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.
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.
Photo by Dave Richardson (who spoke after Nitya - something to get used to).
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: 10th 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.
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.
One side of the road looks like this; heavily invaded with plants 3-4 m high.
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.
The other side looks like this after 4 years of clearing work
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.
August and September are traditional times (in South Africa) for thinking about what’s going to happen next year. For academics, it’s the time that we finalise projects and advertise them online. Interested to see what I’m thinking about? Then you can look here and here. For students, there are much bigger questions because deciding to do another postgraduate degree will likely change the course of your life. We all hope that this would be for the better, but that’s not always the case.
Undergrads
If you are currently a third year undergraduate, you should now be deciding whether you want to do Honours next year. Honours is super hard work. It’s also a great fun year. Your first real exposure to a research project that is yours, and a super intense course with people who all share the same goal. It’s a year of great camaraderie, and you are likely to significantly enhance your chance of employment as well as your starting salary. For most undergraduates who decide to do Honours, the main problem will be ensuring that you get the grades. Most schools require good marks for undergraduate degrees, and with good reason. Not everyone will survive the Honours course and a good undergraduate degree really is the best indication of whether or not Honours is for you.
Honours students
Should you do a Masters degree? A MSc will again enhance your chances of getting employment and you will again start with a higher salary than someone with an Honours. It’s important to know that there are two types of MSc, one that is taught (with a project component) and which is over in 12 months. This taught masters is like a super intense Honours degree at a much higher level. It is not for the faint hearted and if you struggled in Honours then this is not for you. The other type of MSc is by research. If you loved doing your Honours project and really enjoyed the writing and researching side, as well as the practical doing of research, then a MSc by research might be for you.
Masters students
Are you getting ready to submit your Masters? Do you feel that you could do it all over again? Really? Well, I’m still going to say that a PhD might not be the right choice. This might seem surprising as so far I’ve been encouraging you all to do more and more education. Why would I not want you to do a PhD?
Doing a PhD actually reduces your chance of employment, and over the long-term your pay will be lower.
The reality is that most employers don’t want someone with a PhD, because it is a very academic qualification. It should have taken you so far down the rabbit hole, that there’s very little left for employers to use. Employers who want people with PhDs (and there are a few) generally want professional researchers who are essentially academics. Good work if you can get it, but it tends not to pay well. You might end up only being fit to be an academic, and that life is getting increasingly harder without any end… like doing a PhD every year. Very hard to enjoy.
Academia is getting more competitive. Whereas once it was almost certain that you could be employed as an academic after finishing your PhD, this is no longer the case. Indeed, the number of people who get PhDs is greatly increasing the world over, and most are in direct competition for a decreasing amount of academic posts. Universities appear to be exploiting this excess of qualified people to hire them on contracts, reducing the number of full time positions. Essentially, this means that in most places your time as a PhD student, post-doc and junior lecturer will keep you outside the employers core staff. Joining those on the inside (with well funded posts) becomes increasingly more difficult. Some have suggested that the world of academia is becoming more like a drugs gang (see here).
Doing a PhD is really hard work.
It’s not a MSc with an extra year. It really is much harder and tougher on you mentally and physically. The chances that you’ll end up jaded and malcontent with the entire academic system are very high (maybe even obligatory). You are probably not going to be very happy while doing it (there are some exceptions of course), and it will likely have negative impacts on all the good things that you currently have in your life (think family, friends & relationships, as well as free time and fun).
Any PhD has to be yours.
It’s entirely useless to do a PhD for someone else. You must take complete ownership in order to do it. In fact, you need to be obsessed with the PhD subject and really want to do nothing else at all. A PhD is an obsession where you can be unwavering and manic in your fascination with a subject. Very few people really understand what a great privilege this is. If you don’t feel like a total maniac for learning, a PhD is not for you.
There follows a great video by Simon Clark (except I suggest you stop before he tries to sell you something). It is well worth watching, especially if you are wondering whether or not to do a PhD. If you totally identify with Simon, and you already know what passion and fanaticism he’s on about, then maybe you should do a PhD. But you must have an exit plan. What will you do if you can’t finish it, and what you will do if you can. Please don’t do a PhD if you have no idea what’ll come next. You must have a clear vision of how you will use it to go forth an conquer the world.
If this sounds scary - it's because it's meant to!
...and if I haven't put you off, then the next question is what project and supervisor should you look for. This is of course super important, but I'm not going to blog about it now. Maybe make an appointment to chat with me instead.
