Even in Kyoto

Yesterday when I was telling scrottie about the oodles of worms in the compost pile, he got to wondering where all the worms go in winter, and surmised, "Maybe we could put tiny GPS trackers on them to find out."

At which point I think he noticed the smoke coming out of my ears and pointed out he was only joking.

But then I did a search to look up how biologists tag and track slugs, and lo and behold:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35643091

How cool, and also, how hilarious! I had thought I might encounter some clever method with tattoo ink or something, but no.

I'm not sure this would actually work with earthworms, though, because of how deep they may go, heh.

This post brought to you by some efforts to clear out email inboxes and browser tabs, also known as efforts to procrastinate from grading.

1. From the NYT: A story about the roles of insects and other small organisms in the hypothetical colonization of Mars: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/science/mars-needs-insects.html

This story is less interesting to me from the standpoint of trying to colonize Mars, and more interesting from the standpoint of potential agricultural transformations of landscapes on this planet. I'm thinking, in particular, about learning about some of the agricultural challenges in parts of Sudan. What I learned about in that case had more to do with the soil organic matter fraction. I don't know that black soldier fly larva frass is the answer for Sudan, but the topic sure gets me wondering about fertilizer applications of other types of frass or invertebrate wastes, such as worm castings or cricket frass. At the end of the day, these things are all potential hooks for future undergraduate research projects here. After all, I've got all these cricket colonies here, producing tons of frass. Why not put more of that frass to use?

2. I've been following the work of Madhusudan Katti for a while, as he's a reconciliation ecologist, an area of interest to me. I was pleased to see his name appear in this recent NYT article about the impacts of historic housing redlining practices on urban wildlife: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/science/birds-cities-redlining.htmld

I don't have a ton of other comments to make on this particular article, but the included figure from a 2020 article published in (also paywalled) Science is great for helping to highlight how scientific thinking is developing in the arena of thinking about social/historical legacies and ecology. To me this is an important topic because if you want to get people to care about environmental issues, they need to have exposure to the living world around them. Humans are generally bad at abstract thinking; we need concrete starting points. It all starts with urban ecology. Even New York City has its ants.

3. Speaking of the journal Science, here's a brand-new commentary piece on efforts to get the oceans to absorb more carbon dioxide: https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-crisis-sparks-effort-coax-oceans-suck-carbon-dioxide

This commentary piece is exciting because it gives me an example I can point to, for students who might be wondering what they can do with regards to climate change. We spend a lot of time in Animal Physiology talking about gas transport, which is not a simple topic to comprehend; I can use this article to highlight how they can potentially apply their expertise to a real-world problem.

4. Last but not least, right now is the season when I start to think about the theme to use for the spring seminar I teach for our "Advanced" General Biology students. Last year's theme was a big hit: we talked about the biology of sleep. That included talking about how frigatebirds manage to sleep while in midair, about sleep-deprived bees, about sleepless flies, and about REM sleep in jumping spiders. Towards the tail end of the semester, a brand-new paper came out, too late for me to include, about how seals take naps when they're at the bottom of their dives.

Well. Just now, an article has come out about how chinstrap penguins sleep, too: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl2398

Microsleeps, apparently!

The main element here is that I think there are enough new discoveries related to the biology of sleep, that I could justify using the same theme a second time. Especially given how popular the theme was. It's a highly relatable topic, really, for undergraduates, isn't it?

My Animal Physiology students had their final exam last night. I managed to queue up a fun selection of Calming Manatee equivalents to display on the projector throughout the exam. Once everyone was settled in and well underway, I was finally able to read a recent Science review paper entitled, ahem, "Overcoming the coupled climate and biodiversity crises and their societal impacts." The authors note in the Acknowledgements that this article was coauthored "as a follow-up to a meeting of 62 scientists from 35 countries, cosponsored by the IPBES and the IPCC." That's the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in case you aren't totally up on your biology crisis acronyms these days. So basically, this is the outcome of an important meeting among big thinkers on these topics.

On the one hand, the title captures the main thrust of the review, which is simply to note that it is most powerful to work on addressing the climate change and biodiversity crises together rather than treating them as separate issues, and that efforts to do so must also happen in the context of benefits for human societies and quality of life. On the other hand, well, there's a reason this is a review article and not a punchline, heh.

Overall, what I appreciated the most about this review article is that it offers me a more hopeful framework for talking about the climate and biodiversity crises in my courses. To provide some context: when I was an undergraduate, the whole idea of looking at the impacts of elevated carbon dioxide on biological processes was still fairly new. I can recall going to a couple of talks as a student that were very much along the lines of, "Well, carbon dioxide is increasing, so we wanted to know what higher carbon dioxide levels would do to Plant X. Here are the results." The internet tells me that the IPCC first got started in 1988, so this seems like about what you'd expect for the development of the discourse by that point.

In contrast, the students arriving to my classes now have very much grown up with gloomy and/or panicked discourse about climate change as the norm - vehement climate deniers aside. [Also, if you've paid close attention, we're well out of the general denial phase by now. (I can't give you a detailed chronology, but the political shift has happened).]. This plus the discourse about diminished economic opportunities and overall quality of life can help to explain a substantial fraction of the despair felt by many young people. Yes, many are wrapped up in the hormonal fog of youth, but that's not all of it, entirely.

Our first semester General Biology sequence also includes the topics of speciation and extinction, and as a part of that course segment, I consider it crucial to talk about the current/ongoing mass extinction event - the biodiversity crisis we are living through. We get pretty existential.

In general, humans are finely tuned to imagine doomsday scenarios. Hollywood shows us that. What is often harder is imagining what needs to happen to get OUT of a doomsday scenario, because the kinds of existential challenges we're up against won't be addressed by the emergence of any single particular hero - not even Greta. Collective action is needed. I noted these things when blogging about seeing the climate film Demain back in 2017.

And that's where this recent review also comes in. One of the fundamental tenets of Biology is that everything is connected. Biologists study living things in the context of both biotic and abiotic factors that affect the ability of living things to survive and reproduce. Biologists recognize that we, ourselves, are living animals that are connected to the world around us as well.

I think this article correctly identifies that what a lot of people need in order to know how to take action in the face of massive problems, is a framework. What I most appreciate about the particular framework offered in the article is that it should allow me to speak to the full audience of my students in General Biology. This is of note mostly because of an existing cultural division that tends to happen, between students interested in careers in the health professions and all of the other students with other interests. Often, the students interested in careers in the health professions become myopic and transactional about their studies: "What do I need to do to get an A in this course so I can get into ___ school?" I am constantly seeking ways to get them to think more deeply beyond the information, to create broader context for the knowledge and ideas we explore. So this review, with human and social welfare as a third pillar, helps to do that. The climate and biodiversity crises are collective existential crises, requiring collective solutions that benefit life for human populations as well. Our goals can be aligned.

What remains to be determined is how, exactly, I can work this article into my teaching. The first author on the review, HO Portner, is a marine respiratory physiologist, so I'd actually read several of his papers early in grad school in our Comparative Physiology course. He has a distinct and dense writing style, and this review sounds quite Portner-esque to me - long, convoluted sentences that can take a minute or two to fully unpack. Exam-proctoring was the perfect time for me to read and digest it; I could read a section, pause and look up to see if anyone had a question, then resume reading. There's no way I could assign the article as a reading assignment for incoming Biology students. So we shall see.

Oh, as one other element, there is a lot of discussion within the article about including Indigenous Peoples and local communities in addressing these major challenges. That actually ties in well with my thinking about bringing in the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge when introducing "the scientific method" (hypothetico-deductive reasoning) as a way of knowing and understanding how the world works.

And yes, I probably should get back to grading.

One of my longtime social insect heroes, Justin Schmidt, just died. Actually, this follows rather closely on the heels of the death of another well-known and well-loved social insect biologist, John Alcock.

Both of them worked with many of the incredible flying stinging insect species of Arizona, albeit each in different ways. Actually, both of them were also participants in the long-running joint Hexapodium meeting series organized between the two larger state universities in Arizona. And they both wrote phenomenal popular science books and articles about insects.

I first got to know Justin through the Hexapodium talks. I think it was at a meeting at the Sonoran Desert Museum, where we wound up sitting at a table together. I can't overemphasize just how wonderfully enthusiastic and welcoming he was to me as a newcomer graduate student first falling in love with the social insects. It is HUGE to show up to a talk where the audience is mostly expert strangers and be warmly greeted from someone who is just full of sheer joy for talking about social insect biology.

Justin is best known for the Schmidt Sting Scale, which is incorporated in a wonderful fashion in his book The Sting of the Wild. His work should be contrasted with the sensationalist and exploitative use of stinging social insects on social media and video platforms; Justin always noted that his sting experiences were incidental, over the course of work with a wide range of different species. I would discourage you from supporting more sensationalist uses of social insects, as this sets a bad standard for how to relate to some of the spicier wild animals that are out there.

He was also interested in sting properties from the standpoint of understanding the evolution of venom across stinging insect species. It's thanks to Justin that I gained an appreciation for the diversity of compounds found in different types of venoms, and the diversity of venom effects.

Here's a wonderful interview of Justin from a 2016 Entomology meeting: https://youtu.be/Nv8bH_TcmR0

Justin will be greatly missed by many people.

I gave my talk on day 3 of 4 at this meeting, in a symposium that was rather uneven. The symposium subject was on topics in life history evolution in social insects, and included a mixture of talks on longevity and senescence plus other topics (my talk was definitely 'other topics' since I talked about the other end of the colony life cycle, nest initiation). In any case, it was fine but not an especially inspiring day.

On the last day, however, there was a symposium on the division of labor in social insects, where I finally felt that HERE was a research area where I was well-acquainted with the subject matter and the talks were all quite compelling.

The conference wrapped up with a general meeting of the Society, and a lecture from the recipient of the Hamilton Award, named after Bill Hamilton, who is famous in academic circles for articulating the concept of inclusive fitness. I learned that the award only dates as far back as the 2006 meeting, so Bert's the fifth recipient of the award so far, and a very fitting one. By now he is old enough that he declined to travel all the way out from Germany just to receive the award, so instead one of his collaborators read a speech that he prepared. What was most wonderful about that is that you could absolutely hear Bert through the speech, and he used it to tell wonderful stories both about meeting and interacting with Bill Hamilton, and also about the changes to his thinking through time with regards to inclusive fitness theory and group selection.

And then, just like that, the meeting was over.

Since this is an international conference that only takes place every 4 years, it was an opportunity to see and catch up with many international collaborators that I haven't seen in quite some time; I didn't make it to either of to the 2 prior meetings in Australia and Brazil because my postdoc work was all in the cricket realm.

It is also hard to understate how helpful it was to be surrounded by people who know and care about many of the kinds of questions I seek to address through my research. I can't understate how emotionally challenging it can get to continue pursuing academic work when one is in a context where the work feels rather...academic. I don't think this tension will ever resolve, but I also deeply believe in the benefits to this kind of work, so I'm grateful to be buoyed by my colleagues' encouragement.

In the past, when I've been at a conference such as this one, I've wound up getting so anxious about the conflict between attending talks and actually working on my own stuff, that I've bounced back out of the talks and back to my computer to get back to work. I didn't have that same sensation at this meeting, but I think a good part of that is because I still need to do a lot of catch-up work on file management across computers; this laptop still isn't configured right for academic work, and at this point I'm not sure it ever will be, so I'm going to have to think through what to do about that.

I think I might finally be finished with this round of Science in the Kitchen experiments, thank goodness. Getting this project wrapped up has been causing me all sorts of anxiety - not only did I need to do test runs of these experiments, I then needed to figure out the best method for communicating the experiments to students for the fall. We have to have this stuff all in place far enough in advance of the start of the semester so we can also ensure we have supplies lined up and available to students who will be taking the course remotely. I have just been continually feeling like I've been flailing at this stuff to get it done but making too-slow progress.

In any case, as of today I have reasonably complete drafts for the 3 experiments I said I'd spearhead. I've already blogged about the yeast/bread dough experiment a bit. It wound up taking me 5 days to complete the refrigerated portion satisfactorily, and the refrigerated dough failed to reach the same ending volume as the room-temperature dough, interestingly. This is why I am paranoid and do test runs of experiments before asking students to do them. Attempting to forestall all kinds of trouble, although I always find that students manage to find many other creative ways to have problems even under the best of circumstances.

The next one requiring work was a project on what we've been calling "Seed Germination Ecology," although it has more-or-less wound up being about plant competition. So the inverse of all those "companion planting" guides you've ever heard about. The challenge there is creating an experiment that can be successfully completed in a 2-week timeframe. That means figuring out what plants will grow fast enough to produce meaningful and interesting outcomes.

So when I was at the hardware store back in July, I hurriedly bought corn seeds, radish seeds, marigold, and some variety of fancy pea seeds, because I needed to start the test out NOW. The plant choices were partly inspired by reading online about other plant competition teaching experiments, so they weren't a totally random flail.

I planted them at different densities and in a couple different combinations: each by itself, then combinations of corn + peas, and radish + marigolds. The seed arrangement photos came out surprisingly well:

( A whole bunch of photos ensue... )

And that concludes this summer's Science in the Kitchen projects. Again, thank goodness. I have so many other things I need to get done still.

We finally have ants. On campus. My leafcutter ones. As usual, big thanks to scrottie and Princess TinyHouse for helping to get them here.

The insect room is the warmest it has been - up to 26.5 degrees Celsius. Twenty-eight degrees would be even more ideal, but I think I can work with 26. I'm should now play around with local temperatures within the room.

I need to give the ants some serious TLC. It is so much better to have them here. The space is just so much better configured for this purpose.

This feels like a big milestone. Because it is.

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What do you think I should do for the Climate Strike on Friday? I'm feeling conflicted because both of my classes are on that day. I was thinking to bring in postcards and take a few minutes to help people figure out who their representatives are to encourage them to write postcards to their representatives.

Here is an item that has been taking up space in the lab:



Today, this happened:



(In case you can't quite tell, the front glass windscreen panel shattered. As best I can tell, it was a total freak accident when a student tried to close one of the side doors on the balance.)

I stripped one of the screws while trying to remove it from the broken balance, so the repair is going to take slightly more work tomorrow.

So, yesterday's labs were cool and went well, overall, but still, what a circus. With approximately one bajillion moving pieces to a given lab, we never know what's going to cause the most trouble, and just have to cross our fingers and hope it's something minor.

In this case, the source of trouble was some of the instrumentation. Rummaging around last week, I had quickly managed to locate a box full of "displacement transducers." These consist of a long strip of flexible metal that is configured such that as you bend the metal, the degree of bending changes the strength of the electrical signal produced by the transducer. Okay, great, these transducers should be fantastic for measuring reptile breathing: all one needs to do is (gently) tie a string around a reptile's ribcage, then hook the other end up to the displacement transducer, make a few adjustments to get the tension just right, and then one should be good to go. I even tested one of the transducers to confirm that it worked properly.

Sometime after that, I got to wondering whether we had force transducers as well. Force transducers work similarly, except they're configured for a wider range of forces, and the piece of flexible metal isn't nearly as flexible and is much shorter. And there are actually interchangeable pieces of metal, depending on the range of forces a person intends to measure, from milligrams to kilograms. I didn't recall seeing any, so this was a source of concern for a night or two, because I'd been hoping to use them for a later lab, and they're expensive (about $1200/transducer).

Some time after that, while rummaging around through the cabinets for other thermocouples, I finally discovered the box full of force transducers. PHEW.

So then we get to yesterday's lab, and as we get underway with the displacement transducers, almost all of the groups started to report error messages from the software. After a little bit of troubleshooting (plug/unplug, switch off/on, plug/unplug, reboot program, reboot computer), I had to conclude that 3 out of the 4 displacement transducers probably weren't wired up correctly for our converter units. So, force transducers to the rescue! Still, that had me sweating for a bit.

After all of that, dealing with the reptiles wound up being relatively painless. I started out working with our largest reptile, a plated lizard, who has been through this routine multiple times in the past. Altogether, he was absolutely chill about things: as soon as we had him out of the cage, he pretty much just sat there, holding still. And after that, the remaining reptiles weren't too complicated, either. I could also tell that my handling experience from the morning labs helped for the afternoon labs.

Across our reptile collection, I was kind of surprised to discover that I like the anoles the best. They are our newest addition, and are small tree-dwelling lizards. I thought they'd be a hassle because they're fast-moving, but they weren't too terrible, and they were fun in that they like to perch on a finger or a shoulder and aren't afraid to make short jumps. Not bad given that the descriptions I'd been reading stated they weren't really good pets for holding, heh.

( photos below the cut... )

In preparing one of my syllabi for the spring, the one for Animal Physiology, I've been spending a bit more quality time in the Animal Physiology lab space, starting to inventory and track things down.

This is an adventure. At some point I should pause and take photos. So far, I've just been pulling out various pieces of the most obviously broken equipment (labeled as "broken" or "does not work"). Mostly this has been microscope light sources and thermocouples. I know there's a "broken" microbalance in there, too.

I think I'm also going to emulate one of my PhD mentors by creating a "Manuals" cabinet, as it seems like up to this point the manuals for various instruments have simply been crammed into cabinets with the instruments themselves.

On the one hand, this is a lot of stuff to sort through. But on the other hand, it's satisfying to mix some tangible work in with all of the intangibles.

I am thinking that I should see if any of the prospective research students are interested in doing small instrument repairs. A useful skill to develop.