I was going to start this post by saying taxonomy has a language of its own, but that's not really true. Taxonomy just has a whole lot of Latin. When I've given talks in schools, I've almost always been asked why scientists insist on giving creatures those strange Latinised names. The answer is, we need names that anyone anywhere can recognise and pin to particular species or group. A common name like "black bird" might make sense in conversation in New Zealand, but in other circumstances it could refer to a single species (Turdus merula), the five species that make up Turdus, or a whole bunch of species in the new world family Icteridae. When taxonomy really got started Latin was the language which scientists from different countries used to speak to each other, so modern taxonomy follows Linnaeus in using Latinised names.

But the Latin terms used by taxonomists don't stop with names, if you thought they were difficult to understand you should open a taxonomic work. The first time I did I was lost in a sea of lecto-, neo- and allo-types; homonyms junior and senior and Nomina nuda, obltum and protectum. The title of this post, Incertae sedis is another of those strange taxonomic terms and translates as "uncertain placement". Most big taxonomic reviews include a few species the author is certain are well defined, but hard to place into a higher group. Those species get placed under the heading Incertae sedis.

I used that title because today's subject is... a land snail... of some sort

Labels: environment and ecology, molluscs, new zealand, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

Don Merton holding Richard Henry, an important Kakapo. Photo is CC 3.0 from here (thanks to Errol Nye from DoC)

Don Merton probably saved more species from extinction than anyone on earth. If it wasn't for his efforts we would have lost the Chatham Island's Black Robin and the Kakakpo, and the methods he pioneered as used by conservation projects all around the world. Last week Don Merton died.

Don's most famous achievement was his heroic rescue of the black robin. The species was reduced to five adults and only one fertile female called 'Old Blue', all living on a tiny rock sticking out of the sea in the Chatham Islands. By going against the "hands off" approach to conservation that prevailed at the time and translocating the surviving birds to a larger island and 'fostering out' Old Blue's eggs to the local tomtits Don founded a population that now has 300 or so birds. Their future is a long way away from being secure, but the fact they exist at all is down to Don Merton's creative thinking, hard work and perseverance.

Don also led the team that rediscovered female kakapo after that species was considered 'functionally extinct', and the team that captured Richard Henry, the kakapo he's holding in the photo above this story. (A bird so important for the kakapo recovery program that his death was recorded by Wired magazine). On top to those achievement you can add hundreds of projects in New Zealand and overseas which Don contributed to, or made use of the methods he'd developed here

Nic Valence spoke to Don about the robin project a few years ago.

Labels: black robin, conservation, don merton, environment and ecology, kakapo, sci-blogs

Did you know that I'm in the pocket of big bussiness ? Or that I set out to bamboozle people with fancy graphs? Or that I show the typical arrogance of the modern scientist? Well, it was news to me as well, but all this, and much more, appeared in the comments underneath my article on Ken Ring's (non)ability to predict earthquakes when it was picked up by the National Business Review. One of my crtics did a little research about me and decided that... well I'm not sure what he decided:

As for people like David Winter - well he is in the pocket of people like the NBR - after all if the economy goes down the gurgler he just might not get any more freebee grants so he can go off and study snail trails. Studying snail trails wouldn't engage someone for many hours a day, no doubt why he has had time to pen the "syndicated" article above. So here we have people like David Winter and the NBR "feeding" of the Christchurch earthquake.

I've had plenty of support, both public and private, in funding my research and I'm very grateful for it, but I'm not sure propping up a right-wing newspaper would be a very good way to expand spending on basic research. As it happens, I have never studied snail trails (although there's plenty of science in that mucous), but I've looked into something I'm sure my anonymous critic would be equally dismissive of.

I want to know what my snails eat. That might seem like an easy question to answer, couldn't I just set up in the field with a notebook and write down what I see? Not really, land snails are generally only active for a small proportion of the day, and even if you can observe them feeding it's hard to tell what they're eating. The lettuce-destroying slugs and snails we are familiar with are the odd ones out in the malacolgical world - most land snails don't eat live plants, instead, they prefer decaying matter or algae and fungi growing on various surfaces (some others are carnivores). So, to try and learn something about the diet of my land snails I broke out a scalpel and started collecting the gut contents from my preserved specimens and picking through them to see what they've been eating (and if there are differences between species).

I'll talk about those results one day, but while I was doing those dissections I started finding and more of the leaf veined slugs I've written about before. Including babies:

Which made me think: what are these guys eating? As ever, I turned to google for an answer and Te Ara had it "their biology is poorly known, but they are thought to live mainly on algae and fungi on the surface of plants". Sure enough, searching through the literature on the 30 or so species of leaf veined slug in New Zealand, there is no indication of what it is that they eat. That was too depressing for me, we know so little about the biology of our native invertebrates, but this species (Athoracophorus bitentaculatus) isn't particularily rare, we should at least know what this one eats.

Don't worry, I didn't start sacrificing cute little slug-lets in the name of science. There's another way to get gut contents (note also, that even flattened slugs have the strangely twisted anatomy of the snails from which they descended):

So, I took to stepping outside an night time, finding a couple of slugs, and placing them in a bucket. In the morning I'd move them back to the shrubs from which they'd been plucked and scoop a few fecal samples out of the bucket to inspect along with my dissections. And here's what I found when I looked down the microscope:

And a little closer:

It's took me a pretty long time to work out what these three-lobed structures were, but I'm pretty sure I know now. They're pollen grains. You can tell a lot about the world from studying pollen grains, each year plants put out millions of these structures, each once identifiable to a taxonomic group. To a trained eye, a series of pollen samples from a old lake bed can reveal past climate change or the evolutionary history of our country. Pollen can even solve crimes. To my eyes... well, I think these are from the massive pine tree next door ( the smaller lobes are "bladders" designed to catch the wind and let the pollen fly, and are unique to pines and their relatives).

It's not actually clear that the slugs were going out of their way eat pollen, it might just have been on the surface they were eating from and unavoidable. It's certainly clear that a lot of grains made it through the digestive system intact. So I still hadn't really cracked the mystery of what these guys were eating. Then, a couple of weeks ago I noticed something. The railing along the pathway the leads down to our front door is covered in algae and fungi, with a very distinctive pattern:

These are slug feeding trails. As they slide across a surface, slugs and snails use an organ called the radula to rasp away and remove the food. I must have walked past this evidence a thousand times without ever thinking about it! The next night I went out with my deeply amateur night-shoot gear and, sure enough, there the slugs were:

So, now we know, leaf veined slugs do indeed live on algae and fungi (and possibly pollen too) but not only on the surface of plants!

Hello boingboing readers! If you want to find some more backyard science, I've also been keeping an eye on a little colony of spiders (1,2,3) and I once tried to find out what makes bumblebee workers get working. If you're a fan of spineless creatures in general, you should check circus of the spineless which collects posts from all over the web (and all over the world). The last edition was hosted by Zen Faulkes at Neurodojo and you can find the older ones here.

Labels: environment and ecology, leaf veined slugs, photos, sci-blogs, snails, sunday spinelessness

Sometimes I wish I was a better photographer. I have lots of fun sticking a lens in front of the spineless creatures I find in my travels, but every now and then I happen across something so cool I wish I could share it in some real detail:

That's a mother wolf spider (Lycosidae) clinging to the wall of our house, with hundreds of baby wolf spiders clinging to her back. Wolf spiders make good mothers. They spend their days hunting, eating whatever prey passes their course. That mobile lifestyle leaves them no chance to build a nest for their offspring, so, instead, they carry them around with them. First as an eggsac (I photographed a pair fighting over ownership of eggs last year), then. once they've hatched, as a whole mass of spiderlings. The spiderlings stay on their mothers back for a week or so, leaving just before their first moult, and they don't eat during their stay. 

So, a pertty cool piece of biology, but I can't help but feel it's shame someone with a bit more skill (and some flash camera gear) had come across the sight:

Labels: environment and ecology, sci-blogs, spider, sunday spinelessness, wolf spiders

Genetics Otago (the group behind the Southern Genes blog at sciblogs) runs a bi-weekly meeting for postgrads to catch up, find out about each others work and perhaps even learn something about life as a budding academic. Next week I'm going to present a short talk on... how to present a short talk.

Looking about for some resources around the web, it seems most just reinforce the preferences of the author. To try and be a little more representative in my approach I'm going to present the notes I've written for my talk so anyone with an opinion can tell me what I've missed and what they think I've got wrong. This is going to be presented to postgraduate genetics students, but most of the skills that go into making a good presentation apply beyond genetics and even science, so I'd welcome feedback from anyone.

(As new tips come in, I'm adding them in italics)

Think about your audience, then tell them a story

You might know all there is to know about the protein family you study, the amazing new phylogenetic methods you used or why finding the mutation that underlies the phenotype you are studying will change the world - but does your audience? As a postgrad you've become an expert in a very narrow field, but you'll hardly ever talk to an audience in which everyone is as clued up as you are. Be generous and share some of your knowledge, think about who comes to the sort of talk you're presenting (you lab? your department? an inter-department program? the public?) and think about what they already know, what terms they'll be familiar with, and what sorts of data and results they're used to interpreting.

It seems bizarre that I should have to mention this, but you should also think about what sort of thing the members of your audience care about. You hardly ever get a chance to talk about all of your research at once, so when you prepare a talk you are always making a decision about which details to include. Think about your audience when you decide the 'angle' you want to take in your talk; are they specialist your area will be interested in how you applied a bleeding edge technology to your problem? Or are they wider audience, who are more interested in how your results will be translated into practical benefits? (That last angle is a little harder to work if you study speciation in land snails).

Once you have your angle, and you know the level at which you will pitch your work, you're well on the way to the single most important tip for any presentation: tell us a story. A week after you've given your talk, no one is going to remember the degree to which transcript NM_091299.1 was over-represented in your second experiment, but if you told them a really good story about how you found out how a certain gene plays a role in a disease it will stick with them. So how do you tell the story...

Whatever you do, don't open powerpoint now

I couldn't care less what software you use to present your story, you can make awful presentations in prezi and you can make wonderfully clear ones in powerpoint, but the worst thing you can do is start writing you presentation in powerpoint. As soon as you sit down in front of that program you're sucked into making those bullet point lists:

• Capulets and Montagues
  • Alike in dignity
  • In Verona
  • Ancient grudges
    • led to new mutiny
• Romeo and Juiet
  • From these loins (C&M)
  • Star cross'd lovers
  • death marked love
    • buried their parents' strife

There might be some sorts of information that are best presented in this way, but certainly not the whole talk. More to the point, most people use these lists to mark out the structure of their talk. That's not what slides are for. The slides are their to illustrate, back up and reinforce the things that you are saying and to present your results once you've prepared your audience for them. At the moment you should be worrying about the story you're going to tell.

Stories have structures, and almost all good scientific talks follow a similar structure. They start with a broad outline of the field you studied (tailored, of course, for the audience you are talking to) which narrows in on the one bit that you are working on. It's nice to end this introduction with a clear statement of the questions you're asking: "what genes get turned on in queen bees but not workers", "what, if anything, is a rabbit?", "Why are some sheep more resistant to parasites than others?". Then you present the results that hopefully answer the question, before finally stepping back and showing how those results have changed the big picture you presented to begin with. It goes without saying that you need to be careful and precise when you are describing your results, "telling a story" is not another way of saying that you are free to throw in wild speculations or ease over wrinkles in the data.

Take some time to design your slides

You could spend a whole session on information-design and scientific data (I contributed to one last week!), but the most important points are pretty obvious. Make all your slides clear. Don't spend hours worrying about the particular font or colour combo you use (light on dark is fine, as is the opposite) just make sure everything you present is legible and nice to look at. Don't use esoteric fonts, because they probably won't be on the computer you use to present your talk. Do proof read your slides (I'm terrible at this, and really should get other people to do it for me).

Often, cartoon style diagrams or illustrations help you explain complex ideas quickly. When it comes to graphs and data, you should really think about each element of the figure and decide whether it needs to be there to convey the point you are making: does anyone care about the precise value of the probabilities on your giant phylogenetic tree? Do you need a legend for your bar chart, or can you directly label the bars? You don't want to end up saying "I know this is hard to see but..." at any stage (that includes pie-charts of your 154 GO terms, use an ordered dot plot or bar chart instead). If you use colour, be aware about 7% of the males in your audience will be red-green colour blind, you can use one of these palettes and check your resulting graphics here.

If you are presenting the same comparison in multiple slides (wild type against mutant, or one species against another) keep the colours consistent from slide to slide. There's a lot more that could be said about this, I'll add links to some great resources on information design below.

Give you slides decent, descriptive titles ("Mutant is 100x less effective than wild-type", not "Alleles compared")

Practice your talk

Another one firmly from the "I shouldn't have to say this" category, but how many times have you been to a seminar that ran 20 minutes over time? Despite anything else, it's incredibly rude to turn up to a presentation without having rehearsed it, especially if you're at a conference in which your overflow eats into someone's time.

Rehearse your talk out loud, and preferable to a test audience.

You should consider your notes and your first set of slides as a first draft - something to be pared down into a tight presentation that you know inside-out by the time you present it. The challenge here is how to do that and still sound fresh when you present...

Be an incredibly charismatic and dynamic presenter (or just yourself, actually)

Everyone will have their own presentation style. I'm one of those people that talks a thousand miles per hour, walks about the stage and waves his hands. Some people think that's a presentation skill, but, really, I'm just a big science fan-boy and I can't stop myself. If you're not that sort of person, then there's no point pretending to be, and you can present a great talk without running around like a fool. But there are a few things you can do to to keep an audience interested in what you're saying.

Don't rote learn every line of your talk

It's much better to have a few key points or phrases you want to get to and a good idea of how you'll navigate between them that to present a dreary mantra. Knowing where each passage is headed also prevents that very kiwi trait of adding an upward inflection to each sentence, which doesn't fill anyone with confidence! You'll likely be nervous when you start your talk, knowing exactly what you'll say in the first few minutes will let you ease into the talk and feel confident once you move into the body of the talk.

Know what's on your next slide

This is a really easy and effective one, if you start talking about the next piece of data in your talk before you actually present it you are able to prepare your audience for what they're going to see, and you don't take their attention away from what you are saying. The "Presenter tools" feature in later versions of powerpoint lets you see the next slide (and a timer) on your screen.

Take a breath either side of presenting something cool/weird/important

Just like it says, use a little bit of silence to underline the things you really want people to remember. If you have a really controversial or counter intuitive point to make, think of a short sharp sentence that describes it, take a second to let it sink in then start explaining why you think it's true.

A pointer on pointers

Be confident

You know what your talking about, really, you've done a literature review and you've collected all this data. A lot of younger postgrads suffer from a sort of imposter syndrome: they think they've somehow snuck their way through an undergrad course and into a scholarship and PhD program without anyone noticing they don't have a clue about what they're doing. This lack of confidence is manifested in two ways: people either present their data apologetically ("I think...", "...or something", "but I don't know") or they go to the other extreme and drown their message in jargon, as if they were proving they too can wield these words, just like a real scientist. Neither of these are approachs are a good idea; if you don't believe your conclusions why will anyone else, and too much jargon will leave half the audience behind.

Leave time for questions, and be honest in answering them

Of course, you should leave time for questions and of course it's much, much better to say "I hadn't considered that, do you want to talk about it later" than to extemporise a wild and whirling answer to that guy that just has to ask the really mean question.

In powerpoint, typing the number of a slide then pressing 'enter' lets you jump to that slide. If you remember the number of "the big data slide" in your presentation (or write it on a post-it), you can skip write to it when you are asked a question about it and look like a pro.

Have fun, and ignore what I said

Remember, I want your ideas on how to make my advice better!

Here are some links with tips on designing charts/diagrams/illustrations (feel free to suggest more):

• Mike Dickison from Canterbury runs an information design consultancy and has some useful tips on his blog. Mike also runs a short course on presenting, you can download the notes from his class [pdf] and see a whole slew of useful links here.
• Elf Elridge porvided a link to some tips put together by the postgrads at the MacDiarmid Institute
• Edward Tufte is kind of the grandfather of information design, lots of great stuff (but be aware his followers can be a little... fanatical)
• A recent workshop entirely devoted to visualising biological data (with speaker's slides available)
• Check out David Lubinkski's advice and links in the comments at sciblogs, lots of good stuff

Labels: sci-blogs, science communication

Today marks the end of the Daylight Savings Time in New Zealand, so local readers will have had an extra hour at their disposal to sleep through, get more work done, or explain to their children that they are meant to stay asleep for longer today. However you used that extra hour, you should take a moment to think of the extraordinary amateur entomologist that came up with the idea that gave it to you.

George Vernon Hudson was one of New Zealand's first and finest entomologists. He described hundreds of our insect species and worked out the lifecycles of still more by raring their larvae at his house in Karori, Wellington. Hudson was a not a professional entomologist - he had a day job as a shift worker at the Wellington Post Office. Working shifts gave Hudson a chance to get out and collect insects while others were working, and it also made him aware just how much daylight people were sleeping through during the summer. In 1895 Hudson read a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society (part of what became the Royal Society of New Zealand) in which he advocated putting clocks forward in October so sunrise wouldn't happen hours before anyone woke up and the pushed-back sunset would mean "a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired".

By all accounts Hudson's proposal wasn't well received. The paper itself wasn't printed (the quote above is from a follow-up he presented in 1898), but reactions to it were reported in the society's journal. William Maskell, the president of the society and a fellow entomologist, was particularly scathing (and inaccurate) when he said " the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best." Apparently, Hudson wasn't deterred by the bad reaction his paper got, and he kept pressing the idea. By 1898 he claimed the support from many people, particularly in Christchurch, but in the end, it all came to nothing. Daylight Saving Time as we know it was really the result of an English builder called William Willet, who came up with the idea independently and managed to get his plan considered by parliament. But the turning of the clocks, and GV Hudson's role in coming up with the idea, are the perfect excuse to show off one of my favourite possessions :

I have a copy of Hudson's first major scientific book, New Zealand Moths and Butterflies (1898). My copy used to belong to the Wellington Acclimatisation Society. It came to me by a circuitous route, but it seems the book spent at least some of the last hundred years sitting in a shed. It's largely a taxonomic work, full of anatomical details and the curious codes by which taxonomists speak to each other. That much is interesting to a specialist (and I really should donate the book to a research library), but the real stand-out feature is the 13 colour plates, each one full of Hudson's beautiful hand-drawn illustrations

Labels: butterfly, environment and ecology, GV Hudson, history of science, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness