Nitya punches hard with his first PhD pub

Out online early in Biological Invasions, Nitya shows how you can use interviews with local people to reconstruct the invasion of a species. 

This is a great paper where Nitya went to 91 villages across the Andaman Islands to interview local people in order to discover when and where Indian Bullfrogs had invaded the islands. A quick look through these time slices below will show not only the sites of initial invasion, but also how they spread. 

Want to read more? Catch the paper now at Biological Invasions:

Mohanty, N.P. & Measey, J. (in press) Reconstructing biological invasions using public surveys: a new approach to retrospectively assess spatio-temporal changes in invasive spread. Biological Invasions   DOI: 10.1007/s10530-018-1839-4

The frozen liver conundrum

You want to go frog trapping tonight, but the shop only sells frozen liver. You're already in the field, so what do you do?

Liver is a really useful bait for frogs in the genus Xenopus.  Attracted by the meaty odours, the frogs will willingly come into a trap placed overnight into a ditch or pond. However, chicken livers are regularly sold frozen, and the frozen block is really hard to sparate and use. 

Here you see Marius Burger finding a solution to this frozen liver problem. Although his first key idea was functional, it wasn't popular. The next solution is, I believe, unbeatable and one that we are ready to share with you. Moreover, this might be the first time that anyone has come up with such a practical and fast solution to the frozen liver conundrum.

Thanks Marius!

Nitya takes centre stage

Nitya presents his work on invasion of the Andaman Islands by Indian bullfrogs (Hoplobatachus tigerinus) at the Neobiota meeting in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland. He wowed the audience with his presentation on how he used a new approach to retrospectively understand spatio-temporal patterns of the bullfrogs’ introduction, establishment, dispersal, and spread.  in biological invasions, using the case study of an ongoing invasion of the Indian bullfrog in the Andaman archipelago, Bay of Bengal.

Dan Simberloff was seen snapping away at Nitya’s presentation, so we expect that there’ll be some heavy citations of this article. And so there should be. Nitya has provided an excellent field-example of how to determine the early steps of an invasion.

To cap it off, Nitya heard last week that his paper on the same subject has been accepted for publication in Biological Invasions. Well done, Nitya!

Mohanty N.P. & Measey, J. Reconstructing biological invasions using public surveys: a new approach to retrospectively assess spatio-temporal changes in invasive spread. Neobiota 2018: 10^th International Conference on Biological Invasions: New Directions in Invasion Biology. 4-7 September 2018. Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland.

Disenfranchising Scientists from Middle-Income Countries

 

We are all quick and ready to agree that Open Access is the best way forward for all scientific results. The aims and objectives of Science Europe are laudable and will lead to a far better publishing environment for European scientists. Scientists from other high-income countries will also benefit from this decision, having a far greater number of journals in which to publish Open Access.

If current trends continue, scientists from low-income countries will be granted full fee waivers. Many journals use the Hinari Eligibility list of countries to separate Group A (free access) and Group B (low cost access – normally billed at a 50% reduction in fees). The lists are made up from five global economic and development criteria.

Middle-income countries are missing from these lists, and receive no support for fee waivers. Their governments provide scientists with no means of paying fees. Scientists who pay fees often do so from their own research budgets. The increasing number of journals that charge unjustifiably high publishing costs are forcing middle-income scientists away from Open Access journals. In my own lab, publication fees are regularly more than the cost of conducting ecological research.

Looking forward to 2020, it is possible to see that even though fees may be capped on the new and existing European Open Access publications, as long as there are still fees, scientists from middle-income countries will be excluded from publishing. Worse, we will be forced to send our manuscripts to second-rate journals that retain pay walls, or start our own low-cost productions.

Science Europe must recognise that science is a global responsibility, and by moving their own members forwards they risk disenfranchising scientists in middle-income countries that are already struggling to fund and publish their work in an increasingly costly publishing climate.

There is still time to amend the announcement, and ensure that it will not risk the publishing of science from any scientist anywhere in the world.

This email was sent to Marc Schiltz but went without reply.

Learning about the impacts of aliens on lives

The BDE345 class took a trip to an area near Kleinmond to learn more about invasive plants and the impacts that they have on land and lives. The class spent some time looking at an area of land heavily invaded with Australian myrtle, black wattle, Port Jackson, and silky hakea. During a fifteen minute search in an area of around 10 m² with botanist Jan-Hendrik Keet, the class found all of these invasive plants, and only 3 native species. The vegetation was around 3 m high and couldn’t have contrasted more intensely with the farm on the other side of the road.

This property, owned by Craig Saunders, is 455 ha and Craig met with the class and told them frankly about his 4 year and R3.5 million battle to get the aliens under control. When Craig bought the property, there was no difference on either side of the road. Now, they couldn’t be more different, and the same 10 m² yielded a list of more than 30 native species, several of them endemic to the region.

Craig told the class frankly about how he had underestimated the true cost of the alien invasion, together with lots of practical lessons learned in getting them under control. However, everyone could see how much better the land looked. Although Craig acknowledged that the battle is not over, the annual cost of keeping the aliens under control should fall year on year.

 

Thanks very much to Craig Saunders for spending his Saturday morning with the class and giving us a great idea about what owning an invaded property means.