected by vegetated corridors, as opposed to bare corridors (see schema below). Spiders were set loose upon the land from a source patch and their movements were closely monitored.

Experimental design from Baker 2007 studying effects of corridors on jumping spider connectivity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baker found that P. princeps always preferred vegetated corridors and was never found on bare strips. Even when vegetated corridors were absent and their population was overcrowded 2-3 times their natural density, the spiders rarely moved across the bare ground. This has pretty fundamental consequences for movement and dispersal ecology, underlying the importance of the types of corridors between habitat patches. Invertebrates in particular, typically being littler, are more subject to small changes and micro-habitat conditions. As Baker noted, “If an animal, as in the case of P. princeps, does not respond to density pressures when habitat patches are surrounded by unfavorable habitat, the persistence of fragmented populations may be severely compromised.” To put it lightly.

The fact of the matter is that most creatures won’t risk it out in the open. They need cover to help ensure their survival when moving around. This is a nice arguement for conserving natural corridors between habitat patches, as opposed to creating corridors for animals after we’ve destroyed their habitat. In a recent review on the effects of corridors on habitat connectivity, Gilbert-Norton and colleagues (2010) found that among the 78 experiments published in 35 research articles (including Baker 2007) since 1988 corridors helped increase movement between habitat patches by about 50%. This is a nontrivial number when we are talking about species at the brink of local extinction. Additionally, the effect of these corridors was much stronger for natural corridors (with preexisting vegetation) than manipulated corridors (those created by us), so much so the authors concluded that maintaining existing natural habitat corridors were a worthwhile conservation endeavor.

Baker, L. (2007). Effect of corridors on the movement behavior of the jumping spider (Araneae, Salticidae). Canadian Journal of Zoology, 85 (7), 802-808 DOI: 10.1139/Z07-061

Gilbert-Norton, L., Wilson, R., Stevens, J., & Beard, K. (2010). A Meta-Analytic Review of Corridor Effectiveness Conservation Biology, 24 (3), 660-668 DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01450.x

Metaphor for science communication?

What would happen if scientists took to the internet en masse and wrote about what they are most interested in? Is this effective outreach? Does it interfere with traditional science communication efforts? Will it throw the world into utter and incoherent CHAOS??? Well, we can argue that what we’ve currently been seeing in the last 5-8  years is a sort of communications renaissance as scientists embrace the internet to mingle with the commoners, communicate their research and discuss the finer points of scientific discourse.

Last week, I participated in panel for SONYC (Science Online NYC) with my colleagues Jamie Vernon, Darlene Cavalier and Molly Webster where we discussed “matching medium and messengers to meet the masses”. SONYC is a monthly event organized by Lou Woodley of Nature.com, John Timmer of Ars Technica, Joe Bonner of Rockefeller University and SWINY, and Jeanne Garbarino of Rockefeller University. I’d like to thank the organizers and institutions for supporting the event and the audience for their most excellent involvement and tough questions.

What are scientists’ goals for using the internet?

As I mentioned above, we are in the midst of a migration of scientists from their homes and cubicles towards the internet using blogs and social media. It is hard to characterize the reasons why this is. In a very large part it is due to a generation of academics in their 30s who for part of their adolescence grew up with online media. Their comfort level with having an online presence straddles the barrier of a generation that fears the inherent overexposure of the internet and complain it is a regressive time sink, with a generation who has known nothing other than the internet.

Scientists have a wide variety of goals for being online. Many scientists view online activities as a form of outreach. If this is their reason, then having a large presence with steadily increasing traffic and growth would be a goal. Outreach is concerned with broadly informing an audience so metrics such as page views, number of unique viewers, social media followers, etc. become important. Engagement is also a key component and community building and networking are tools to draw more eyes to your work. Blog posts should be the start of a conversation, which can take place in the comment sections. The more engaged you audience is, the more likely they are to return.

Another reason for scientists’ online activity is to participate in a more communicative and collaborative way with their colleagues and peers. There are many sub-communities of science blogging whose primary goals are to share ideas and data. While they interact with and may derive satisfaction from broader outreach, traffic metrics may be less important. Engagement likely ranks the highest among this group. Number of comments, inbound links, and perhaps tangible products (papers, proposals, collaborative products like software or code, etc.) are measures of success.

But let’s be honest, many scientists enter the online arena for personal gratification. Perhaps traffic didn’t matter at the outset, but a sense of community is what was really being sought after. Engagement matters, but might not be an initial driving factor. Gaining traffic is just icing on the cake. This was common 5-8 years ago when science blogging was really coming into its own niche and is true today with many new additions to the science blogosphere. It didn’t take long before scientists realized the potential of the internet for broad dissemination of science. Thus, there is a natural transition among scientists to move from personal satisfaction to strategizing about outreach.

Finally, Kate Clancy writes about three additional reasons that scientists might engage online: 1) building  networks of peers, 2) test the waters of scholarly ideas, and 3) post-publication peer-review. All three of these reasons straddle the line of outreach, collaboration with peers and personal gratification. As Kate says, “The peer review process is imperfect, and a growing number of blogs are devoting a significant portion of their space to analyzing published papers. This takes private academic conversations public, which is useful for layreaders and fellow academics.”

Everything mentioned above does the service of bringing both interesting science and ideas to the forefront of the public and makes the process of doing science much more visible. While scientific literacy is a noble goal to strive for, I am more than content with an appreciation for scientists and their commitment to the scientific process. I can’t expect everyone to understand, or want to understand, all the intricacies of climate science, but I want to see an improvement in the trust placed in the scientific consensus on issues.

If you build it, will they want to come?

It is absolutely true that if you do not build something, no one can come. But creations do not intrinsically demand audiences. Making an initiative worthwhile takes craft and strategy. There needs to be a satisfactory return for the investment and a constant reevaluation of goals. What that return is depends on the targets set by scientists and will certainly vary widely. While reaching 3 people can, and should, be viewed as a success, it is my opinion that scientists concerned with outreach should see growth.

As I mentioned previously, scientists often fall into digital communication quite naively. Its not hard to do and there is minimal financial overhead. The costs and benefits of digital engagement are less than tangible and vary among individuals. As Steve Hamblin wrote in a very thoughtful post on the economics of blogging,

“The opportunity cost in terms of lost research time or reading time is worth it to me, but it’s still a trade-off that I am consciously making. Academic advancement committees have yet to recognise blogging as a valuable activity, and they are unlikely to reward you for the number of Twitter followers you have… [academics] could possibly be [making] a significant sacrifice in terms of career advancement for uncertain returns in the social media space.”

During my 5-6 year tenure of science blogging and social media outreach, I’ve seen talented writers and communicators drop like flies in the chloroform by the dozens. Many still keep their blogs up and once a month might post about how busy they are and can’t wait to start blogging regularly again… sometimes this can last for several months. This is not a “pull up your bootstraps” issue. There are real obstacles for scientists to maintain an online presence outside of their research and teaching needs.

If you think about it – and this might not be a popular statement – scientists tend to enter into things naively. We like to think we are careful and meticulous, but doing research is different than starting projects. This isn’t a bad quality! Naïveté is just not realistic by definition. Scientists’ naïveté often helps them get projects started from the pub napkin to the lab bench. How many times have we sketched out an experimental design and thought “hmm, I just need to do X, Y and Z then ship off the manuscript!” Ok, maybe that was just me, but very few projects ever go as originally thought up!

It is this naïveté that makes it easy for scientists to start low overhead communications projects. But, like most things it’s just not that easy. But it is worth doing for those that are interested and needs to be done well. There is a responsibility to the profession when you decide to become a public figure. And that is in effect what you are doing once you open a blog or twitter account – you become a public figure, a representation of all scientists. I know, you are not ALL scientists, but humans generalize, so… sorry, yes we scientist communicators are representing all scientists.

Who watches the watchmen?

Sometimes, the pressure to perform and interact can be too much and scientists must choose to to disengage or scale back in order to do their “day job”. Its a very tough challenge in an already demanding arena. When online outreach is undervalued by our colleagues and administration, it is often sacrificed at the altar of status quo. Yet, employees of many public universities and government institutions are mandated by their mission statements to engage with the communities. For instance, my graduate alma mater, Penn State’s mission:

“As Pennsylvania’s land-grant university, we provide unparalleled access and public service to support the citizens of the Commonwealth. We engage in collaborative activities with industrial, educational, and agricultural partners here and abroad to generate, disseminate, integrate, and apply knowledge that is valuable to society.”

Or my undergraduate alma mater, University of California at Davis’ vision of excellence:

“The mission of UC Davis, as a comprehensive research university, is the generation, advancement, dissemination and application of knowledge to advancing the human condition throughout our communities and around the world. [...] applying that knowledge to address the needs of the region, state, nation and globe. UC Davis is committed to the tradition of the land-grant university, the basis of its founding. This tradition — built on the premise that the broad purpose of a university is service to people and society — guides today the campus’s special commitments and emphases.”

Every institution has a mission statement or vision, have you ever read yours? These might seem like hollow words, bureaucratic-speak, but these are guiding principles of institutions and as an employee you are mandated to operate within them. This potentially becomes a powerful tool to exploit to online outreach skeptics. Assuming your research program and teaching are doing well enough, how can your outreach efforts be criticized (in theory anyways) if you are acting within the mission of your employer?

But there is what appears to be a lack of oversight on the administrators. Who is watching the watchmen? The admins have made it clear that a certain bottom line and prestige are the favored metrics, many times at the expense of their own mission. In order for those scientists who want to engage in outreach to succeed, we need to provide an environment for them to succeed in. The tools are in place, the funding agencies request broader impacts, the public stands ready to learn and be entertained. But for the pieces to fall into place, we need to change the culture of science.

At the most basic level, as a first step, the philosophy of what academia is needs to be critically evaluated. There is no doubt that the need to balance financial resources and growth with student opportunities and high-quality research is exceedingly tricky. I admire the job that administrators must accomplish but it cannot come at an expense to public engagement. Teaching is profitable because draws in tuition dollars. Research is profitable because is draws in grant money overhead. But outreach is not profitable, unless those efforts are funded externally and the institution can reap overhead benefits.

Should academic institutions support initiatives that drain resources? If not, then they need to strike out public engagement from their mission statement. Don’t say you are about outreach when you penalize those whose wish it is to uphold this often lauded, yet frequently disregarded or poorly done, principle as a part of their way of doing science. There is a crushing hypocrisy behind a university that purports to be a public resource while not making these actions a priority. But the watchers of the academic watchmen have failed and succumbed to bureaucratic, “profit-driven” style of management. That is, the faculty and staff of academic institutions have failed to keep their institutions on point.

So how do we get administrators to care? There is no easy answer. The problems herein are cultural and ethical. How are you going to define academia? What is the purpose of an academic education and environment? Naturally, this will vary among institutions but there needs to be a movement toward rewarding public engagement. It makes sense: improves the institution’s image and by becoming a strong leader in the community public support can be more easily wrangled in leaner times.

To accomplish this though we need tools to evaluate how well we are performing as outreachers and communicators. Digital science outreach has benefits because one can gather hard user data is relatively easy. We can infer impact through metrics like page views, number of visitors, inbound links, location of the IP addresses and a wide variety of other values. Administrators, as well as other scientists, like numbers and can use these to set benchmarks for performance and reach. Other forms of offline outreach may be less easily quantifiable. One proposal I would like to throw out there is for real goal-oriented, audience-building adaptive outreach strategies.

From many, one

I think one of the most basic goals of science communication is to persuade people to care about science. Personally, I do not care to convince future generations to pursue scientific careers – let’s be honest, we don’t have enough jobs for our current pool of scientists – but, I want people from any walk of life to appreciate what scientists do and how they carry out the scientific method. Whether this communications is accomplished by creating content and pushing it online, engaging the public and grade school students offline, or throwing out a platoon of science cheerleaders in a football field matters little to me. We only need to think more carefully about our audiences and reaching out to those in need of a little more science in their lives.

During last week’s SONYC panel, one unifying concept among the panelists was utilizing a wide variety of communications approaches, what I call pluralism. All too often communicators are satisfied with their approach to communicating and do not think about breaking out of their routine. Writers write, teachers teach, and graphic designers design. Certainly I am guilty of favoring the blog and social media as outlets for my communications efforts. Yet, each medium has specific audiences. My colleagues at Southern Fried Science, Deep Sea News and I have a book chapter in press for an upcoming reference on Environmental Leadership where we write about Digital Environmentalism (pdf file of preprint available for download). In it, I wrote:

Finding out who participates in social media is challenging because different applications appeal to different audiences. In general, social networking appeals to men and women age 35-44, with a wide variation in ages of users who adopted certain services. Social networking services vary spatially, as people tend to adopt specific services by nationality, en masse (Chappell 2011). Such spatial and demographic variation presents problems for using a one-size-fits-all approach to social media and highlights the necessity of taking on a pluralist approach to science and environmental communication to cast a wide net when attracting an audience (Zelnio 2010).

The point being that your audience is defined by the tools they use, not the tools you use. By blogging you are reaching an audience that, by default, reads blogs. Yes, they can find your blog using keywords in search engines. I get a ton of traffic that way. But you are still limiting your reach by restricting your tools. How do the kids using Bebo find you? And what about those who still do not use social media – the elderly, younger children, perhaps the poor? These might be highly valuable outreach audiences – i.e. members of the voting public – that are unwittingly glossed over.

Other connections to our audiences are invaluable in ways we cannot measure. In-person connections still reign supreme for long-lasting impressions. Meeting someone, shaking their hand and carrying out a conversation are extremely important. Social media attempts to supplant that feeling, but so many cues are lost across the wires. Audiences fail to see the presenter’s animation, range of emotion, spontaneity and interactiveness with the audience. Subtle cues play an important role in connecting to your audience and convincing them of your message. It is a trade off between how many you can reach and the quality of the interaction.

Part of the trick is to convince people that they are stakeholders in science, whether or not they realize it. Their tax dollars fund research and some salaries of scientists. The benefits of research have direct consequences on people’s health, economics and environment as well as indirect effects on things like happiness and quality of life. Science is a framework for living yet this is often lost on many people because of poor messaging, ineffective education and misconstrued perceptions of scientists and their lifestyle. Still, though, people are intrigued by science and curious by nature. It is our job as communicators to take that lead and pull them along for the ride. To this end, in particular, citizen science has emerged as an effective program to get people to actively participate in science as stakeholders.

A pluralist approach to science communication is all about targeting your audiences. In my personal view, many science communicators doing online outreach do not think about their audiences very much or get entrapped within a certain portion of the community. The “if you don’t build it, they can’t come” philosophy makes the implicit assumption that what they write is searchable – which may be maximized further using search engine optimization tools, indexing, word of mouth, etc. – and viewers will come if scientists just push out content. Quality content is no doubt a key component to success! But we should strive for growth and breaking into new markets as well. This is the crux of outreach, the reaching out part. It is incumbent upon the scientist to reach out to new audiences and not for audiences to find the content.

Very few science bloggers do the simple act of surveying their readership. It is no secret that most viewers lurk in the shadows, yet many will actually come out in a survey and you can get a rough idea of your passive audience composition. For instance the table below shows selected viewer statistics from Southern Fried Science (SFS) and Deep Sea News (DSN) reader surveys published in our chapter:

We’ve learned a lot from this survey. Our response rate was ~10% of average daily traffic during the period of this survey. It is likely biased towards people who are generally into blogging, but a large portion of the responses came from individuals who are otherwise disengaged with blogs (>54% never comment on blogs). While we strive for more engagement, like commenting, most users utilize blogs passively. Though we were happy to see that our blogs weren’t excluding women and appealed to people from a variety of educational levels, we learned that we are not reaching minorities (13% of DSN respondents), the elderly or people younger than 24 very well. These demographics often have less access to computers or use the internet less for non-specific web browsing. Here is where targeted outreach using novel offline approaches, partnering with online resources that have a much wider appeal (i.e. men’s or women’s magazines, newspaper websites, etc.), or a more niche topic appeal like lifestyle websites or kid’s magazines can make a bigger impact.

The message still reigns

The blogs/social media-only approach is an “easy way out”, which I do not mean in a derogatory sense. You do not have to worry as much about strategy, can write what you want when you want, advertise your content on nearly unlimited social networking services, optimize it for search results, and with no face-to-face interaction can easily and thoughtfully script content and responses. Its a brilliant way to communicate and can be metricized to some extent. Other factors certainly come into play with audience-building such as participation in a blogging network. Finally, there is a lot to be said about how writing style defines the audience – an often overlooked factor. But entrenching yourself in only 1 or 2 platforms is sure fire way to get left behind and not grow to your full potential.

The message will still reign supreme as it will always remain independent of the mediums, which are merely the tools of dissemination. As with any tool, we must chose the right one for the job and we should carry a wide variety of tools in our toolbox so that we are prepared for many problems. There is no doubt that increasing the number of people exposed to, and involved in, online science outreach will only benefit the future of science and science communication. But the world is not yet ready for complete switch from offline to online information and inspiration. Often, those with the ability to access online science content are already predisposed to seeking out this type material. Same goes for those who seek out content on certain platforms. Pluralistic approaches that target the groups needing the information or exposure to science in your community goes a long ways. They key is to keep the message consistent and hammer it in from as many approaches as possible.

Previously - Evolution’s Tempo, Movement I: Adagio

Small changes can have big effects. The mood of a piece is set by is tempo. You can play the same notes, in the same style but change the speed at which you play it and it takes on an entirely different meaning. Still, some changes are so small that you cannot perceive it to have any meaningful impact. Slow down the Allegro from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by one beat per second and you will not likely notice any difference – the feeling still remains vivace.

Now repeat this change with each listen. You may gradually become more accustomed to the slower tempos and may not even notice how these small, imperceptible changes affect your mood. As the tempo decreases a song once vivace turns moderato, perhaps larghissimo. Over time, the summation of the changes can be dramatic.

One of the key characteristics in the Great Song of Evolution is differential reproductive success. Some live and some die. Of those that live, some reproduce while some don’t. It is not so much of a struggle for existence as a fact of life – nothing lasts forever. Births are the crescendo of populations. Kept unchecked they increase al forte, but population growth is never unchecked. The decrescendo, or deaths, attempts to balance out the population’s volume.

Ecology has often taken a very simplified approach: counting the notes without paying attention to the key the music is played in. Adding evolution to the ecology is akin to introducing a world class composer to an eighth grade orchestra. It works the other way, too. In each passing generation, only a subset of all living things confers its most prized possessions – the genes. The confluence of evolution and ecology is powerful and masterful. The works of humankind merely pass through the wake of the selective  maestro.

The intimate relationship of organisms’ form and function over only a few generations is shaped by a wide variety of interactions – many of which are out of the control of the organism. One must remember, though, that while soloists live and die by the song, the orchestra moves on. Since populations are groups of organisms that interbreed and exchange genes, any arrangement of genotypes is available in a population at any given time. Potentially adaptive genes may reside in low abundance until conditions favor their phenotype, like the french horn section waiting for its ripieno moment in a baroque march.

For example, take the unseemly stickleback (drawing above), which recently has emerged as a model organism for studying evolution at an allegro pace. They reside both in the ocean (e.g. top fish: larger, with spines and plates) and in freshwater lakes and streams (e.g. bottom fish: not as heavily armored). The differences between the two are stark. Yet, in only a handful of generations can one turn into the other.

Sticklebacks are anadromous fish, meaning they spend part of their lives in both freshwater and in the ocean. More familiar examples of this are salmon, who swim upstream in freshwater rivers to spawn their young in its shallow, protective confines. If, per chance, the salmon stayed in the ocean to spawn then filter-feeding fish and whales would swim fin over tail to gulp the egg masses down before the larvae’s heart had beat even a quarter-note.

That is not to say that shallow headwaters of freshwater rivers and lakes are without their dangers, but their chances improve greatly enough that this life cycle is favored. For some ancient populations of the stickleback, though, they stuck around the lake or managed to get cut off from the route to the ocean. The young smelt made their living in the freshwater, eventually establishing stable populations.

Life in the lake is much different than life in sea. To an oceanic fish, freshwater predators must seem quite ornery. Dragonfly larvae attacking from the lake bottom by grabbing onto the spines under belly, versus the larger fish that gave chase in the open sea. It makes sense then those fish in lakes with smaller belly spines survived attacks more often.

Remarkably, what we see is that the transition is astonishingly staccato! An abrupt change in frequency of fossil with more armor and spines to less (see video above). But it is not a complete and permanent change since the genes for this adaptation are still prevalent in the population and eventually we see various hybrid morphs (see image at top and video). That is, the gene variants for each phenotype exist in the population irrespective of their frequencies. This genetic variation is key to a population’s ability to rapidly evolve.

Astonishingly, in just half a century a reversal occurred just outside of Seattle! In the 1960s it was realized that Lake Washington was literally a cesspool of filth and pollution from decades of neglect, runoff and outright pollution. Once called “Lake Stinko“, the city, University of Washington and advocacy groups spent $140 million to clean it up in what University of  Michigan professor John Lehman hailed in a NRC report as “an example of creative interaction between the scientific community and the political arena”.

Fast forward to 2006 and we have a very striking example of rapid reverse in evolution to the armored phenotype (figure on right)! It is thought that the much improved water clarity resulted in the necessity for better armor and larger size against pelagic lake predators, such as cutthroat trout.

Rapid evolution is not isolated only to sticklebacks. We have inferred, and even directly observed, changes in populations over very short periods in a wide variety of organisms. For instance,

• Periwinkle snails (Littorina obtusata) on the northeastern seaboard in 1870s were were significantly taller and had thicker shells, yet those same population in 1980s were much flatter and thicker. In the early part of the 1900s, the intertidal crab (Carcinus maenas) expanded it’s range northwards. Clearly, those snails whose shells were more difficult to handle lived.
• Aphids, a common commercial crop pest, were shown to evolve rapidly even in a single experimental planting season. Experimental populations containing two genetically distinct clonal lines with different growth rates (i.e. potentially evolving) were shown to grow up to 42% faster and attained up to 67% more density than populations consisting of single clonal lines of aphids (not evolving) in the presence of competitors or predators. With even minimal genetic variation, evolution – as measured by changes in allele frequencies in a population – still proceeded by only means of natural selection.
• Plants and pollinators form a highly specialized bond, often strengthened through thousands of years of coevolution. But, what happens when a plant loses its pollinator? Does it wither away, reproduce with itself? In the wild Mimulus plants, experiments show that when pollinators are removed the plant initially suffers in terms of it’s fitness but quickly rebounds within 5 generations. There are also morphological changes as well as changes in genes associated with improved self-fertilization abilities.

In addition to ecological examples, there are many more from rapidly evolving reproductive proteins, antibacterial and pesticide resistance, to pathogens evolving resistance to host defenses. This is the hallmark of a star performer: the ability to improvise in a world of change. There are no better performers than the diversity of life embedded within the natural orchestra that surrounds us.

Bodbyl Roels, S., & Kelly, J. (2011). RAPID EVOLUTION CAUSED BY POLLINATOR LOSS IN MIMULUS GUTTATUS Evolution, 65 (9), 2541-2552 DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2011.01326.x

Kitano, J., Bolnick, D., Beauchamp, D., Mazur, M., Mori, S., Nakano, T., & Peichel, C. (2008). Reverse Evolution of Armor Plates in the Threespine Stickleback Current Biology, 18 (10), 769-774 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.04.027

Seeley, R. (1986). Intense Natural Selection Caused a Rapid Morphological Transition in a Living Marine Snail Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 83 (18), 6897-6901 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.83.18.6897

Turcotte, M., Reznick, D., & Hare, J. (2011). The impact of rapid evolution on population dynamics in the wild: experimental test of eco-evolutionary dynamics Ecology Letters, 14 (11), 1084-1092 DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01676.x

Microscopic Worlds – Life that we don’t see from Daniel Stoupin on Vimeo.

Well, why not let the people themselves decide exactly what scientific research they would like to see done! To accomplish this, #SciFund uses a crowdsourcing approach to funding. Partnering with RocketHub, they launched the #SciFund Challenge. This partnership allows scientists run their own crowdfunding campaigns to fund their research. Scientists put out their proposal and do everything they can to get people as excited about it as they are. This has the unique effect of creating a scientific proposal that appeals to a general audience and not a panel scientific experts. So, successful proposers need to make it and make it relevant, creating a plethora of entertaining proposals using videos, images, colorful text and throwing in research swag and other rewards for different levels of donating. What is great about this system is that scientists can accept micropayments, much as non-profit organizations do, and build up to their research goals.

The #SciFund challenge contains 49 fantastic research projects that span a huge variety of topics. You can scroll them all and see for yourself, but here are the projects with an evolutionary focus:

• Bats in Peril: Flying Foxes Past and Present!
• Cat’s Nails: A Parasitic Plant of South Africa!.
• #Chlamystress!
• Species in Peril!
• The Wild Life of Our Homes!
• Squirrel-Snake Face Off!
• The Evolution of Stress-Induced Hypermutation!
• C-Cilia in Motion!
• Evolution in Agriculture!
• Mysteries of a Prehistoric Affair!
• Doctor Zen and the Amazon Crayfish!
• Ancient Roman DNA Project!
• Domesticating Algae for the 21st Century!

As you can see there are no shortage of worthy, fascinating research out there that needs YOU to participate in it. Even with $5 or $25 you can make this work a reality.

Rattus rattus, via alexfiles on Flickr (click image)

It seems that everywhere you find a group of humans, you’ll find a clan of rats hiding in the shadows. This history seems born out of opportunity for the rat, but we’ve done our part to help them get around the world rather easily. This commensalism – a relationship where one species benefits, but the other receives little or no harm – is probably the result of the sloppy nature of humans. It appears we’ve never been very good at properly stowing our trash!

The flagship rat species, Rattus rattus, originated in India. While some of its cousins hung around on forest edges and fields, many found a living chasing down humans and loitering around their encampments for scraps. About 1 million years ago a split occurred among rats and what consistently separates the black rat from the wide variety of other Rattus species, including the infamous norwegian rat R. norvegicus, is its cozy relationship with humans. Though we may provide the rat with a treasure trove of our trash, it doesn’t always repay us in kind! Plague, typhus and wrecking agricultural havoc aren’t very nice ways to say thank you.

Perhaps surprising for such a widespread nemesis, but black rat biogeography – the study of how organisms are distributed on this planet – is relatively unknown. The first step, though, in determining the history of the rat’s tracks is figuring out what exactly a black rat is. In a study published last week in the open access journal PLoS ONE, Ken Aplin and colleagues set out to find how intimate our connection is with this feared and reviled co-inhabitant.

Looking closely at a set of genetic markers that allow a deeper historical context, Aplin and colleagues discovered that several other species of rats were genetically similar to the common black rat, thus forming a complex of species that share a close ancestry. In fact, the black rat complex split off from its closest relative around 1 million years ago and is composed of at least 6 distinct lineages that appear to have diversified around 200,000 years ago, which coincides with the second to last glacial period during the middle of the Pleistocene.

Figure 4 from Alpin et al. (2011): a) Distribution of lineages I and II. b) Natural ranges of lineages I-VI. c) Distribution and movement of lineages I, II and IV.

Of the six black rat lineages, two are particularly widespread. The most ancestral individuals of lineage I live in India, supporting an out-of-India hypothesis for European and African black rats. On the other hand, lineage II stayed in southeast Asia, hanging around the Mekong River basin. These two widespread lineages separated ~200,000 years ago and now occupy distinct, non-overlapping ranges.

Lineages I and II dominate the global distribution of black rats, but there are much finer-scale patterns among the other lineages residing in southeast Asia. Lineage III is restricted to the Himalayas and lineages V is hypothesized to be a different species of Rattus, showing consistent morphological differences from the species that it coexists with. Likewise, lineage VI is composed of two previously described Rattus species that are distributed similarly to the black rat and show consistent morphological differences and are generally not found at human settlements. Lastly, lineage IV is restricted to the lower Mekong River and just barely overlaps in its northern range with lineage II.

Perhaps most striking, we can see from the maps at right that there were likely several origins of commensalism. The split of lineages I, II and IV occurred over 500,000 years, well before evidence of human settlement. Fossil evidence of humans are evident between 50-60 thousand years ago in Asia, yet permanent human settlements didn’t really occur until the Holocene, or within the last 10,000 years. Thus, these black rat lineages were established prior to human arrival. Modern black rats are very keen to exploit disturbed habitats, though. It seems probable that as humans swept through the area, burned forests and fields, and settled into an agricultural society, ancestral black rats would have done well to take advantage of this – commencing the commensalism.

Another feature of Alpin’s analysis shows clearly how lineages I and II in particular – but also lineage IV – had a little bit of help getting around during the Age of Exploration, especially in traditional port towns. But some individuals have a genetic signal dating their arrival to the southeast Asian islands in the mid to late Holocene, or around 5-10 thousands years ago. This would have occurred after the last glaciation when sea levels were tens of meters lower and there were intermittent connections between the Asian mainland and what is now Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia. So for earlier-than-boat-transport, it is conceivable that rats in lineages II and IV, scampered across the formerly well-connected landscape.

Humans were also migrating during this time, though. Rats, being lovers of disturbed habitats and human waste, trailed along the path of destruction and found their way into these new environs. Once sea level rose they were trapped and couldn’t breed with other populations. This isolation would have promoted the high diversity of species and within-species lineages that we now see in southeast Asia. And this is only the beginning of the process – it’s only a few thousand years in. The outcome of further speciation will ultimately depend on the degree of contact between lineages, which appears accelerated by people. While the rats might seem like they are tagging along in our footsteps. It is evident that we are being used as a vehicle in the rats’ quest for global domination!

A final take home message is that different rat vector-borne diseases are also associated with the various lineages. Thus, it is recommended that it would be prudent to type the host lineage to understand the context of the disease vector. For introduced rats away from their ancestral southeast Asian or Indian homelands, one can retrace the geography from where the diseases might have come from. This could actually be a simple, yet useful way to quickly determine responses to various rat-carried diseases.

Aplin, K., Suzuki, H., Chinen, A., Chesser, R., ten Have, J., Donnellan, S., Austin, J., Frost, A., Gonzalez, J., Herbreteau, V., Catzeflis, F., Soubrier, J., Fang, Y., Robins, J., Matisoo-Smith, E., Bastos, A., Maryanto, I., Sinaga, M., Denys, C., Van Den Bussche, R., Conroy, C., Rowe, K., & Cooper, A. (2011). Multiple Geographic Origins of Commensalism and Complex Dispersal History of Black Rats PLoS ONE, 6 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026357

Semibalanus balanoides, Photo from Wikimedia Commons

The following is edited from a post I published in 2008.

It’s the dead of winter and you must start to think about finding a lover and getting your gametes in the water in time for the Spring algal bloom! But wait a second, you’re a permanent fixture on a rock. Can’t move. What is a young, love-struck sessile hermaphrodite to do? Well, if you are hung like a barnacle you don’t really have to move that far.

Barnacles are known as one of the more ‘hung’ of the invertebrate world with penises reaching up to 10 times their body size. Not all barnacles are equally endowed though. To make the situation more complicated, barnacles are simultaneous hermaphrodites – they carry both male and female reproductive parts at the same time. Famous evolutionary biologist and theorist Eric Charnov proposed an extension of his Sex Allocation Theory to simultaneous hermaphrodites. It is this theory that makes predictions for how much resources should be allocated in being male or female based upon how competitive your local environment is.

How much does a penis cost?
Barnacles tend to flock to one another, their larvae exhibiting what researchers refer to as gregarious (=”live in a flock”, not unlike Gregorian monks) settlement. This results in dense mats of barnacles upon barnacles on rocky shores. For the sessile, once you choose your “build site”, there is no chance to move house! Since barnacles are unable to move, being packed like sardines must be a good thing, right? One would think the closer your neighbors are, the less effort you need to “reach out” to them.

Biologist Matt Hoch (2008) tested the effects of overcrowding and wave exposure on the penis morphology of the acorn barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides. As males from many species might tell you, bigger is not necessarily always better. Hoch explains:

“Variation in barnacle penis traits may be important when comparing sex allocation of barnacles for several reasons. As the number of individuals in the mating group increases, mate competition intensifies, which is predicted to lead to greater relative allocation to male function. The penis itself represents a significant investment into male function, in terms of construction, maintenance and performance costs. For example, the presence of the penis, located between the feeding cirri on the terminal body segment, may reduce feeding efficiency. As penises grow larger, interference with feeding is expected to increase.”

For most of the year, the barnacle’s penis is rather languid. The vernal season for this little fellow is September to October where it rapidly grows until ready to spring into action come November. Unfortunately, the excitement of it all is short lived and the penis is cast off with the next moult upon mating. Because the growth and decay of the penis happens so quickly, Hoch hypothesized that it must be costly to maintain this single-use appendage. If the closest neighbor is far away, it will need to invest more energy into maleness, resulting in a longer penis. Such a trade-off might occur at the expense of the femaleness necessary to make and nurture the barnacle babies until they are spawned.

Hoch compared barnacles found in a crowd, when their shells were touching their neighbors (see photo above for example), to those in uncrowded situations. Studying barnacles in scenic Shinnecock Bay in Long Island, NY, Hoch found that crowded barnacles had significantly shorter penises than its uncrowded brethren. Yet, the thickness at the base remained unchanged and there was no difference in the relationship between penis length and body volume between the living arrangements. Additionally, as the distance between neighbor’s increased, there were fewer fertilized egg masses.

Proportion of fertilized broods as a function of distance from nearest neighbor on exposed or protected coastlines.

Take a lickin’ and keep on kickin’

The rocky intertidal is no place for a wuss. Tides and wave forces make it an intensely dynamic environment, not to mention stress from heat and drying out. One needs a thick skin in order to take the constant, rhythmic pressure of wave exposure so Hoch studied his phenomenon at two sites. The first was exposed to a higher frequency of waves, facing the Atlantic (exposed). The second faced into the bay where it was more tranquil (protected). Perhaps unsurprisingly, fertilization was more successful in the protected area. Additionally, the disparity in fertilization success between protected and exposed areas grows as the distance between neighbors increase.

So, exposure to waves appears to hinder fertilization success, but why? Is it because waves break off the barnacle’s penis, or sweep it away from its intended target? While there is no difference in penis length between exposed and protected areas, the basal diameter was thicker in exposed barnacles. The penis seems to adapt to take a pounding by buffing up at the base. Yet, its not enough to fertilize at the same rate as in protected areas.

Hoch provides an interesting hypothesis that, at least in barnacles, the physical environment plays a strong role in molding morphology. Such characteristics are said to be plastic. In order to understand how evolution of novel morphology arises, the degree of plasticity in the trait should be assessed. Reproductive morphology is typically considered to be under a high degree of selection, because it is directly associated with producing the next generation, among other reasons.

What is the take home message here if you are a barnacle? If a barnacle’s goal is to be the “John Holmes” of sea world, live in uncrowded areas in wave-exposed environments. If the barnacle’s goal is to fertilize as many eggs as possible, live in close quarters at areas protected from wave exposure. I’m not quite sure which goal barnacle’s are seeking. They are cunning creatures with a knack for keeping their cirri to themselves.

HOCH, J. (2008). Variation in penis morphology and mating ability in the acorn barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 359(2), 126-130. DOI: 10.1016/j.jembe.2008.03.002

Stickleback stamp from Faroe Islands. Public Domain, artwork by Astrid Andreasen, 1994.

What is the first thing you do when you want to find something out these days? Head to that dusty collection of encyclopedias in the attic (or *gasp* a LIBRARY!?) or call up the closest friend/relative who knows something about something? Like me, you probably “google” whatever it is you are interested in finding. And, like me, you probably google lots of variations of the something you’re looking for because results are not always satisfactory. Furthermore, if you are like me, you get distracted by LOLCats, new music and Lonely Island videos and forget what on Earth could have drawn you to the internet in the first place.

As I was preparing another, (perhaps) more substantial post for this blog, I was looking for informative videos about sticklebacks. I won’t spoil the future post, but sticklebacks are small fish that live in the ocean and during the last 10,000 have been trapped in coastal lakes. Thus, they have arisen to become model organisms for studying rapid evolutionary change. This was an aspect I wanted to highlight in the larger context of that post.

Unfortunately, the search for informative YouTube videos of stickleback evolution was rather futile. At the least, videos describing some of the fascinating evolutionary research that has been done. Perhaps I have not done the search justice, used the wrong terms or what not – but that’s not the point. The point is that what shows up on the first page of search results is more important THAN ANYTHING. Here is what the top 5 Google search results are for “stickleback evolution”:

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great resources in the list, but numero uno sticks out like a sore opposable thumb. That is the top result on the internet for one the fast growing areas of research in evolutionary biology. There are over 13,500 references to stickleback evolution in the Google Scholar database. Yet kids doing school projects, science teachers whose knowledge may be outdated, parents keeping tabs on what their children are learning, and anyone else who is not a research scientist will never see those. They will not go check the scientific literature in Google Scholar. They wouldn’t even have access to the articles if they did. They will go to the Google search engine and type the words they want to know about and get those search results above, most likely clicking on the top link first.

Now, I prefer visuals like video, infographics and figures. It is always a challenge to find good ones existing on the internet and very time-consuming to make your own multimedia content. Most people don’t have the tools and technical know-how, much less the ability to work on “labor of love” projects without financial compensation. These realities reflect the available content that is easily searchable. This is the golden axiom of internet: They who have the resources, shall have algorithm rank! Well-funded institutes can produce well-crafted material. This is apparent if you repeat the aforementioned search on YouTube itself:

There is nothing wrong about the scientific quality of the videos in this list. But… look at the times? 50 minutes, 10 minutes? What nonspecialist is going to sit through these online lectures? Ok, certainly some are fascinated enough by stickleback evolution to do that, but those aren’t the people that need reaching out to. When someone wants information, whether its a teacher, student, parent, or even a blogger… they likely want it to be short, factual, entertaining and from an authoritative voice. From outsider’s perspective, I doubt that the above are entertaining and they fail on length. And it is not for lack of time in our lives. People have plenty of time to be entertained, I am sure they still have plenty of time to learn about stickleback evolution on the web. More fundamentally, it is about lack of attention span.

What I am getting at here has little to do with the sticklebacks, really. They are a case study because I was trying to teach myself about the research done on rapid evolution using them as a model species. I did find decent video on them as well – though, not from YouTube and further down the google search results list. If we want accurate scientific information on the web we need to approach from a new angle. No one cares about your video of your cutting edge invited research lecture at top-notch University. Scientists, particularly in publicly contentious areas like evolution research but also climate change or stem cell research among others, need to make an investment in creating high-quality, viral content. And no, I don’t mean viral in the biological sense.

Viral content is not just a buzzword that I’m throwing around. It has the unique characteristic of being broadly interesting across a range of audiences such that it is rapidly and widely shared. The two key components that evolutionary biologists, in particular, need to focus on: broadly interesting and widely shared. When content goes viral, it means much more than just lots of eyeballs gazing at it. This is the justification for doing any form outreach! Why do anything if it not going to reach the maximum pairs of eyeballs possible?? But, just as importantly, viral content reaches mainstream media and tends to infuse itself further in society and propagate to new audiences that you might have never realized you could ever reach. THAT is the power of viral content! Maximize your reach with minimal effort. Its the perfect cost-benefit argument for the typical cash-stretch outreach effort – if it works.

So, how do we do this? We need people dedicated to producing the content and putting it out there. We also need a network that gets the viral infusion started. Believe it or not, I would argue the latter point is the easy part. You see, there is a world online with eager science communicators and enthusiasts who are just waiting to point at something and scream from the top of their lungs “OMG SCIENCE!! LOOK!! SO FREAKING AWESOME!!!!”. The exist on blogs, on Twitter, in the Google + machine, amidst the Tumblr-weeds, on Reddit and just about any other social networking site has a community of science lovers and scientists on it. That stand at the ready to be awed by your content and share it among their networks. This “nerd army” is great start to getting content to go viral. And all you have to do is tell them: send an email, tweet, direct message, chat or whatever. The service doesn’t matter to the soldiers in the nerd army, because it’s all the same – it’s communication.

But, we first need to create the content. This is the hard part, and going to a huge effort to pull off, but I guarantee it will be worth it. There are many great examples of science content out there, Creature Cast and MBARI are great examples of a good content producers. For Creaturecast’s beautiful produced videos with fun, vivid artwork and camera footage, their videos often reach a couple hundred to couple thousand viewers – 7 notable exceptions out of 37 total videos were viewed 55,000 (2), 23,000, 17,000 (2), and 12,000 (2) times. It is no doubt these numbers show how successful their content was, but it deserves to go even bigger. Creature Cast is specifically the outreach project (with NSF funding) of a single lab. MBARI, on the other hand, has been wildly successful with thousands to millions of views. Of course, MBARI is an institution with a public relations and outreach team, as well as dozens of scientists capturing fantastic footage right outside their door.  Their authoritative position as an institution likely contributes to their success, though I would make an argument that the creativity of Creature Cast is more in tune with viral content.

It is often difficult to predict what content ends up going viral. Many advertising campaigns have tried hard to make viral advertisements. While several have taken off, many fell short of expectations. Given the cost that large companies will put into advertising, the cost to benefit analysis may not be as great as the potential for science content. To get great content up and taking off, labs and scientists need to rethink how they approach this form of outreach. The traditional approach is to do such things as a lab activity. This worked very successfully for the Dunn lab, which produced Creature Cast, in part because they had funding for a student to spend time to create these masterpieces. So one method is to include funding for you and your student assistants to make content in grants. The other is for institutions or labs with funding to hire out professional outreach or science communication specialists.

Both options are a win situation for science communication. On one hand you give students exposure and experience in developing communications materials and instill in them a sense of commitment to this ethic that will more than likely carry on throughout their careers. On the other hand you are putting your work in the capable hands of people with a solid science background who know how craft messages and market content. It is these latter people, the professional communicators, that could really get your content distributed widely. Additionally, it frees up your lab to keep making discoveries, publish papers, and train students. Either investment strategy is a good bet for both the lab, institution, and the public. The key lies in harnessing the creativity to make good content, solid messages, and thoughtful marketing.

Evolutionary biology is in dire need of a PR campaign. There are some great initiatives out there already, some that are getting off the ground and some that exist only in brilliant minds that have yet to be tapped. Sticklebacks tell an amazing story of evolution and there are many facets of the story that can grab the attention in various ways if done right. But this is not about sticklebacks, it’s about evolution and science. It’s about improving the standing of STEM education in society. It’s about nurturing an appreciation for the STEM fields to keep our country competitive, keep jobs being created and keep up progress in making new and innovative discoveries about our world. Few talk about science as a job creation vehicle, but I challenge you to find one thing around you that is not the result of STEM research. Consistent vigilance and communications efforts are imperative to maintaining public support of science research and future job creation.

Click image to go to Amazon page.

I love reviewing children’s books. I’ve had 5 years experience reading children’s books and have 2 enthusiastic assistants who can be among the most harsh of critics. Through their interest and body language I am able to rapidly assess the quality of the book, making it much easier review it. Kids have this great quality of being horribly honest sometimes, so they make quite excellent critics!

David FitzSimmons is an author and photographer and he brings Curious Critters to life with stunning, large, high-quality photographs of typical backyard and not uncommon animals. The photography itself is bright and vibrant on the white background. What I particularly like about it is that it focuses entirely on the animal and gives each critter a full page spread. It emphasized that nature is majestic enough that we need not dress it up more to make it interesting. My kids, the 4 and 6 year old critics, agree. In fact, I think their ages were right on target for this book. I would put the appropriate age range from 4-8 based on the written content.

Accompanying each critter is a bit of text about them. It is factual, yet entertaining, and written from the critters’ perspectives. For instance, the pink bush katydid:

“Sometime I wish I could change color. I mean, all the other katydids are green, but I’m pink. Scientists say that pink katydids are special. My mother thinks so, too. She says that her great-great-great grandmother was pink. That’s how I got my color. It was handed down to me from my relatives. I guess each of us shares traits with our relatives… the color of our eyes, the shape of our noses, even the size of our feet!

My bright color is often pretty cool. I blend in with pink flowers, and, when I can’t hide, it seems birds and other animals cant eat me. I guess you could look at it this way: Would you eat a blue hamburger?“

What FitzSimmons has done in this short description is quite astonishing for a children’s book. He introduces evolutionary (traits being passed down) and ecological (crypsis and predator-prey interaction) concepts in 120 words. Many natural history children’s book focus on the ecological interactions and leave out much else. In Curious Critters, ecology adorns every page touching on camouflage, symbiosis, feeding strategies, and metamorphosis to name a few. Furthermore, brief natural history descriptions are included in the back so parents can teach their kids a little more about their favorite critters as well as a match-the-silhouette activity to reinforce learning the common names (no scientific names are included). I am also VERY happy with the selection of animals, a good balance between the spineless and the spined, and all familiar animals you could encounter in a walk through your wood.

All-in-all I loved this book! Its beautiful, well laid out images, and just enough text to give you the “elevator pitch” for what makes each critter unique. The non-distracting background makes the high resolution photography really stand out. In one image of a red flat bark beetle you see mites crawling around it – the author even uses that to make a point about symbiosis (“They just hang on me and ride. They might as well be shouting all along the tree, “Here comes the big red bus!” To be truthful they don’t really hurt me, but – oooooh! – they are mite-y annoying!”). My kids were mostly captivated by the images and were proud to recognize some of the critters like the american toad and eastern box turtle. I highly recommend this book for parents who enjoy reading natural history books with their children, but really, its a book that they will sit down with on their own and thumb through the pages before they can even read.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy by the publisher for the purposes of review. This does not affect what I think of the book.

Arvind, at Fins to feet, tell you everything you need to know about jawless fish!

Can’t get enough transitions? Stephen Matheson posts on the BioLogos forum a three part series on limb evolution, New Limbs from Old Fins: check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Beacon, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, has a fantastic blog where researchers describe their work. Check out these two posts on bacterial evolvability and the effect of rising ocean temperatures on marine plankton.

Ed of the award-winning blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, talks about the occasional sexy-time between humans and neanderthals. The evidence is the genes, and not those tight, skinny hip-hugging, low-cut ones.

Over at Cassandra’s Tears, a chapter-by-chapter review of the book The Emergence of Life is started. Head over and follow along!

Jerry Coyne write great, and often contentious posts, quite frequently over at his blog Why Evolution Is True. Check out the awesome discovery (and photos!) of dinosaur feathers preserved in amber and follow along on his discussion why you might have to wait a million years for big evolutionary change.

Stephen, at Quintessence of Dust, discusses the incredibly interesting phenomenon of hitchhiking genes in the human genome.

Stan, of Honest Ab, had great fun with creationism at the Baugh Creation Evidences Museum! Read all about it here (and make sure to go back read the other posts about his visit there.)

The Mermaid’s Tale is a great blog written by 3 excellent biologists, in support of their book by the same name, studying genetics at the interface of evolution, development and ecology. Here is a small sampling of interesting conversations they have started: Killing Malaria and a back-and-forth about why paleoanthropology garners so much of a spotlight.

Skeptically Speaking has a nice podcast with Michael Barton (of Dispersal of Darwin fame) talking about the misuse of Darwin’s words by evolution denialists and a discussion with Dr. Lee Allan Dugatkin about his new book The Prince of Evolution.

John, at Evolving Thoughts, found an interesting nugget in book of Huxley’s letters concerning species and sparks an interesting discussion.

Speciation by magic! David explain at The Atavism that quirks in gene flow models (sometimes called “magic traits” tongue-in-cheekly) might be a driver in speciation, using a great example of a land snail shell handedness. See also, Ed Yong’s excellent take.

Greg Laden is excited about both David Attenborough’s new project Flying Monsters 3D and a new crocodile fossil.

A fantastic post by Jeremy at Denim & Tweed about plant-bacteria coevolution and maintaining the fine line of mutualism.

Here on the Sci-Am blog network, the Lab Rat discusses ice age bacteria with antibiotic resistance (!) and Lucas at Thoughtomics talks about how penguins colonized Africa 3 times. Also, check out my contribution at EvoEcoLab about firefly evolution in the cost of bearing lanterns!

That is all for this round, stay tuned to the Carnival of Evolution for the next host!

This naïveté is fundamental, yet driven by a general lack of understanding how to measure social media influence and true reach. In another critique of Christie’s post, Steven Hamblin notes on an example of shoddy journalism by a media professional,

“Brian Anderson writes for msnbc.com, which gets millions of hits a month.  When Brian Anderson writes a crap piece, a lot of people see it.  When I write a crap piece on this tiny little blog – according to my site stats - 3 people see it.”

And this leads to biggest overlooked point science communications evangelism. Its the reach, not the medium, which matters. There is much to agree with in Christie’s (and Steven’s) article and I am looking forward to Part 3 because this is a dialogue we need to have in science. While Christie does a great job describing social media as a set of tools to aide scientists’ communication reach, she makes a common, but unfounded, assumption that equates online presence with access.

57% of Americans say they talk to people more online than they do in real life. Scientists need to be on social media because everyone else is already, talking about their thoughts and feelings, having discussions about things they care about, and generally, well, being social.

I deeply care about the public’s view and support of science, and am not being critical of Christie individually as this is a most common error among many people who are excited about the possibilities of social media to reach large chunks of the population. Let’s break this into several points, of which I am certain there are more that I am overlooking.

For the sake of illustration, let’s take Dr. X who just read Christie’s post and perhaps several others’ over the last few months and felt so inspired he is now going to jump the bench and dive full-speed-ahead into science communication. To begin, Dr. X will start a blog on the lab’s research interest. After writing an intro post introducing Dr. X and the lab’s exciting research interest, a few new posts are written about new papers in their field and Dr. X’s opinion on a perplexing problem for the field. Naturally, Dr. X proudly creates his first insider LOLcat that pokes fun at a vanquishing paradigm that colleagues often snicker at.

Dr. X is ready for the world to read the new blog and decides to create a Facebook page and twitter account to share the content with the world, hoping for intelligent dialogue  with other scientists and questions from interested laity. Let’s follow Dr. X on this journey that many, including my colleague Christie, many other Sci-Am bloggers and myself have undertaken.

1. Time – Christie wrote an entire on post on the subject, go read it if you haven’t yet. Often the first barrier to scientists’ communicating is justifying the time to do so. This should be obvious. Dr. X must balance his desire to do their part for science outreach with teaching, research, grant-writing, university committee obligations, outside hobbies, family life and who knows what else. Time is at premium for most folks.
2. Shared sacrifice? – In Christie’s Part 2 post she had a very good suggestion that perhaps social media, blogging and outreach efforts could be a shared activity among a lab. Dr. X need not go lone wolf, there is a pack at the ready. This is a great idea – the lab that outreaches together, learns together – it teaches students the value of communicating (which likely improves their writing skills), gives the group a non-research focused bonding activity and fulfills university and grant missions. But there are good reasons for going it alone too. One the biggest drawbacks of scientists from participating in group initiatives, such as editing academic Wikipedia pages, is how to credit the work. Group activities get sticky and it can be unclear where and how much credit is due to each participant. Heck, we have this problem with determining co-authorship on papers. Additionally, while Dr. X wants to instill a sense of values to his students and postdocs, which include communicating their work to the public, there is a fine line to walk between encouragement and distraction. Students are curiosity-driven by their nature (until it gets beat out of them, that is) and tend to be a bit overenthusiastic about the “funner” side of science than the nitty gritty dirt work. But, perhaps I’m speaking from personal experience (as a former student).
3. Technology – Starting new things requires initial investment in a wide variety of resources, some which you may not foresee. Choosing blogging platforms, deciding which social media services to use, etc. This initial hill can be much too high to climb for many, especially the older crowd – which, I would argue, are the ones who need to support this idea of social media science outreach the most. The truth of the matter is that it has never been easier to stand on your internet soapbox and proclaim SCIENCE unto the world! Many great, useful platforms like Blogger and WordPress exist that are free and flexible and provide built-in tools to share your work easily over the social web. The real problem is actually…
4. Getting heard – Nothing makes outreach more rewarding than actually reaching out. The initial excitement of starting a new blog, twitter account, etc. can be eclipsed by the deafening noise of chirping crickets. Going back to the first point, building an audience and a network takes time, and not just overnight, or even over a week. It takes many months of relationship building over the internet. This can be very discouraging, like yelling into a void. Its like in a zombie apocalypse movie, you wake up and realize its a ghost town, cars crashed into light posts and not a single soul around to hear you – a defeated feeling. This is where most of the promising science bloggers give up. In my many years of doing this thing, I’ve met, read and encouraged dozens of really talented writers who just felt after several months it was not worth the effort. They just felt they couldn’t reach out to people and to do so on a scale that would make the effort worthwhile was something they felt they could not justify to themselves, employers or advisors.
5. Finding followers – Social media really only has one requirement: to be social. To take part of this system, Dr. X needs to engage his audience and peers. This requires dealing with a wide variety or personalities and agendas. It also requires nurturing your network, which can range from commenting on other people’s blogs to retweeting followers links and much more. Scientists who successfully engage in social media are those who develop friendships online, interact with readers and other random people, and show in interest in supporting the online activities of other scientists. Frankly, many scientists just don’t have it in them to do this kind of work. Furthermore, we shouldn’t expect every scientist to want to do this and many should, in fact, NOT engage with the public!

What is the solution? At the most basic, philosophical level, everyone actively participating in social media outreach, or who is broadly interested in it (perhaps even as only a consumer), need to encourage a university community that values science outreach. The online and social aspect of this is merely a tool to reach out and maximize the number of individuals or audiences. Faculty, especially tenured faculty, should create an environment that encourages and rewards activities that reach out to local communities. The  support of tenured faculty, in particular, is vital to success of untenured faculties’ outreach programs. Many researchers get their grants funded by NSF and NIH; and at least NSF includes a mandate for broader impacts that they do take seriously.  In fact, many universities have mission statements which enshrine a belief to improve the local community that supports the university. For many researchers, your online outreach activities become justifiable after spending a considerable effort selling the idea.

Providing incentives for outreach activities, online or not, will go a long ways towards increasing participation of scientists and bridging the scientist-public divide. Perhaps too much incentivizing might result in poorly done efforts undertaken in order to game the system for the tenure package, but I doubt it. As either John Hawks or Greg Gbur said at Science Online 2011 in a panel about blogging as academics, online outreach is icing on the cake if you already have a good tenure/promotion package. If you are lacking in teaching or research, your online activities could be a detriment. Incentives, though, legitimatize the efforts and online outreach has the advantage of being able to be quantified in some respect by various metrics. With web statistics, many often available for free, one can now pinpoint many details about how their blog and website are used. For instance, if Dr. X uses StatCounter (only 1 among several free webstats applications), they will be able to

• see the number of page views, number of unique IP addresses, number of returning IP addresses (all of which on hourly, daily, monthly, yearly scales) and how long each visitor stayed on his pages – all of which let Dr. X know how many people are being reached.
• get a rudimentary understanding of how many audiences are being reached by viewing the keywords that brought readers, what websites link to Dr. X’s content and how many readers came from there, and what links they leave Dr. X’s website for. Additionally, Dr. X can see on the individual level where each reader went while on the site. Did they click around or just read a post and then leave?
• get to know the readers very well: what operating system, web browser, and internet service provider do they use? What city, county, state, country are they from? The latter information can be tied to location based statistics from other sources, like government pages, about the population in those areas. What is the poverty rate, how many minorities are there, proportion of students that finish high school, go to college, etc. to understand at a fairly coarse level, at least, how your online outreach efforts affect various groups of interest to the universities mission.

So, I agree with the general consensus that more scientists online talking science is a good thing, but lets not expect it of them. Some are better and more motivated to communicate than others. I have seen way too many talented communicators enter the fray naïvely with a “build it and they will come” attitude, which sounds a bit like what Christie’s post was suggesting. To be fair, when scientists like myself and Christie were starting out blogging, the stage was much less crowded and it was far easier to get noticed. These days, many scientists are filling in a wide variety of niches on the internet and communicating to audiences small and large for a variety of reasons. For many scientists, it can be uphill battle trying to sell your outreach activities to your employers and mentors. Going about it smartly though there are a variety tools and arguments to make on how your efforts affect people, even in your university’s, government lab’s, company’s community.

Having been in the game for a long time, it is sad watching talented new communicators succumb to naïveté. Anything worth doing isn’t going to be easy, likely never to pay you and might surround you with controversy. Yet, these are worth doing. Many scientists tell me they feel personally rewarded doing outreach and engaging in social media. The majority of these individuals do it in the “spare time” and it affects their research and teaching productivity very little. The key, in my opinion, is creating a culture of outreach encouragement at institutions. This can only be done by those who have any power in the institution and if you ever believed that we needed to engage the public more, now is the time to support those faculty, students and staff who want to make a difference.

Male Schizocosa sp. CC license photo courtesy of Marshall Hedin on Flickr (click for full).

When our news editor asked on twitter what sort of animal “this six-legged spider thing” is? Her question was answered in less than one minute by entomologists. It was indeed an unfortunate spider who has lost two of his legs. While Robin may be fraught with concern or sympathy for the poor little bugger, she need fear not because spider commonly self-amputate a leg here and there. Of course the process of regeneration may leave the spider a bit more vulnerable out in the wilds of nature. Thankfully, her little friend will likely be much safer in the confines of the Scientific American offices.

Spiders may amputate their legs as a defense strategy, but it’s not clear what trade-offs exist. For instance, if a spider amputates its leg and undergoes regeneration, is future reproduction impacted, is it more susceptible to predation, is it less mobile or less of a competitor?

In a 2007 study by Wrinn & Uetz, the hypothesis that leg regeneration puts spiders at a physiological and developmental disadvantage was put to the test. The authors examined the frequency of self-amputation in the field and the relationship to size, mass and physiological condition in the wolf spider (Schizocosa ocreata, similar to picture above). Additionally, they did laboratory experiments to test the hypothesis that leg regeneration specifically impairs foraging, decreases growth or affects development time.

The field data they collected indicated that leg loss impaired foraging ability, evidenced by decreases in mass, size and physiological condition as one would expect. The laboratory experiments also suggest additional trade-offs. Though not significant, spiders regenerating legs took an average of 3.7 days longer to molt, which they must do regularly in order to grow. One interesting observation was that

“Although spiders appear to show costs of regeneration, the differences in molt interval, size, and mass between intact and regenerating spiders were only true for the first molt after autonomy. During the second molt after autonomy, regenerating spiders were able to compensate for previous costs by either shortening their molt interval or increasing their growth.”

It appears these spiders are bounce back pretty readily, minimizing the costs associated with leg loss and regeneration to only one molt. Another trade-off was between development time and mass. Regeneration resulted in either longer time to molt or lower mass, but not both. Regeneration is a fascinating phenomena. The selection of improved regenerative capabilities comes at a cost, but clearly for the individual the costs do not outweigh the benefits of continuing to live and reproduce. Our news editor needn’t fear for this poor spider’s handicap. He should be able to head back out into the spider work force in no time!

Wrinn, K., & Uetz, G. (2007). Impacts of leg loss and regeneration on body condition, growth, and development time in the wolf spider Schizocosa ocreata. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 85 (7), 823-831 DOI: 10.1139/Z07-063

Firefly photo by James Jordan on Flickr. Used in accordance with CC license.

LIGHT.

Its all around us and performs some of the most fundamental ecosystem services on our planet. Plants, whether on land or in the shallow seas, use the power of light to catalyze a cascade of reactions that ultimately result in an amazing, complex web of interdependent organisms. Even in the deep sea the products of light find their way to the bottom to be recycled among the myriad critters inhabiting this temporal oasis. Light is not only produced by chemical reactions in the sun, but animals, fungi and bacteria have harnessed a particular chemical reaction for communication.

Fireflies are in the family of beetles called Lampyridae, the “lantern bearers”. Much like our own homes, fireflies have light bulbs which use switches to turn it on and off. Luciferase, the light switch, is an enzyme that fits lock and key with the bulb, a substrate called Luciferin, in a special organ within the fireflies’ belly. This is a slow, two-step reaction with a fairly high cost to the firefly. In fact, this is why we can see the light decay after the initial flash. .

There are about 2000 species of lampyrids globally, with about 120 of those in North America. A phylogenetic study by Stanger-Hall and colleagues (2007), using a variety of genes, found that light production evolved more than once in this family and the current taxonomic classification was not supported by the molecular data. There were other anomalies too. For instance, two genera (groups of closely related species) which were classified outside of the Lampyridae family were clearly nested cozily within the group.

If lantern-bearing arose several times among one group of closely related beetles it must serve a unique purpose that the ancestors of the family were pre-adapted towards. But based on morphological analysis, light production evolved early, predating the Lampyridae, and was retained from the larval form. Like all beetles, their larvae are grubby little worm-like creatures that live a life apart from their adult counterparts. Branham & Wenzel (2003) report lampyrid larvae with a constant, but faint, glow in the abdominal larval light organs. This is supported by observations that adults vary widely in light production as well as light organ placement and use.

Typically, lampyrids use their light displays as sexual signals to attract a mate. But more ancestral family members use pheromones. Citing a chapter by Lloyd (1997), Stanger-Hall described three mating signal systems in the 120 North American species of firefly:

1. Chemical signals (pheromones): so-called ‘‘dark fireflies’’ which produce no light as adults, are active during the day and release chemical signals to attract mates.
2. Glows (continuous light signals): these ‘‘glowworm fireflies’’ tend to have larvae-like females who spend the day in underground burrows and emerge at night. They glow (short distance) in combination with using pheromones (long distance) to attract males who fly towards the glow, but usually do not signal themselves.
3. Flashes (short intermittent light signals): the more common ‘‘lightning bug fireflies’’ that are active at dusk or in the dark. Both males and females use species-specific light signals to communicate with each other in an interactive visual morse-code.

There are no clear patterns in the evolution of the signaling pathway though. Whether they used flashes, glows or pheromones, each strategy is independent of any evolutionary lineage. Below, the tree on the left is color-coded by sexual signal modes (individual species are irrelevant for this discussion). Green signifies flashes, orange is glow, grey means using pheromones and weak glows, while black is only pheromones. It is obvious from the random arrangement of color in the figure that glows and flashes have multiple origins in the North American firefly fauna.

Figure from Stanger-Hall et al. (2007). See text for explanation.

The tree on the right is the same, but this time orange branches are for both flashes and glows while black branches are for pheromones only. The asterisks denoted light signal origins (orange) or losses (black) while the letters A & B represent two possible evolutionary scenarios. In scenario A, light signaling originated once in ancestral adults, but were subsequently lost nine times. Alternatively, in scenario B, ancestral lampyrids used pheromones as the sexual signal, then independently transitioned to light signals four times, which were followed by four losses of light signaling.

Taken together with outside evidence, there is support for the hypothesis that North American fireflies invaded the continent multiple times with multiple origins (i.e. Europe or Asia). While scenario A allows for only a single origin of light production followed by 9 losses, scenario B is more parsimonious – that is, requiring fewer steps. Gaining light production appears more rare than losing that ability. So, we are left with a conundrum. It is clearly a useful strategy if it evolved repeatedly and independently in fireflies, yet these insects are clearly asking for it by announcing their presence to a very hungry world.

To reconcile this evolutionary problem, we need to know a bit more about their ecology. Using a technique called open flow respirometry, which measures carbon dioxide production, Woods and colleagues (2007) measured the energetic costs on the firefly during flashes and when at rest. More carbon dioxide was produced (meaning a greater metabolic rate) during light production than at rest, but it was a lower metabolic rate than walking while not flashing. When comparing lampyrids that are capable  of light production versus those were not, there were no differences in metabolic rate meaning that bioluminescence carried no physiological costs.

Figure from Woods et al. (2007). See text for explanation.

But, as we might surmise from common sense, producing light must make you a beacon to predators. To test what cost there might be to switching on the light bulb to predation, Woods set up an experiment with arrays of sticky-trap cups with flashing LEDs that simulated the mating signals of Photinus greeni and sticky-trap cups without any light (see left). P. greeni is chemically defended against would-be predators and considered unpalatable. But there is one predator that remains unbothered by this defense. In fact, it is another species of firefly, Photuris versicolor, that sequesters the compound for use in its own defense. Naturally, P. versicolor hunts other fireflies by tracking their mating signals and capturing ‘grounded’ males in the midst of getting it on. Out of 218 individuals of P. versicolor trapped, only 4 were caught on non-flashing traps. Interestingly, 96% of all trapped Photuris were females.

The take home message? It doesn’t cost much to flash your stuff but you may attract the wrong company!

“Every single night, male fireflies are out there flying a fine line between sex and death. For us, it definitely rivals the most exciting television thriller! So, next time you’re outside on a summer night take a moment to admire the firefly romance and risk that’s playing out all around you.”-Sara Lewis, Professor of Biology at Tufts University (quoted from press release on physorg.com)

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Branham, M., & Wenzel, J. (2003). The origin of photic behavior and the evolution of sexual communication in fireflies (Coleoptera: Lampyridae) Cladistics, 19 (1), 1-22 DOI:10.1111/j.1096-0031.2003.tb00404.x

Lloyd, J.E. (1997). Firefly mating ecology, selection and evolution In: Choe, J.C., Crespi, B.J. (Eds.), Evolution of Mating Systems in Insects and Arachnids. Cambridge University Press, London, 184-192 DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511721946.011

Stanger-Hall, K., Lloyd, J., & Hillis, D. (2007). Phylogeny of North American fireflies (Coleoptera: Lampyridae): Implications for the evolution of light signals Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 45 (1), 33-49 DOI: 10.1016/j.ympev.2007.05.013

Woods WA Jr, Hendrickson H, Mason J, & Lewis SM (2007). Energy and predation costs of firefly courtship signals. The American naturalist, 170 (5), 702-8 PMID: 17926292

Screen capture from Weather.com

I have a draft composition of the next Evolution’s Tempo movement, but it appears that an unexpected natural disturbance has occurred in my blogging schedule. You see, hurricane Irene is coming straight for me as a write this.

Disturbances have a funny way of reorganizing the ecosystem a little – and sometimes a lot! While my productivity is temporarily thrown in a loop as I secure my home and yard, we aren’t actually quite sure how hurricanes affect many species. I think we sort of just assume that most animals bounce back readily cause, well, that is where they live. It is optimal habitat for them.

I’m not so different really. Coastal North Carolina is optimal habitat for my family. The weather great nearly year round. The water is warm enough to swim from April to October (though for some of the more braver of our species it is year round). It’s safe here, we have a large property that get occasional visits from fiddler crabs strayed from the Marsh a few meters away. My kids grow up being an intimate part of nature, and the sea. The slow pace of life is felt just about everywhere you turn here. The wild horses on Carrot Island mosey around and munch of the salty grass, the feral cats on Piver’s Island just stretch out belly up on the overgrown railroad tracks, and even the squirrels and butterflies seem less skittish here.

Sometimes, places just get a little too calm and complacent though and Mother Nature (for instance: the Coriolis Effect, friction and a sprinkling of chaos) shakes things up a bit to remind us to keep our guard up. The individuals that survive the disturbance are better adapted for future catastrophes. These traits are passed on through to offspring and continues a thriving lineage of well-adapted species. At least, that is until a new disturbance comes along.

I hope to impart on my offspring, through our preparedness and handling of this situation, characteristics that will make them well-adapted for these sorts of disturbances which they will undoubtedly weather throughout their lives. Especially as we, as well as all life, are trying to adapt to a chaotic climate made ever more erratic by a warming planet. Throw a little heat into the pot and you’ll get boiling eventually.

We love our life in coastal North Carolina, but part of the price we pay is vigilance. All species are rewarded with survival when they keep their guard up in the face of the Gael.

Evolution is a harmonic composition that is balanced by the environmental forces that act upon ecosystems and the biological forces that mold populations and species. Like the epic concerti of the classical greats, evolution is composed of several movements. Elegant sonatas of populations steadily drifting apart are punctuated by candenzas of rapid adaptation of species as a result of newly arisen barriers. Some species are soloists amid an orchestra of diversity, but that orchestra inevitably evolves together  da Capo al fine.

The first movement I want to discuss in the concerto of life is a slow movement. Much like an Adagio, macroevolution makes wide generalizations using elegant, simple chords “with a tense melodic line and taut harmonies” (NPR Music). The “tense melodic line” being the unbroken line of descent with modification from a common ancestor. Here, the scale of change occurs at and above the species level and deals with the origin novel traits. The appearance of feathers on birds or differences in leaf shape among oak trees, for instance. What we miss in this movement are the details: how did novel traits arise? The answer delves into each species’ unique physiology, genetics and ecology.

Bordering on “just so” stories, macroevolution piques the interest and cues the emotions of the listener. Unlike one of the great concerti, we only get to hear the end of the Adagio movement. What we only now observe is a climax, the strings are taut and the harmonies reverberate through the concert hall, but the song is still far from done. It appears to us that everything we have listened to over the last several hundred years of natural history research has led up to this finale, but we would be fooling ourselves as this concert has been playing steadily for billions of years. At this point, we move from merely an audience to participants in the sonic storyline.

The slow, intentional pace of the Evolutionary Adagio belies the intensity of each note. A deliberate stroke on the string of adaptation echoes through to generations beyond leaving a modified draft of the song in each generation’s wake. Yet every important note, every crescendo, and each major lift is hidden from our ears in this Adagio. It’s as if we are digging through the world’s greatest sonic masterpiece and only finding parts of a score here and there in the fossil record. We have enough pieces of the score to get idea of how the song should go and to understand the major features of the orchestra, but we do not know how each transition went.

Contrary to musical composition, in evolutionary science this isn’t so much a problem. We know the general melodies of the theories and it is still very harmonious and a pleasure to listen to. The pieces fit nicely and the composition of the Evolutionary Adagio makes sense, if but a little staccato at times. This seemingly slow, deliberate change of macroevolution is exceeded by the magnitude of novelties that have arisen to fill new niches left over from a landscape in constant flux. We can measure differentiation and understand very well the pattern of speciation understanding very well the unique signature that every individual note leaves on the song as a whole. Adding up all the notes we get a plausible history, but more importantly we have a testable hypothesis with transcendent explanatory power.

This movement’s strength comes from a deceptive simplicity: out of nowhere an eye arises, scales turn into feathers, or spines appear. But these novel traits are really proxies for entire sets of circumstances and reactions that affected ancestral populations. Hidden inside this drawn-out movement are other movements operating at more allegro tempos. The sum of which equate to an Evolutionary Masterpiece that underpins the entire symphony of biology.

If you new to the Circus, each month a new host takes us on a journey of some of the best spineless offering of the last month! It’s a great way to catch up on excellent science, natural history and nature photography of the under-appreciated majority in the Animal Kingdom. if you blog, send in 1 or 2 of your best posts or volunteer to host! Even if you do not blog, you can submit posts you’ve enjoyed from elsewhere.

Now, on with the Circus!

The Insect Big Tent!

Brandon Keim at Wired Science has some amazing photos and science of the Dung Beetles! Not only can they dunghandle their crap uphill both ways – hey, one beetle’s crap is another beetle’s treasure! – but admire their fungal farming abilities and ooo and aah at their sexual dimorphism!

Not impressed by beetle farming? Well check out these ants collecting mesquite seeds from… wait for it…. coyote Dung! Roberta at Wild About Ants will give you something you won’t see at Barnum & Bailey!

Dragonflies are all the rage, as well they should be. They are, after all, perfect as Dana observes at En Tequila Es Verdad. So much so that JSK at Anybody Seen My Focus? has photographed them all over the place!

Scandal is afoot at the Circus! Some supposed “dragonfly lady” has written an excellent essay on the post-monsoonal descent of the Palo Verde Beetle on Tuscon! From Odonata to Odo-nono!

Bees, wasps, and the flies that look like them abound in Flatbush Gardener’s NYC garden!

In tribute and memorial to great insect chemical ecologist Thomas Eisner, Jennifer of The Artful Amoeba writes a fantastic essay on the chemical defenses and offenses of the bombardier beetle and plants.

Can one overstate how amazing ants are? Explore this metaphysical connection of people and their six-legged friends with entomologist Marlene Zuk at Myrmecos.

Arachnids of Wonder!

Plate 66 from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904) (Wikipedia Commons, click for species IDs).

Watch in awe as spiders transform into ants! Learn the ancient art of myrmecomorphy right here on EvoEcoLab.

Pretty in pink won’t keep this moth off a tiny spider’s dinner plate. Pictures and story by Wanderin’ Weeta.

Marine Invert Comedy Hour!

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll come away with a new outlook on life as Dr. M guides us through the many personalities of anemones over at Deep Sea News!

BUZZ!!! Hello? huh, nobody there… BBBUUUUZZZZZ!!!!!! hello? oh sorry, that must be my lobster! Zen at Neurodojo explains loud lobster buzzing, predator avoidance or just crustaceous self-massage?

Follow Iffy, Alvy and the whole hydrothermal crew of Deep Fried Sea, a comic series at Southern Fried Science.

Finally, enter the HALL OF VERMES!

Everyone’s favorite “elegans” worm is the star of this show! Come watch as their sperm delivers lethal toxin to embryos over at Quintessence of Dust and fear for the loathsome nematode as it wrestles for its life with badass fungi AT THE BOTTOM OF THE FREAKING SEA at Deep Sea News!!

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That’s all for this edition of the Circus of the Spineless! Stay Tuned next month as the Circus travels to the Cephalopodiatrist to get that embarrassing head-foot problem looked at. Send your submission to me to pass on to Danna! The gmail knows me as kzelnio.

Ant, or Spider? You Decide! Top: Sandilya Theuerkauf; Bottom: Sean Hoyland (both from Wikipedia Commons).

Myrmecomorphy

Part of the fun in natural history is playing word detective! Naturalists speak in greek and latin and love mashing together parts of these languages to create new, yet often very descriptive, words. This month, I want to talk a little about an awesome word – MYRMECOMORPHY.

This beauteous etymological wonder is derived from from the root words myrmex, meaning ant, and morphos, meaning form. Soooooooo, myrmecomorphy is ant-mimicking! This is a form of Batesian mimicry, which occurs between two, often very different, species are very similar in appearance. The caveat is that the initial species is usually toxic, spiny or otherwise unpleasant to eat, while the mimic is a fraud and only appears to be dangerous.

In the two photos at left did you spot the real ant? If you count the legs it’s easy to tell. The individual in the bottom photo has eight legs whereas the top photo is the Weaver Ant, Oecophylla smaragdina, the queen nonetheless. The mimic is Myrmarachne plataleoides (female shown in photo, males have gigantic mandibles, about 33% of their body length). The spider genus Myrmarachne (Salticidae – the jumping spider family) literally means ant-spider and is characterized by these fraudulent mimics with nearly 200 species of ant wannabes, and for good reason!

While ants are nice, tiny little “fun-size” prey-items, they are typically quite dangerous to eat and mighty unpleasant to the palate. Therefore, a wide variety of potential predators of the Myrmarachne, including other salticid spiders and preying mantises, leave them well alone! Prey preference experiments have shown that these predators are not just averse to chomping on ants, but they  avoid the Myrmarchne just the same.

Jumping spiders have complex mating behaviors. Nelson & Jackson describe in detail the mating behavior of the mimics Myrmarachne assimilis and M. bakeri. Its quite the romance novel so let me set the mood…

(Visualize a hot steamy jungle next to a white sand beach, a gentle breeze, seagulls laughing in the distance…)

He’s alone, walking through the brush and then as if out a dream, she appears before his eyes – all of them. The morning dew glistens off her abdomen, four eyes catching the sunrise to the east. He arches his palp, twitches his abdomen… standing erect. She faces him, eagerness dripping off the hairs of all eight legs, waves her palps gingerly in the air. He watches with the utmost anticipation. She turns away, he follows. She turns around, he waits. Eyes locked. Her cephalothorax lowers, he dances with the rising sun as if beckoning the light to share in this moment.

She lunges past him, yet is blocked by his desire. Eight eyes staring. Eight legs trembling. Two hearts melding. She tries to leave, but his approach calls to her as a primal scream. She must answer. His legs erect, brushing up against hers. She wants to run away, escape from these feelings, yet can’t seem to pull herself away. The hypnotic, primordial power of lust overcomes all her senses. She shifts her abdomen closer, he gently places his chelicerae upon her abdomen. Softly, calmly, he applies each palp once, then its over…

“When the male disengaged his applied palp, he moved over the female (her abdomen no longer raised or rotated), tapped and stroked and then, once positioned again beside the female, the male scraped his palp across her now flexed-up and rotated abdomen and resumed copulation. Before next palp application, while centered over the female, the male sometimes stepped backwards and forwards, stroking and tapping intermittently.”-Nelson & Jackson 2007

Left: Oecophylla smaragdina, Right: Myrmarachne plataleoides (female). Photos by Chih Fah Shin.

Nelson, X., & Jackson, R. (2007). Complex display behaviour during the intraspecific interactions of myrmecomorphic jumping spiders (Araneae, Salticidae) Journal of Natural History, 41 (25-28), 1659-1678 DOI: 10.1080/00222930701450504