The 13th Annual Research Meeting of the CIB - Congratulations Natasha!

The 13th Annual Research Meeting of the CIB took place at Stellenbosch University Thursday and Friday.

Presentations were made by Nitya, Natasha and Marike.

From top right:

1. The judges receive their thank you presents from Dave Richardson: Piero Genovesi, Laura Meyerson, Petr Pyšek & Tim Blackburn.

2. Marike answers a question from the audience (and who was part of the winning pod)

3. Natasha gives the talk that won her best runner up for a PhD presentation

4. Nitya wows the audience with the size of his bullfrog. 

Well done to the whole lab who put on a magnificent set of froggy presentations. Especially well done to Natasha!

Xenopus not so aquatic

A new paper using the data from Andre's MSc project shows that African clawed frogs move large distances overland (up to 2.4 km). The 3 year study found that 5% of frogs moved between 8 ponds in the study area of Kleinmond. This amount of movement may be so much that these frogs can no longer be considered a metapopulation. 

We got the top slot on the PeerJ website (again!). 

The really surprising result is the amount of movement between sites, and the animals that were moving. We found no evidence of the smallest size classes of frogs moving between ponds. This would turn the dispersal paradigm on its head for this species. For most pond breeding frogs, it is the metamorphs and juveniles which are responsible for most of the dispersal within a population. This may not happen for X. laevis as smaller animals are so much more susecptible to dessication. The study isn't over and we will be following up on this idea in years to come. 

De Villiers FA, Measey J. (2017) Overland movement in African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis): empirical dispersal data from within their native range. PeerJ 5:e4039 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4039

Read the article here

Thanks to @Xen_Ben for the blog title!

Working hard at the invasive syndromes workshop

Three days of talking about invasive syndromes was hard work for all involved, set in fantastic surroundings. 

The guest list read like a who's who in invasion biology. Most important were the rising stars many of whom have received training from the CIB. In years to come, we expect that the most well known invasion biologists will be the freshest of faces here.

Thanks to Ana Novoa and all at the CIB who worked so hard to make this event possible. Additional thanks to all who came from far and wide to participate in what was a fascinating workshop. 

Watch this space to see a link to the forthcoming publication on invasion syndromes...

Spatial frogs tick all the boxes for Zishan's MSc

Zishan Ebrahim's MSc thesis on using spatial data for the conservation of frogs on the Cape peninsula passes all the necessary paperwork. 

It's been great working with Zishan over the past couple of years and we're all really pleased to see his thesis pass the final hurdle. Congratulations Zishan!

Avoid zig-zag and use parallelism

This is the advice in a new ‘how to write’ paper by Mensh & Kording (2017).

Zig-zag is where you change subjects multiple times, or distract the reader by focussing on a subject that is not your central theme. This does not mean that you should not mention other subjects, just that you should not allow them to distract the reader by repeating or jumping back to unrelated ideas once you have arrived on your central theme.

Parallelism is around consistency with your topics or variables. Let’s say that you introduce three key variables in your introduction, and later want to discuss them. Parallelism requires you to use them in the same order and in the same way so that the reader can easily follow each of these concepts, even if they skip around in reading the paper.

I remember this same advice when having one of my papers edited. The editor complained that I had brought up three variables in the introduction and then used a different order in the methods, and yet another order in the discussion. Satisfying the editor meant re-writing all sections, and that never something that an author relishes. Thus, it’s a really useful tip to bear in mind in your planning. In this case, the editor had an inspiring message: I want this to be a highly cited classic paper.

We should all want our papers to be read and cited, and once accepted they can’t be easily changed (and certainly not re-written), so getting it right is important: even if you consider your work to be minor now, think of it as a future classic.