A trip to Angola 13 years ago...

It seems like a long time ago when in January 2009 we set off up the N7 through Namibia to Angola to join a SANBI expedition to the southern highlands of Angola and Iona National Park. Our team on reptiles and amphibians consisted of Krystal Tolley and myself (then from SANBI) and Bill Branch and Werner Conradie (from BayWorld). We were just one component of many teams from different disciplines that joined forces to inventory the biodiversity of southern Angola.

As time has gone by, there have been many more trips to Angola with many more people involved. Together, all of this data represents an important resource, and has now been written up as an updated herpetofaunal inventory for Iona National Park by Javier Lobón-Rovira and colleagues, and published in the journal Check List.

With 5 amphibians (the park is essentially a desert) and 70 reptile species, the new check list records 40 of these for the first time in Iona National Park. This is a remarkable achievement.

Read the full paper Open Access here.

Lobón-Rovira J, Vaz Pinto P, S. Becker F, Tolley KA, Measey J, Bennet B, Boon B, de Sá S, Conradie W (2022) An updated herpetofaunal species inventory of Iona National Park in southwestern Angola. Check List 18(2): 289-321. https://doi.org/10.15560/18.2.289

Downloading data from Hobo loggers

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and leave expensive equipment in the field in order to get much needed long-term data. This is what we did last February in a trip to KZN where we made an elevational transect while collecting African clawed frogs for Laurie (see Blog Post here). We placed four loggers at sea level, 1000 m, 2000 m and 3000 m asl. Sadly, the logger at 3000 m asl disappeared very soon after we placed it in a deluge of floods that hit Lesotho in March 2021. That meant that there were still three more loggers out in the field that needed to be retrieved. 

Fortunately, with the help of Bongani Ntloko from Letseng mine, we were able to redeploy another Hobo logger into a pond with Xenopus at ~3300 m asl. The results after one year (March to March 2022-23) are amazing.

Firstly, note that the scale on the y-axis only goes up to 20 C, and the water never gets that warm. For most of the year, the water is below 10 C. Only from around mid-October to late-March is the water above 10 C. This means that the frogs in Lesotho are more than half of their year in water less than 10 C. Even in summer, the water still regularly dips below 10 C on a daily basis.

Happily, the logger from 2000 m asl at the Fat Mulberry was retrieved by Marggie and she brought it to Stellenbosch where we could download the data.

This month I made a trip back to KZN to retrieve the outstanding loggers from near Dalton and at Bonamanzi:

The temperature of the water in a dam near Dalton never went below freezing, but it did get quite cold (as well as getting hot in the summer). 

Meanwhile at Bonamanzi, the temperature was nearly always above 10 C, and even went above 40 C! Contrast this with Lesotho when the water temperature rarely went above 10 C!

You may remember that Bonamanzi was where we had our traps vandalised by crocodiles. Happily though, you can see that the logger (right) didn't come to the same fate. The logger near Dalton (left) was still tied to the same stone sunk in the dam. 

Thanks to friends in Lesotho, we redeployed one of these Hobo devices there. Because you can replace their batteries, they are fantastic and just carry on working. We are hoping that the new logger won't go AWOL!

What is Sci-Hub?

Sci-Hub is a file sharing website that allows anyone to access to ~95% of all scientific articles that normally sit behind a paywall. While publishers see Sci-Hub as a pirate site that disseminates content that they own illegally, many of the world's scientists have come to rely on using it to quickly gain access to articles that they would otherwise be charged to read. Read more about Sci-Hub and its Kazakhstani founder Alexandra Elbakyan on Wikipedia. 

At first sight, this does seem to be a lawless exercise, but remember that none of the knowledge or content are paid for by the publishers. Indeed, many scientists are increasingly viewing the publishers' paywall as immoral, while sites like Sci-Hub are akin to a Robin Hood dissemination of knowledge already funded by civil society. To read more about the issues with publishing science, see How to Publish in Biological Sciences (Measey 2022). 

Who uses Sci-Hub?

Today, Alexandra Elbakyan gave us the stats on who uses Sci-Hub. What struck me most is that we might expect scientists from poorer economies to use Sci-Hub proportionately more because they lack the economic power to access the papers. 

What Alexandra revealed is that it is the more wealthy economies (who publish more) that use Sci-Hub the most. In other words - everyone uses Sci-Hub.

Here I have graphed on the x-axis GDP (Purchasing power parity; international dollars from IMF for 2021) of the top 50 countries downloading Sci-Hub (data taken 15-02-2022), while on the y-axis the number of papers each country has published so far in 2022 (from Scopus 15-02-2022). Size of bubbles are proportionate to the number of Sci-Hub downloads. Both axes are on log scales.

Although we might expect the bubbles to get proportionately bigger as the economies get poorer, what we see is that it is mostly the largest economies who are accessing Sci-Hub the most. 

Is this a mistake?

Surely, rich countries such as the USA and France (#2 and #3 on the Sci Hub download list) don't need to access Sci Hub as all of their institutions can subscribe to all content? This is how it might seem from afar, especially if you work in a low or middle income country. However, the idea that all academics work at wealthy institutions in rich countries is a fallacy. Countries, such as the USA, have very large numbers of tertiary institutions and most of these are not at all wealthy. Those who conduct research there need to obtain research from behind paywalls that their institutions don't subscribe to. Their only option is to use Sci Hub. I say that this is their 'only' option as paying $30-$50 for each article that they need to read is not really an option. 

Let's not forget that the better educated public in rich countries might also be more likely to try to access scientific articles, although I doubt that many will know of the Sci Hub option.

These same people (i.e. the vast majority of scientists in the world, even those from rich countries) suffer from the new price ticket on gold Open Access publications. Like those scientists from middle income countries, they cannot afford the prices that publishers charge and so have to look for alternatives. 

There are also some oddities in the list. As Alexandra Elbakyan points out, many places in the UK do not allow access to Sci Hub, and so there people might be using proxy servers to access it via the USA (also inflating their figures). But this is speculation. 

An unusual MSc defence setting

Defending your MSc with an oral presentation can be a harrowing experience. The assembled crowd is anticipating the results of your research study, you are aware that your presentation counts as 20% of your final mark (in South Africa at least). It is time for your best performance. However, with COVID comes challenges and also opportunities. For Sam Peta, being able to present his MSc thesis defence online allowed him not to miss the opportunity of a lifetime with fieldwork in Mauritius. With the island closed to visitors (from South Africa) for nearly two years, Sam's only opportunity to go came around the same time that he needed to defend his thesis. 

An hour before the defence, the heavens opened and torrential rain fell on Mauritius. Undeterred, Sam continued to prepare to give his talk. The, about 30 minutes before the defence was due to start, the power to the house failed and we were thrown into the gloomy darkness of a power-cut in a storm on a tropical island. Quickly we devised a plan, we could use the mobile network and hope that the laptop battery would continue to work for the full talk. Just as we got it all set up, around 10 minutes before the start, the power popped back on again and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Sam settled into presentation mode, making himself comfortable as much as he could while he talked to the congregated academics. The talk went well but now it was time for the inquisition. Sam responded to all questions in his usual detailed response, and after nearly an hour the defence was over.

I took Sam out for dinner at the Flying Dodo to celebrate this final hurdle of his MSc studies. We will remember this MSc defence for a long time to come.

Sam Peta - In Mauritius at long last

The COVID-19 restrictions have been tough on most people, but for MSc student Sam Peta they turned his international fieldwork for his MSc studies into a very local affair. Sam was supposed to be investigating diet and trophic levels of invasive and native populations of the Guttural Toad (Sclerophrys guttuarlis) using a suite of quantitative methods. Those invasive populations include Cape Town, and the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion. 

However, the COVID lockdowns started only 3 months into Sam's thesis, when he had only managed a single trip to the native range in Durban. At the time, we thought that we'd still get Sam into the field to work on the island populations before the end of his thesis. But back then we were not familiar with the course of the pandemic, the waves and the variants that would see those in southern Africa become the new pariahs of the rest of the world. 

Although the trip was postponed, happily for Sam he managed to make it to Mauritius and conduct the planned field work on their tiny toads. Sadly, this work is too late for his thesis, but it'll be a great addition to his existing work on Guttural Toad diet. Reunion remains closed.