Monday, February 25, 2013

Assorted links: predictable evolution, why the US government maybe the best thing for open access, and the lab junk drawer

A few interesting places to start the week. Probably these are worthy of full blog posts, if only I had the time.

A recently published paper in PLOS Biology shows that in multiple experiments, independent  populations of E. coli showed similar processes driving adaptive diversification. That is, similar ecotypes of E. coli arose from different populations, sometimes as a result of the exact same mutations at the same nucleotide position. A really cool result.

Good news on the open access front - the US government revealed a new policy stating that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s embargo. It will remain to be seen how this plays out for most researchers, but it appears to be an important step, and one inline with European policies. It seems like steps made by big governments and universities will ultimately be what will create a new normal in publishing.

Why do biology labs tend to have hoarder-esque tendencies? Even newish labs seem to have a junk drawer of equipment that may or may not work inherited from past tenants, half used primers, ancient samples in a freezer somewhere, and more sharpies that don't work than do. An amusing list of the usual suspects was complied in this comment thread.



Friday, February 22, 2013

Academic ambivalence, part 2: poor prospects

The topic of Caroline's excellent post on why we choose grad school and an academic career seems to be hitting an on-line crescendo. A number of blogs and numerous posts to the ECOLOG listserve have been arguing and lamenting the state of job prospects and the grad school experience in general. What has been lacking is an analysis of the job numbers. In a case of perfect timing, Jordan Weissmann, and The Atlantic, has posted an excellent analysis of the numbers of recent PhDs employed across fields. The general message is: the number of fulltime, permanent jobs waiting for PhDs has been declining. However, the proportion of PhDs taking up post-doctoral postions has not declined (and in fact has increased for many disciplines).

From PhD comics

People in graduate school need to be cognizant of the available options, but it seems that if there is an emerging bottleneck, it certainly is not at the postdoc stage (the proportion of postdocs has not changed recently). Of course, the academic stream is but one option for recent PhDs, and the loss of other opportunities is a serious concern. The graphs in the Weissmann post enumerate full-time jobs, and I wonder how many people are taking up part-time, sessional positions as a way to move forward? Regardless, employment opportunities are changing.

My feeling is that academic institutions should be doing a better job of researching, and presenting viable career options to their graduate students. There are a number of industry, governmental and non-governmental postions out there, but people in academia often have a very limited understanding of these types of positions -where they are, how many are available and what kind of training they are looking for.

Perhaps it is time for graduate programs institute real career training.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Academic ambivalence: why do we want to join the academic pipeline?

(This is inspired by a few related posts, and the ongoing discussion in the comments and elsewhere...
http://deepseanews.com/2013/02/19294/)

At the foundations of the University is the concept of academic freedom, unhindered exploration. At their best, universities are reservoirs for society’s brightest and most creative thinkers, people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to explore their intellectual potential. Despite the worst things we might say about academia, it is a place with unmatched room for the exploration. And as a result, academic positions are in constant demand from bright, thoughtful people.

As every grad student learns, academia’s popularity greatly outstrips the availability of research funding and academic positions. Last year there was a string of articles declaiming graduate school as a mistake, a pyramid scam, and an institution in drastic need of rethinking. It’s also a place where students interact with like-minded peers for possibly the first time, succeed or fail at independent research, and experience more responsibility for their own success than many full-time employees ever will. Depending on who you listen to, it will be the best, or the worst, experience of your life.

And then there are tenure track positions. These are the holy grail of the academic pipeline. Advertised positions in ecology often get more than 100 applications for a single job. And yet everyone knows that these jobs are accompanied by a list of problems. They are unremittingly--exhaustingly--competitive, and for that reason, they are associated with long working hours and no concept of “overtime”. The frequent moves between universities mean that relationships can be strained or disrupted, the long hours make family life complicated, and women faculty especially face balancing pregnancy and childrearing with academic demands.

And yet. Hundreds of applicants for every position. So this is the ambivalence about academia: is it one of the best jobs in the world or the worst ones? An (admittedly ridiculous) article in Forbes about how faculty jobs are among the least stressful received rapid condemnation. But this must be reconciled against the fact that many professors choose to remain active years after retirement, and that faculty jobs are often ranked among the most fulfilling.

One consequence of this system of concurrent reward and punishment, with its supply of many similarly-talented people and stochastic element, is a strange culture of competitive martyrship. This shows up in many subtle and less-subtle ways on job boards, in personal conversations, on panels and discussions, in the comments on blog posts. The funniest example I’ve experienced was the comment from a grizzled prof that having a dog would decrease my publication output by one paper a year (I can’t imagine how much a baby would set it back). The saddest examples are people who emphasize that they work 12, 14, 16 hours a day, at the cost of seeing their children and/or spouses. These statements are always made with the confidence that this is the necessary sacrifice for success, that people not willing to give up on balance and hobbies and everything else in life are deserving (or at least risking) failure. The people who make these claims are survivors of the academic arms race. They found one strategy (immense hard work combined with talent) that got them through. But this can create the attitude that those not able or willing to sacrifice aren’t deserving of a position – rather than that the position may demand too much of people.

Such people also tend to be more vocal than other survivors of this arms race who had more success balancing the personal and professional. If you are lucky as a grad student, you know some faculty members who had families, hobbies, personal interests, and managed to be successful academics. This suggests that the dichotomy between personal and professional success is not absolutely necessary.

What we really need is less rhetoric and more open debate about what is acceptable and what is appropriate in academia, and how to shift the culture to be aligned with this. This is difficult, but also not impossible. For example, departments can decide that they want to encourage a particular atmosphere within the department. For example, EEB here at the University of Toronto has decided that they want to support families: as a result, there is a move to provide some maternity funding for graduate students, and provide income for faculty on maternity leave to hire a postdoc during this time. The hope is that this postdoc will help reduce the publication gap that having children can cause by maintaining research activities, while also providing support to current undergraduate and graduate students. Obviously this is only a drop in the bucket. But what matters is that we recognize that academia combines both good and bad, and merely selecting for those people who can survive the bad isn’t optimal. Instead, we can try to make academia a place where the best people can thrive. In this I am, and hope to remain, an idealist.


Monday, February 11, 2013

The birds and the bees and the microbes

Vannette et al. 2013. “Nectar bacteria, but not yeast, weaken a plant-pollinator mutualism”. Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."- John Muir

You can’t help but marvel at the complexity of ecology, at the intricacy and multiplicity of species interactions. But this complexity is also problematic. For many ecologists, it becomes necessary to focus on a single type of interaction, or on interactions limited to only a few species. But real ecological systems are hardly ever limited to a single important process. They might include competition, mutualism, facilitation, predation, environmental constraints and fluctuations, additive and interactive effects, nonlinearities, thresholds and emergent properties. Can knowledge of  omplexity emerge from simplicity? Can simplicity emerge from complexity? These are important and longstanding questions in ecology, the focus of some of our smartest minds. We may not have the answer yet, but if nothing else, it is helpful when experimental work in community ecology attempts to explore multiple interactions.

For example, some of the work from Tadashi Fukami’s lab is focused on how communities of microorganisms (yeast and bacteria species) assemble in Mimulus aurantiacus nectar. In the past, this work has focused particularly on priority effects and resource competition, which plays an important role in structuring these communities. While past work has suggested the importance of pollinators as a dispersal vector for microorganisms, fascinating new work suggests that microbial communities have important effects on pollinators and their mutualistic interactions with the host plant as well.

Vannette et al. (2013) focused on the effects of the two most abundant species in Mimulus nectar, Gluconobacter sp., an acid-producing bacteria, and Metschnikowia reukaufii, a yeast. They then looked at three related questions – how do nectar microbes affect nectar chemistry, how do they affect nectar removal by hummingbird pollinators, and how to they affect pollination success and seed set. Basically, do nectar microbes disrupt important mutualistic interactions between the plant and their pollinators, or are their effects neutral?

This is where the story becomes interesting. Both types of microbes altered nectar chemistry, but in different ways. The bacteria acidified the nectar (to ~ pH 2.0) far more than the yeast species, and tended to also reduce the sugar content of the nectar far more than the yeast. Hypothesizing that these changes could ultimately affect pollinator preference, the authors then filled artificial flowers with nectar containing either the bacteria, yeast, or no microbes. Half of these flowers were bagged to prevent hummingbird access. Compared to the bagged controls, flowers with bacteria-inoculated nectar had less nectar removed than either yeast-inoculated or sterile nectar. It appeared that nectar removal was related to the changes in chemistry driven by bacterial growth in the nectar. Finally,  the authors looked pollination success in relation to microbial inoculation. Flowers inoculated with bacteria did indeed have less pollination success (measured as the number of stigmas closed) and had decreased seed numbers. Microbial communities were not isolated from the ecology of the plant.

Perhaps none of this is that surprising – hummingbirds are intelligent and will preferentially feed, and pollinator choice is important for plant fitness. However, these bacteria and yeast species are specialized for growth in the hypertonic nectar environment and their continued presence in the ecosystem depends on dispersal from one flower to the next before their host flower dies. The transient nature of this nectar habitat suggests that obtaining a dispersal vector should be important. The fact that Gluconobacter alters nectar chemistry in a way which negatively affects their likelihood of movement to other patches suggests an interesting paradox and a complicated relationship between plants, their nectar microbes, and pollinators. Gluconobacter species growing in Mimulus flowers produce acidifying H+ ions and reduce sugar concentrations in nectar – this increases their likelihood of winning competitive interactions with other microbes in the nectar, which should select for the maintenance of acidifying, sugar-reducing characteristics. But on the other hand, these characteristics reduce the likelihood of being transported to new flowers and persisting in the metacommunity. Further, these pollinator-decreasing characteristics may result in selection by the Mimulus plants for nectar compounds that reduce microbial contamination. So understanding competitive interactions in microbial communities, or understanding pollinator-plant interactions, or understanding pollinator-microbial interactions on their own might be inadequate to understand the important ecological and evolutionary processes structuring the entire system.

Given that the question of simplicity vs. complexity is still so difficult and at least for me, uncertain, I would hesitate to draw a general conclusion about whether this is the kind of work all community ecologists should strive for. But it seems that recognizing ecological and evolutionary context is key, whether you work with Arabidopsis, microcosms, or tropical forests.



Friday, February 1, 2013

Travel the world with the Carnival of Evolution

The latest edition of the Carnival of Evolution, hosted by Lab Rat, is online. Take an evolutionary journey around the world.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Exploring biodiversity science: The BioDiverse Perspectives blog

A network of graduate students has started a new blog called 'BioDiverse Perspectives'. The purpose of this blog is to explore and compile seminal papers in biodiversity science.  In some ways this mode of knowledge gathering replaces existing 'Foundations of...' compilations of classic papers. Instead, this blog creates an ever-evolving dialogue about our understanding of the different dimensions of biodiversity. Check it out!

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

A different kind of ecological diversity: on sticking out in academia


This is a guest post from Sarah Hasnain, currently a PhD student in ecology at Queen's University. Sarah did her MSc at the University of Toronto with Brian Shuter on the interplay between environmental and evolutionary processes underlying thermal response in freshwater fish. Sarah was an office mate of mine for a while at the University of Toronto, and we had some interesting conversations about balancing cultural backgrounds and academia.

By the time that I was nine years old, I already knew that I wanted to do something in science. By the time I was eleven, my grandparents had patiently explained that in order to be a research scientist, I need to complete something called a PhD. And by thirteen, after brief flirtations with physics (which seemed cool at the time, and still is), mathematics, and history, I had decided to pursue a career as an ecologist.

My family supported me in my goal of being a scientist, even though they didn't  know what an ecologist was. And as an undergraduate in Canada’s largest, most multicultural city, I didn’t stand out from my fellow classmates, who similarly came from all over the globe. And yet surprisingly, in addition to the usual student woes about finding scholarships, funding and the right academic advisors, the fact that I am a Pakistani female (and until recently a Hijabi) always seemed to play a role in how people responded to my goals. I continue to be asked to explain my career choice and my passion for science on a  regular basis by colleagues, faculty members and visiting scientists  which was and continues to be emotionally exhausting. For example, a senior faculty member followed me to the lab that I worked in as an undergraduate research student, to confirm that I actually worked there. People always came to my posters at conference poster sessions, but a number of them wantied to tell me that they are very glad to have someone “like you” here. One of the determining factors for which PhD labs I wanted to be in was that during the interview, at no point did the potential supervisor asks what made someone from my cultural, ethnic and religious background decide to pursue ecological research. This actually knocked a few labs out of the running.

I understand that my career choice is interesting, considering that ecology is not a field that has historically attracted many Pakistani women. And it’s undeniable that these comments and questions are about people wanting to be open and accepting and welcoming to me. But I can’t help but feel that the constant questions about my background insinuate, probably unintentionally, that my ethnic, religious and cultural affiliations are more interesting than my research. As an ecologist belonging to a minority group, these questions can have the opposite effect – instead of feeling accepted by their interest, I feel like I am constantly justifying my existence in this field. I imagine that for many minority ecologists, the underlying message is that they don't belong here.

Of course I don’t represent all minority, or Pakistani female ecologists. Probably some individuals would appreciate this interest in their background. But others, like myself, may not. Regardless of ethnic, cultural or religious affiliations, ecology is not the expected career choice in North American society. Why is someone like me interested in ecology? Because I like it. Just like everyone else here. 











Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Understanding modern human society through the lens of evolution



We often think about the ways in which evolution has shaped this world, from the amazing diversity of cichlid fishes in the African Great Lakes, to Australian marsupials that seem to replicate strategies that placental mammals have evolved elsewhere (e.g., Tasmanian tiger and the North American wolf). We even look at our own bodies or behaviors to find evolution’s imprint –why do I have a non-functional appendix attached to my intestine? However, we seldom look to important events in human history to examine the effects of evolution, yet, according to Edmund Russell, human history can be better understood through evolution –like my appendix.

Russell is advocating for a new field of inquiry within the study of human history –namely, evolutionary history. When I first read the book jacket, I must admit that I was skeptical. However, this book makes the compelling case that historians gain a much fuller understanding past events by including evolution. Russell’s main claim is that modern civilization is the product of an evolution revolution. Even Russell’s unremarkable dog “Riley, like all dogs, is a testament to the extraordinary power of human beings to shape the evolution of other species”. While citing dogs may seem like a trivial example, it was coevolution that shaped this relationship. Wolves that were less aggressive and less fearful, which tend to be more puppy-like, found benefits by associating with human groups. Human groups that tolerated the presence of these wolves were likely alerted to approaching threats. Even the fact that dogs bark is a product of this relationship. This evolution revolution can similarly explain the domestication of other animals and plants, and ultimately produces the necessary conditions for permanent large settlements.

An important and intriguing underlying theme of this book is that these evolutionary revolutions are not often the product of conscious effort. We are used to the narrative that highlights humans as selecting individuals and driving the evolution towards some goal. But this would require early peoples knowing what they wanted in the end, having a specific goal. In the dog example, do we really think that early humans thought ‘hey, I would like a poodle’? No, the reality is that canines and human changed with one another producing a mutually beneficial outcome. Even the domestication of many of the earliest crop species likely resulted from lazy and sloppy humans. Lazy because humans probably harvested the easiest, most accessible fruits and seeds –selecting for bigger, easily removed fruits that ripened at the same time. Sloppy because seeds were discarded around settlements. Then that laziness again means we looked to those nearby plants for harvesting. Thus evolution has continually informed the development of human civilization and produced the much of the cultural norms today.

While modern cultures may consciously drive evolution through selective breeding and genetic engineering, we are immersed in an evolving world. Diseases that are resistant to drugs, pest that are immune to pesticides, and commercial fish that are now smaller and reproduce earlier are examples of important evolutionary changes that affect human activities and economics. Russell provides evidence that evolution is in part responsible for the industrial revolution, due to some varieties of cotton evolving particular features.

Taken all together, Russell admirably succeeds in his goal of convincing the reader that evolution has influenced much of human civilization. Moreover, his intended audience of historians should be re-assessing previous explanations of important human events by asking the basic question: how has evolutionary change influenced major changes in human history.




Edmund Russell. 2011. Evolutionary History. Cambridge University Press.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Bob Paine's footprint

A great post by Ed Yong on Bob Paine's influence on ecology -both conceptually and numerically, with a large number of academic children and grandchildren.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Who are you writing your paper with?


Choosing who you work with plays an important role in who you become as a scientist. Every grad student knows this is true about choosing a supervisor, and we’ve all heard the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to student-advisor stories. But writing a paper with collaborators is like dealing with the supervisor-supervisee relationship writ small. Working with coauthors can be the most rewarding or the most frustrating process, or both. Ultimately, the combination of personalities involved merge in such a way as to produce a document that is usually more (but sometimes less) than the sum of its parts. The writing process and collaborative interactions are fascinating to consider all on their own.

Field Guide to Coauthors
The Little General
The Little General is willing to battle till the death for the paper to follow his particular pet idea. Regardless of the aim or outcome of an experiment, a Little General will want to connect it to his particular take on things. Two Little Generals on a paper can spell disaster.
Little General
The Silent Partner
These are the middle authors, the suppliers of data and computer code, people who were involved in the foundations of the work, but not actively a part of the writing process.
Silent Partner
The Nay-sayer
These are the coauthors who disagree, seemingly on principle, with any attempt to generalize the paper. Given free rein, such authors can prevent a work from having any generality beyond the particular system and question in the paper. These authors do help a paper become reviewer-proof, since every statement left in the paper is well-supported.
Nay-sayer

The Grammar Nazi
The Grammar Nazi returns your draft of the paper covered in edits, but he has mostly corrected for grammar and style rather than content. This is not the worst coauthor type, although it can be annoying, especially if these edits are mostly about personal taste.
Grammar Nazi
The Snail
This is the coauthor that you just don’t hear from. You can send them reminder emails, give them a phone call, pray to the gods, but they will take their own sweet time getting anything back to you. (And yes, they are probably really busy).

 The Cheerleader
The Cheerleader can encourage you through a difficult writing process or fuel an easy one. These are the coauthors who believe in the value of the work and will help motivate you through multiple edits, rejections, or revisions, as needed.
Cheerleader
The Good Samaritan
The Good Samaritan is a special type of person. They aren’t authors of your manuscript, but they read it for you out of pure generosity  They might provide better feedback and more useful advice than any of your actual coauthors. They always end up in the acknowledgements, but you often feel like you owe them more.
Good Samaritan
The Sage
The Sage is probably your supervisor or some scientific silverback. They read your manuscript and immediately know what’s wrong with it, what it needs, and distill this to you in a short comment that will change everything. The Sage will improve your work infinitely, and make you realize how far you still have to go.
Sage

There are probably lots of other types that I haven't thought of, so feel free to describe them in the comments. And, it goes without saying that if you coauthored a paper with me, you were an excellent coauthor with whom I have no complaints. Especially Marc Cadotte, who is often both Cheerleader and Sage :)

Thanks to Lanna Jin for the amazing illustrations!