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Academic capture

26 October 2021

A talk for Stellenbosch University library

I was invited by the library at Stellenbosch University give a talk for their Open Access week. The theme was UNESCO's "It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity."

As this theme fitted perfectly with my forthcoming book "How to publish in the Biological Sciences", I provided a talk giving a brief outline of the state of publishing. 


The talk needs a little work - especially to get it below one hour long! I suggest that you speed up the content to 1.4x so that it isn't too painfully slow. 
  Lab  Writing

Tadpoles of guttural toads also adapt

20 October 2021

Growing up in a new world

In a new paper published in Neobiota, Max Mühlenhaupt and colleagues bring tadpoles from invasive and native (both urban and rural) populations of the Guttural Toad (Sclerophrys gutturalis) into a common garden. You may remember the exploits of Max back in late 2019 and early 2020 (if not, then you can read about them here, here and here).

Max looked at lots of traits of the tadpoles as they developed over time. This included morphology swimming performance and developmental rate. What he found is that animals from all populations were identical morphologically and their performance did not diverge. However animals from the invasive population in Cape Town developed significantly more slowly.

In the video clip below, you can see how Max stimulated the tadpoles to perform. From videos such as this, he was able to measure swimming performance of individuals.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the end of this experiment, we expect that the slow development of tadpoles from Cape Town would have resulted in their larger size at metamorphosis. This is yet another example of adaptation in an extremely short period of time. Guttural Toads were first discovered in Cape Town in the year 2000. Just under 20 years from when Max started his experiment.

Read more here:

Mühlenhaupt M, Baxter-Gilbert J, Makhubo BG, Riley JL, Measey J (2021) Growing up in a new world: trait divergence between rural, urban, and invasive populations of an amphibian urban invader. NeoBiota  69: 103–132. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.69.67995


Reporter meets pine tree invasion

18 October 2021

Getting a reporter's view

When I got an email from Wendell Roelf, Reuters news agency, asking for information about invasive trees and any frogs that they may impact, there was one clear example that sprung to mind. We have been monitoring the rough moss frog on the Klein Swartberg near Caledon for around 10 years now. In that time the invasion from pine trees on the massif has been spectacular. Since a fire in 2011, we have seen the mountain turn from blackened earth to a carpet of pine seedlings, and now thick sways of pines that are so dense that individuals are as thin as sticks but have reached 3 to 4 m in height. 

In amongst all this the Rough Moss Frog, Arthroleptella rugosa, can be found in fewer spots on the mountain. Where it is still present among the pines the calls are far fewer. Oliver Angus, Honours student in the MeaseyLab, has been using aSCR to determine the density of the remaining populations of the Rough Moss Frog. Stay tuned to see the outcome of his findings here.

The MeaseyLab (myself, Oliver Angus and Andrea Melotto) took Wendell Roelf and cameraman Mike Hutchins up the Klein Swartberg where we introduced him to Andrew Turner from CapeNature, Lampie Fick chairman of the Klein Swartberg nature conservancy, and a team of contractors who are cutting fire breaks that will form the basis of a rotational burn on the mountain that should see it free of pines in the future. After getting the full picture, Wendell took himself off into the pines to jot down notes for his story.

It was a fun day and great to see that Wendell wrote a great article that has been syndicated all over the world.

To read Wendell's article, click the image below:

They also put together a neat video that shows what it takes to remove invading pine trees:

See copies of Wendell's article:

  aSCR  Frogs  Lab

Welcome Stephane

07 October 2021

At long last, it's great to welcome Stephane Boissinot from the Boissinot Lab New York University - Abu Dhabi (Saadiyat Island campus). Stephane has been collaborating with the MeaseyLab for a while. He has been trying to visit for his sabbatical for more than a year now. And finally, the stars have aligned so that he can leave Abu Dhabi and come into South Africa. 

While at Stellenbosch, Stephane will take part in fieldwork to collect African clawed frogs in an altitudinal transect in the southwestern Cape. Click here for the blog post on our altitudinal transect of the northeast.

Next week, we will be joined by post-docs Dareen and Sandra who will join us on the field trip. Watch this space...

  Frogs  Lab  Xenopus

The Peter Principle in Academia

01 October 2021

The Peter Principle

From time to time I come across old ideas, often from different disciplines, that encompass phenomena that I experience in my professional life. It was a delight then to hear about thePeter Principle, on a recent podcast of the BBC’s Witness History (you canfollow this link to listen), from the world of management studies.

Laurence Peter was an educator who was frustrated with what he experienced as incompetence in hierarchies. He noticed that in any hierarchical structure, people talented at their job would receive a promotion to manage others in the same position. His frustration, as will be known to many of you, was that people who are good at their jobs are not necessarily good at the level above what they do: i.e. managing others who do that job. Management positions are very different roles and involve a lot more investment of time in the people in your team, building relationships and inspiring those around you to work together. Hence a woman who is excellent at selling cars will not necessarily be the best person to manage a team of people who sell cars. 

Peter took this idea forward in an interesting way. He reasoned that people who are good at what they do get promoted. But when they stop being good at what they do, they stop being promoted. The Peter Principle then states that people are promoted in a hierarchy until they reach a position at which they are incompetent. Once they reach the  level of incompetence, they will no longer be promoted, but rest in that position. According to the Peter Principle then, in any hierarchy we can expect that people in positions up the hierarchy are all actually incompetent at what they do, but would have been competent at the level below. 

Douglas Adams had his own particular spin on this idea when he said:

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

It is never particularly hard to see that politicians have arrived in their positions of power through sheer determination and ambition. These are qualities that allowed them to get ahead of countless others both in party politics, but also in attracting votes. Yet, we see on a daily basis that these qualities are not what it takes to lead wisely. 

The reality is that people get jobs and are promoted for all sorts of reasons, not purely for their competence in their current role. In academia, a strongly hierarchical system, we know that many academics are highly averse to being promoted away from positions where they teach and research as they are fully aware that they are unsuited to such positions. However, they may motivate very strongly to move into positions that have more power in order to choose the way in which they spend the majority of their time. But the oddities still exist: why would full professors have the lowest teaching load - surely they are the best teachers?

Perhaps where we see academics struggling the most is when they become heads of departments, deans of faculties, or managers of research units. Nothing in their background has prepared them for a role in management. Indeed, one could argue that becoming a good academic has involved a lot of movement away from any training in a management position. Academic departments need heads, and the head is always a senior academic, although not necessarily the most senior. Could it be any other way? Could the head of an academic department be a manager who represents the ideas and thoughts of the academics in their departments? 

Nevertheless, academic institutions and funders persist with the notion that senior academics that are competent at research will make good directors. The reality is that competent directors make good directors, and academics will only be as good as the management team that supports them. In my experience, this regularly comes down to a single supporting individual, and if they leave, the resulting void is difficult or impossible to fill. Of course, Peter would say that if they are performing well in their job, then those in the supporting roles have not yet reached their level of incompetence, and so there’s a chance that they will be promoted away from what they do best.

Laurence Peter also had an antidote to the Peter Principle, and he called this creative incompetence: when you create the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence.

So next time you view those higher up than you in the academic hierarchy to which you belong, remember the Peter Principle, and maybe spare a thought for those that support the academic figureheads.

Happy Birthday Mum!

  Lab
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