bootstrap analysis

gender dynamics in science (and elsewhere)

There have been some interesting conversations taking place about, more or less, "hot" women in science -- how women display their femininity (or don't) in the workplace. This moribund pony has been flogged before, but since the issue is far from resolved, it's worth whipping periodically. There are two sides to this. One is just the quandary women face in presenting themselves and how they are judged depending on how they express their gender identity. I thought Zuska made the most succinct summation:

"The problem, you see, is that women aren't really allowed to be ANYTHING in science. If you are a hot goddess then you are Not Serious and Not A Real Scientist and you are Ruining Science For Other Women Who Are More Serious and so on. If you are just a regular goddess (like Zuska) then you are an ugly hairy-legged man-hating feminazi who needs to get laid and Not A Real Scientist and Ruining Science For Other Women Who Are More Reasonable. The mythical More Serious, More Reasonable, non-hairy-legged, non-high heels-wearing Real Scientist woman has, alas, rarely, if ever, been seen. Because women can't be Real Scientists, no matter how Reasonable and Serious they are."

And then there are women who purposely exploit female cultural stereotypes. One of the comments on the previous post put a bow on it:

"Some women use their femininity to advance their careers in less than ethical ways, and I think that's made many women more sensitive than they should be to attention-seeking femininity...overtly used their sexuality instead of their ideas, skills or experience to get ahead. At the extreme this includes sleeping with influential men in exchange for patronage. More commonly it's stuff like dressing provocatively and being flirtatious to a distracting degree.Once the workplace atmosphere is sexualized, it changes the way that men treat all of the women. In the long run it isn't even very productive for the women who employ this tactic - they tend to get pigeonholed pretty quickly. In doing so they make life even harder than it already is for women who chose not to participate in that game."

You can read all the back and forth there, and some more at Adventures in Ethics and Science. I'd like to add my own wrinkle.

"Hot," as applied to women, is usually equated with youth. What women who have used their "hotness" to advance in the workplace (intentionally or not, I suppose) do when they hit lukewarm later in life is its own topic of discussion. I'd like to bring up another way I've seen women manipulate a cultural stereotype to move ahead: the notion of "needing" a man.

I've seen intelligent, capable women maneuver themselves into work relationships that are vaguely father-daughter/master-disciple. It's sort of a subtle version of ass-kissery, and works particularly well with older men (especially the whole paternalistic bent) but generally exploits any guy who likes to feel in control or whose ego is fed by mentoring gone wild.

In some ways, this may take much more finesse than being sexually appealing or provocative. A woman has to find a way to elicit favors and good will without appearing too helpless. Thus it may not be especially effective for those who really want to get ahead, but I've seen this technique expertly employed by women who seek to hold onto positions for which they are too lazy to really excel at and avoid having to go out and get a job where they might actually have to work hard.

I'm not sure I've adequately articulated this type of manipulation, but I think many of you might recognize it. It can be just as damaging as using overt sexuality in the workplace. It perpetuates the notion that women are dependent on men, or unable to make decisions or perform tasks without assistance. And it makes things harder for women who have a valid need for support or collaboration.

my first major research paper accepted for publication

I recently had a paper accepted to one of the primary peer-reviewed journals in my field. Actually, I've published a number of short notes and papers, mostly observational in nature, in smaller or regional journals -- a number of them on different taxa than my "usual" field. This, however, is my first major research paper. Any -ist is pleased when a paper is accepted. I'm especially satisfied because

• Fewer than 15% of papers in this field are single-author.
• I don't have a graduate degree. In fact, I don't have a science degree. 
• I had help from many volunteers collecting field data, but did all the study design, data prep, analysis, and writing myself, without the support system most graduate students or scientists typically have. I taught myself statistics and how to use statistical software. I am not a faculty member and had no colleagues to turn to for help.
• The paper was rejected only once, and accepted with only minor re-writing at a different journal.
• The research is based on 15 years of field work. No instant gratification here, so this was a long time coming! The long data collection period is due to several factors:
  
  1. When I began, the actual ecological questions I am working on were not apparent until I had done several years of background work.
  2. My field site has qualities that make data collection rather slow, so it took a long time to get enough data to produce results that would be statistically and biologically significant.
  3. Long-term data is much better at answering the type of ecological questions I work on. I think the short-term nature of many graduate student studies have real weaknesses in this area.

I learned many lessons during this process. I'm sure if I had been doing my research in a different setting, I might have been spared some of them through the experiences of others.

• Don't bite off more than you can chew because...
• Shorter is better, even if it means interesting and relevant discussion must be excised. Or even if it means that the sharp focus of a paper, required to make it short enough to appeal to an editor, ends up obscuring larger lessons that might be learned or removes the paper's results from a larger context. I have often been a little exasperated trying to get a look a the big picture when going through the scientific literature on a particular subject. It can be really difficult to synthesize a lot of very specific studies spread out over time.
• Some reviewers may not read your paper very carefully, or at all. Some may have an opinion about the publishability of your paper, but offer few constructive comments to back up the opinion, although these tasks are certainly understood to be the typical role and reponsibility of reviewers. I was both disappointed and frustrated by some of the reviews. I actually didn't have any expectation of acceptance the first time out. But if you tell me no thanks, just give me something to go on! It frankly made me wonder if my work was being dismissed because I lacked educational "credentials," I am not part of an established academic team, or because I am a woman (reviewers knew who I was, but I don't know who they were; see discussion of review biases at Nature's Peer-to-Peer). Then, the next set of comments, and the editor's actions, contrasted markedly with the first.This led me to conclude that...
• Part of getting published is luck (the right editor and reviewers), not scientific merit.

This weakness of the peer review system has been well-flogged, and I wasn't naive about it. I've been an editor of a small regional journal, am currently an editorial assistant at a larger journal, and have acted as a reviewer on quite a few manuscripts. I take all of this quite seriously and diligently. I let the editor know if there are aspects of a paper to which I'm not qualified to assess. I've not treated reviewing papers as merely technical editing, but go well out of my way to communicate to authors my reasoning behind my comments on methodological and theoretical aspects of their work. I know not every reviewer has the time or motivation to be as conscientious, and some slap together half-assed reviews rather than excuse themselves.  I guess it was just jarring to be on the receiving end myself. 

But, I'm not whining. I essentially got it published without multiple revisions, trying to figure out how to address any whacky reviewer concerns, and before anybody else published something substantially similar (although my combination of study site and long-term data set are pretty unique). I know my academic situation handicaps me, but this publication will go a long way in "legitimizing" my research and gives me a platform to build upon. While I wish I could broaden my approach and offer up more big picture results, the reality is that the narrower focus that I submitted actually has great potential for continued exploration, and conservation implications as well.

Look for me to engage in more back-patting when the paper comes out next year.

pesticides, bees, and history's lessons be damned

Last month I wrote about Germany's ban on the pesticide clothianidine, produced by Bayer AG. It was implicated in the death of thousands of honeybee colonies.  See that post for more background.

Last week the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit to force the federal government to disclose studies on the effect of clothianidine on honeybees. The EPA ordered studies on the pesticide from Bayer CropScience when it was registered in 2003. However, agency has failed to respond to the NRDC's Freedom of Information Act request for agency records concerning its toxicity to bees, refusing to disclose the results, or if the studies have even been submitted.

By the way, all the data regarding the pesticides submitted to the EPA when requesting registration comes from the manufacturer itself. The EPA just reviews it, a process which has been criticized. Once a pesticide has been approved, it's hell to get it off the market. Carbofuran was approved in 1967, and has proved deadly to millions of birds. In 2005, the EPA itself stated that all legal uses of carbofuran were likely to kill birds. Yet it took until this year for the EPA to revoke its registration. The manufacturer, FMC Corporation, is fighting the decision in court.

If you have any lingering doubts that 1) the agrochemical business drives regulatory decisions without deep regard for human health or the environment, and that it has done so for decades or 2) we stubbornly refuse to learn from history regarding preventing and controlling introduced (and native) insects, you need to read American Pests: The Losing War on Insects from Colonial Times to DDT. It's a thorough chronicle of battling crop pests in the U.S. for the last 400 years or so. Author James McWilliams carefully documents facts such as:

• By 1876, it was recognized that habitat alteration and the planting of large monoculture crops disturbed the balance of nature and caused the spread of pests
• Doctors and scientists began warning that common insecticides were human health hazards as early as the late 1800s
• Despite the onslaught of criticism against chemical pest control beginning in 1925, producers of agrochemicals thwarted public warnings and the passing of effective insecticide legislation
• People had figured out that the transport of nursery stock was responsible for the spread of introduced and native species across the country prior to 1900
• Not much progress has been made in eradicating gypsy moths since 1911

And so on. It was both enlightening and depressing to read colonial accounts of invasive species, problems with monocultures, and careless application of dangerous chemicals that -- save for the dates and the compounds involved -- could be drawn from today's news. Every other page will have you asking yourself, "Why are we still doing these same stupid things???"

This book is exhaustively researched, yet still readable. McWilliams is a historian, and therefore is able to put everything in nice context (his entire chapter devoted to the framing and impacts of Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was especially well done). My only beef, as a scientist, was that there were no scientific names for most of the pests discussed in the book.

On a related topic, BugGirl posted the American Mosquito Control Association's position (AGAINST) on devices known as mosquito misters. I had not heard of these systems, which are mounted on or near a home and periodically spray compounds (usually, pesticides) all over, whether there are mosquitoes around or not, through tubing coming from a 55 gallon drum! For god's sake people, if you want to poison yourself and your pets and children, why not just drink a glass of arsenic or overdose on drugs? Is slow contamination and health problems via sub-lethal effects really a preferable way to go? And are you really so selfish or ignorant that you feel that it's okay to pollute your neighbor's yard and screw up local ecosystems?  Because hey -- there is no proof these things work!

Have a nice day.

an undescribed species of wasp

Last fall I posted a little photo essay on our project to inventory all the Hymenoptera (bees and wasps) in the yard. We've kept it up this year, and our addition of several species of goldenrods and mountain mint have drawn in the pollinators like crazy. 

I mentioned that we've already had a new state record (the grass-carrying wasp Isodontia elegans). Last year, Kingfisher took a picture of one of the potter wasps that we couldn't identify. There are many species of these black-and-yellow wasps that in the field look a lot alike except for the number and configuration of their markings.

We posted the photo to BugGuide and it was determined by the University of Guelph's Matthias Buck to be a female of an apparently widespread but rare undescribed species in the genus Euodynerus (called "species F"). The other day I was doing the rounds, and photographed an unfamiliar wasp. When I sat down to identify the pictures, I realized it was another female of "F".

Dr. Buck will eventually be describing and naming this species, and I offered to collect a couple so that he has additional material to work with. I haven't had too much spare time to look.  Still, when I saw a male wasp with a pattern that seemed similar to the female (like many wasps, they are sexually dimorphic), I thought it might be a candidate for "F". I caught it and put it in the fridge, then took some photos.

Sure, enough, Dr. Buck says this is a male. Finding new records in your own backyard is pretty cool. Finding new species is even cooler! I'm glad that my casual project getting to know the pollinators right around the house has turned into a way to contribute to science. Get out there and look!

endangered species act still under siege

A distressing article in today's WaPo outlines proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act that would eliminate independent scientific reviews of projects that might threaten species. The new rules would allow each federal agency -- most which have no biologists on staff -- to decide if their own projects would harm protected species. Since Congress has so far resisted major changes to the ESA, these proposed new rules will be implemented via administrative powers. Just yesterday some of us were discussing how much more damage this administration could accomplish via executive orders and the like in its waning hours. Plenty.

This effort is supported by Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne, who as a senator and governor had a dismal environmental record, and was the first reciepient of the Center for Biological Diversity's Rubber Dodo Award in 2007. I recently heard Mr. Kempthorne speak at a dinner that was intended to honor a group of USFWS volunteers. He launched into a  speech about how he was chosen for the Interior position, detailing his meeting at the White House with Bush and Cheney. It was so self-congratulatory and pompous that I was not only turned off, I actually felt uncomfortable and embarrassed for him, despite his complete lack of shame.

November can't get here soon enough.

UPDATE: The National Wildlife Federation has more information, and a letter/petition you can sign to attempt to stop the nonsense (I've had some problems with the petition link, but you can find it on NWF's front page).

deer browsing and songbirds

The latest issue of the Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists' Union, had several excellent papers. One was an overview of the impacts that deer browse has on habitat quality and subsequently bird life. I’d like to highlight some salient points, because they illustrate the interconnectedness of ecosystems, and can serve to help the average person understand that too many deer don’t just mean fewer wildflowers in the woods.

We’ll start with that simple point. Deer browsing changes under- and mid-story vegetation not only by changing the species composition (skewing it towards unpalatable species) but by reducing the abundance and density of trees, shrubs, and vines. For birds, this can mean a loss in available nest sites and roost sites, and an increased vulnerability to nest predation.  This seems fairly intuitive. The impacts of deer browse on the food supply of birds is often less direct.

Deer prefer to eat growing shoots of plants, which not only affects the growth of the plant, but may also delay or prevent flowering. This can reduce the number of pollen-seeking insects on which birds may feed during the breeding season. No flowers means no fruits or seeds, which birds consume later in the season, often fueling migratory flights or providing winter forage. Of course, deer also eat fruit and seeds, putting them in direct competition with birds.

Many insects, such as lepidoptera larvae which are so important to birds feeding nestlings, also prefer to feed on actively growing plant tissue just as the deer do. This paper notes a number of studies have found that these invertebrates can be reduced by deer browse in the vegetation layers that can be reached by deer.

Leaf litter thickness often also changes in forests with high densities of deer. Their browsing can alter the amount of sunlight that reaches the forest floor, and decreased density of trees and shrubs, as well as direct grazing on herbaceous plants, often coincides with more grasses or bare ground. This can all result in reduced number of some types of leaf litter invertebrates that are important to ground foraging bird species.

The New York Times just had a short article on the stupendous increase in White-tailed Deer in the United States -- doubling in population the last twenty years to an estimated 32 million animals. That's 12 million more than were here prior to European settlement, in far less space. The Times graphic shows that here in Michigan, I have a 1 in 86 chance of hitting a deer with my car in the next year, the second-highest odds in the nation.

The Ibis paper (and indeed the entire issue) is available for free at the journal home page.

Gill, R. M. A. and R. J. Fuller. The effects of deer browsing on woodland structure and songbirds in lowland Britain. Ibis 149:119-127.  doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.2007.00731.x

Here are some links to previous posts I've done that included the impact of deer overpopulation:

• Problematic charisma: White-tailed Deer
• Impact on songbird populations
• Deer eliminating bears
• Impact on invertebrates
• Link to overview article in BioScience

table of contents alert (12)

Assessment of management techniques to reduce woodpecker damage to homes.  E. G. Harding, P. D. Curtis, and S. L. Vehrencamp. 2007. Jrl. of Wildlife Management 71:2061-2073.
People frequently ask me how to prevent woodpeckers from banging on their houses. This study looked at several available control strategies: fake owls, huge eyeballs, loud sound systems, shiny tape, and distracting suet feeders and nest boxes. This was a pretty small-scale study, but it concluded that a reflective metallic tape product called Irri-Tape worked best. The authors also recommended avoiding natural-colored stains and paints on homes if near wooded areas.

Female-limited polymorphism in the copulatory organ of a traumatically inseminating insect. K. Reinhardt, E. Harney, R. Naylor, S. Gorb, M. T. Siva-Jothy. 2007. American Naturalist 107:931-935.
My first thought: "What in the hell is a "traumatically-inseminating insect"? As it turns out, females of the Cimicidae (bedbugs and relatives) have typical genitalia that is used for egg-laying, but not for mating. The males inseminate them by piercing the abdominal wall. The females have thus evolved "paragenitalia," consisting of modifications of the external abdominal cuticle which guide the male's piercing organ toward special internal structures that both receive sperm and contain immune cells which help reduce the septic risks of this type of insemination.

This paper looked at Afrocimex constrictus, the African bat bug, unusual even by Cimicidae standards. Males possess female-like paragenitialia. This apparently evolved because these insects only determine the gender of their partner at the time of mating. The male paragenitalia reduce the costs of being wounded by a piercing from another male, but subtle differences in the external structure -- they are "open" whereas in the female they are "covered" -- may tip off the misguided male partner before piercing takes place. The authors also discovered that females of their study population had two morphs. The external paragenitalia sinuses were either covered (typical) or open, like a male. The female morph with the male--like open sinuses were not pierced as much due to this sexual mimicry, and therefore suffered less damage.

One-sided ejaculation of echidna sperm bundles. (WITH ON-LINE ENHANCEMENTS). S. D. Johnston, B. Smith, M. Pyne, D. Stenzel, and W. V. Holt.  2007. American Naturalist 107:E162-E164.
Some papers just beg to be read. When I received this table of contents alert in my email, I found it quite compelling. An echidna is a "spiny anteater," related to the platypus, which made the subject intriguing enough, but the shouting announcement of on-line enhancements just made it irresistible. The first sentence of the abstract reads:

We report for the first time an unusual ejaculatory mechanism in the short-beaked echidna in which each side of the bilaterally symmetrical, rosettelike glans penis is used alternately, with the other being shut down."

Rather than summarize this paper, I'll just let you have at it: it is open-access. You can even view two videos (the enhancements), one entitled, "Erection Behavior and Ejaculation." I'm only including this paper so that I get a lot of traffic from naughty Google searches.

~~

As an aside, I've noticed a slowly growing trend lately away from dull, dry, straightforward paper titles in peer-reviewed journals to some which are more clever or even whimsical. Here are a few examples:

• When to care for, abandon, or eat your offspring: the evolution of parental care and filial cannibalism (Klug and Bonsall 2007, American Naturalist 107:886-901).
• How to be fed but not eaten: nestling responses to parental food calls and the sound of a predator's footsteps (Magrath, Pitcher, and Dalziell 2007, Animal Behaviour 74:1117-1129).
• Fear, food, sex and parental care: a syndrome of boldness in the fishing spider, Dolomedes triton (Johnson and Sih 2007, Animal Behaviour 74:1131-1138).

ivory-billed woodpecker draft recovery plan comments

Yeah, what David Sibley says.

Times a million. Read it, twice, carefully. Hope somebody pays attention.

(The Ivory-billed Woodpecker Draft Recovery Plan isn't the only one that's all screwed up, ignores science, and bows to politics. Check out the peer review of the Northern Spotted Owl Draft Recovery Plan, and try to breathe slowly.)

table of contents alert (11): dog walking and birds

Four-legged friend or foe? Dog walking displaces native birds from natural areas. P. B. Banks and J. V. Bryant. 2007. Biology Letters. Early online, DOI:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0374.
This paper has received a lot of press as it is on a perennially hot-button topic. Australian researchers did a careful examination of the impacts of dog walking at 90 sites near Sydney. They looked at a variety of bird species within 50 meters of a trail, and observed their reactions to walkers with dogs, walkers without dogs, and neither. The results were clear:

"...Dog walking in woodland leads to a 35% reduction in bird diversity and 41% reduction in abundance, both in areas where dog walking is common and where dogs are prohibited."

It should be noted that all dogs were leashed, and it is my experience that dog walkers frequently let their dogs off leash in wooded areas (I am not alone). That this effect was evident in areas where dogs were commonly walked as well as places where dogs were not allowed indicates that birds do not get used to dogs nearby. Ground-dwelling bird species were impacted at a higher percentage, but people without dogs caused only about half the disturbance.

Before I hear from irate dog owners, let me address some of the JPS (just plain stupid) arguments that tend to crop up. You can see many of them in one form or another in the comments of this random article on the paper.

• Development/habitat loss/humans in general are the biggest problem facing birds, not dogs. This is true. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. That doesn't mean we ignore every other large and small disease, disorder, or injury that causes mortality.  If we added up the impacts of every other threat to bird survival, I'm sure it would come close to or equal the impact of habitat loss. If we all do our part in reducing or eliminating the lesser impacts, the world would be a better place.


• Cats are worse. Outdoor cats are awful, I agree. Keep them inside. Then walk your dog around the block or take it to a dog park. And see above.


• These people are hypocritical. Have they never killed a bird with a car? Had a bird hit their window? See point number one, again.


• Nature always finds a balance. The birds just go somewhere else. The "balance" is increasingly ending up in favor of a few highly adaptable species and simplified, altered ecosystems. In a rapidly urbanizing world, these birds end up not having another place to go, or must attempt to survive in marginal, inappropriate habitat, or in increased competition with other birds seeking the same safe haven.


• The birds just fly away then come back. There is no lasting impact. Many studies have looked at how disturbance (predator, human, etc.) has long-reaching effects on birds, such as time away from foraging, increased energy output, nests left untended, chemical reactions in the body that reduce fitness, etc.


• I suppose foxes and wolves will be next! Because of their territorial nature (and the fact many do not survive well in urban areas), other canids do not occur in the density and abundance of domestic dogs. My study site is part of a 300-acre urban natural area. There are red and gray foxes and coyotes. There are more dogs walked through our area -- where they are prohibited -- in any given week than the population of all three native candids combined. And that's not counting the feral dogs, which have been released or dumped there.


• Dogs have a right/I have a right to walk wherever I want. Nobody is trying to tell you can't walk your dog. Just don't walk it through natural areas. If you can't find someplace near where you live to walk your dog, or your dog needs to run free, maybe you need to live someplace else or not have a dog. I don't have a horse. By the way, if dogs have rights, so do birds.


• Maybe it was the researchers that scared off the birds. What are the effects of researchers on bird populations?  Obviously, having a human observer in place creates an effect. However, that effect was equal for all observations, and the dog impact was still seen and profound. And there are negative impacts associated with some types of wildlife research, but all researchers have an ethical and legal obligation to minimize these impacts or not perform the studies. At least we end up learning something from research; we don't learn anything from disturbing birds walking our dogs.

Usually, I summarize two or three papers in my TOC Alerts. I've rambled on enough, though.

monarch tagging

We are about to use the last of this year's 50 Monarch tags, used to track these migratory butterflies.  I'm sure we'd be done by now, but I spent 10 days completely out of it with a really bad virus; as soon as I got better, Kingfisher came down with it. All better now, and trying to catch up...

Normally we raise a couple dozen Monarchs from eggs and tag those that are the late summer, migratory generation, and use the rest of the tags on butterflies we catch in the yard. This year, we spread out a bit. At a location where I'm doing some insect surveys for a grant project, there is a big field of Tall Boneset (Eupatorium altissimum) along a major river, a great stopover for Monarchs. We tagged a bunch there.

The tags are super sticky, and Monarch wings are much sturdier than other butterflies, so these tags last through the fall migration. At the Mexican wintering grounds of the Monarchs, folks are paid to find butterflies with tags, and a database is maintained with recovery information.

There's more on the  Monarch Watch web site, or this cool article from the New York Times.