A few years ago, someone with an interest in dynamical systems devised a complex financial product that allowed banks and other larger corporations to achieve a good return on their investments at limited risk. But it turned out that their money was not as safe as they thought, and things went belly up. Banks lost money hand over fist, some ended up bankrupt, while the taxpayer bailed others out. The global economy took a nosedive, and countries ended up being much more in debt than they would have liked. As the next general election approaches, we are told that things are improving in the UK, but the deficit is large, and it is not coming down as quickly as expected. This is a serious problem, and something that will take time to sort out. There must have been many very difficult meetings in Whitehall, with departments told they need to spend less money and, where possible, generate money. Whether one agrees with this strategy or not, the logic behind it is straightforward to follow: we need to pay off our debts so we should spend less money and generate more of it. Continue reading “My life as a wealth generation asset”

In his thought-provoking blog, Tim asks a fundamental question every ecologist has to think about occasionally: how many terms should I include in my model? Tim argues that models with a high heuristic value include only a few parameters; models like Verhulst’s logistic model of population dynamics and Lotka-Volterra’s predator-prey model. Tim also advises that ecologists in the quest of universal laws should limit the number of parameters in their models to as few as necessary to get the job done. However, I shall argue that the devil is in the detail! Continue reading “How complex should models used by ecologists be?”

One of the things that I enjoy most about the science I do is collaborating with both field biologists who know their systems inside out, and theoreticians who’s specialist expertise is abstraction and equations. One thing I have learned from these collaborations is that every field or laboratory system exhibits some oddities. The Trinidadian guppy system is the latest, wonderful, system I have begun collaborating on, and it exhibits numerous quirks. One of my favourites is what we affectionately term ‘zombie males’. Because females store sperm, males can sire offspring after death. Such behavior is, of course, not particularly unusual, but this is the first time I have had to ponder whether it is necessary to incorporate such a life history ‘quirk’ in models, and if so, how. These system-specific oddities make me take issue with a quote from a theoretician colleague. It goes something like this: ‘reality is just a special case, and not a particularly interesting one’. Reality is, in fact, very interesting.   However, the oddities of each system do generate certain challenges for the modeler. Should they always be incorporated into models? Continue reading “Modelers to the left of me, field biologists to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle with you”

Forty years. That’s at least how long an academic career can last, if you start at 30 and retire at 70. There is no mandatory retirement age (at least in the UK and US) and, unlike most people, tenured academics rarely lose their jobs. For older academics (say over 50) increased longevity can be accompanied by the right to work as long as one wants.

The usual career pattern – always sideways or up, rarely down – means that academics spend 20 years at near-maximum salary and with a tight grip on institutional power and hiring practices. This isn’t actually bad for productivity since studies convincingly show that aging doesn’t affect productivity. And the ability to work into old age is attractive to researchers whose salaries often lag the business sector. Continue reading “Down the up staircase: longevity and academics”

Modern intensive farming produces plentiful, cheap food but is reliant on heavy use of agrochemicals and is a major driver of the ongoing collapse of wildlife populations. Taxpayers pay billions each year to support this system, with the bulk of this money going to the biggest, richest farming operations. In this blog I examine how we got to this unhappy position, question the need to further increase food production given current food waste, and suggest that we need to move towards a more sustainable, evidence-based farming system, with a source of independent advice for farmers, rather than allowing the agrochemical industry to shape the future of farming.

It is not politically correct to criticise farmers or farming. We are brought up on stories about the adventures of a playful piglet who lives on a farm with a sheepdog, half a dozen chickens and a smiling cow, all presided over by a rosy-cheeked farmer, his wife and their two children. Farmers might also be portrayed as custodians of the land, where the countryside that they look after is filled with the sound of skylarks singing, bumblebees buzzing amongst the hedgerows, and butterflies flitting across sunlit, flowery meadows.

Farming is of course the most fundamentally important of human activities; without farms and farmers, we would quickly starve. Going back to hunter-gathering is not an option. What is more, the human population is growing, and therefore we must increase food production. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) declared in 2010 that we must double food production by 2050, and this rationale is used to justify the drive for ever-increasing yield. One might argue that we should focus all our research on increasing yield at all cost, else our grandchildren will starve. Continue reading “Biodiversity v Intensive Farming; Has Farming Lost its Way?”

It’s been a busy old year at Journal of Animal Ecology, with lots of personnel changes and a few new initiatives. Here, we review some of these developments.

The blog

In terms of new initiatives, the highest profile is arguably this blog – Animal Ecology In Focus – which we started in June 2014. Although the senior editors were initially quite sceptical about whether this latest venture into social media would be successful, the feedback we have had so far suggests that it is a valued addition to our outputs, along with our Twitter feed (@AnimalEcology), our Facebook page, podcasts, videos, etc. The blog was kick-started by a controversial post by our own Tim Coulson on the latest UK badger cull trials and this theme was picked up again in a later post by the other Senior Editors, who offered the services of the Journal to Defra to provide an independent assessment of this year’s badger cull trial. The blog was subsequently highlighted by the BBC and cited in a Westminster debate by MPs from across the political divide. It is likely that this issue will continue to feature on our blog for some time to come. Other notable posts in the last six months include one by Ken Wilson highlighting the decline in entomological papers published in the Journal over the last 40 years, one by Ben Sheldon on funding long-term studies and a number of posts by Tim Coulson on issues such as sex-biases in science, the value of archiving data (with Ben), and a call for pre-proposals. In December, we opened up the blog for the first time to our Associate Editors, with a powerful post by Sonia Altizer and Julie Rushmore on the role of wildlife in the spread of Ebola virus. In 2015, we plan to invite other renowned experts in animal ecology to share their thoughts with on a range of topical issues. The first of these, by Dave Goulson, will appear shortly. If you have any ideas about what might make an interesting blog post, and who might write it, please contact us. Continue reading “A Look Back At 2014”

Ebola virus as a zoonotic pathogen

The current Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa is very much on people’s minds as a story of human suffering and death, with nearly 15,000 Ebola cases reported from West Africa as of November. Ebola virus spreads rather slowly but causes a remarkably high fatality rate, with 50% or more of human cases ending in death. The current epidemic dwarfs the cumulative number of cases in previous localized outbreaks, motivating new research into vaccines, treatments, and efforts to slow Ebola spread. Promising signs of slowing transmission have emerged in recent weeks, but many experts predict that widespread vaccination will be needed to fully halt the epidemic. The social, political and economic impacts of the current Ebola virus epidemic will likely linger for years to come. Continue reading “The Wildlife Side of Ebola: What Animal Ecology Can Contribute to Studying the Spread of a Deadly Virus”

Max Planck famously said ‘science advances one funeral at a time’. Sadly there is still some truth to this: some scientists are incapable or unprepared to change their views despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they are wrong*. Outdated ideas often only die with their advocates. One thing I try to teach students is that it is alright to be wrong: many ideas turn out to be incorrect, lots of exciting hypotheses end up not being supported, and frequent promising avenues turn out to be cul-de-sacs. But that is how science progresses. We need to rule out some competing hypotheses in order to advance knowledge. Continue reading “It is alright to be wrong and was Wright right?”

When you submit a manuscript to the Journal of Animal Ecology you are asked the following question: ‘If your paper is accepted for publication where do you expect to archive your data or, if already archived where are the data held?’ Recently, we received a manuscript where the author had responded to this question with: ‘the data will be archived with the lead author’. This is not an appropriate digital data archive!

On about the same date that the previous was submitted, one of us wrote to the authors of a paper published just over a decade ago. In the email, data underpinning the paper were requested, as it seemed plausible that the paper’s conclusions were a consequence of an error in analysis. The authors were unable to provide the data because they had changed computers several times in the last decade and it had been lost somewhere along the line. This won’t be the only time this has happened. In fact, not so long ago, one of us has had to play the embarrassing role of replying to request a for data with the news that it was in a file format that was inaccessible on any current operating system. Fortunately, these sort of things shouldn’t happen in future for Journal of Animal Ecology papers as one of the reasons we require authors to upload data associated with their papers to a respected data repository is to avoid just such scenarios. Continue reading “Archive your data!”

This year I have written two UK research council proposals and a European Research Council grant. They are each on completely different topics. I suspect it has taken about six months of my time. I was pleased with each application, but I don’t have high hopes for any of them, simply because funding rates are low. I am not atypical, and this is not an atypical year for me.

What happens at the UK research councils is one receives reviewer comments on the proposal. From my experience, about half of the reviews are positive suggesting funding, and the remaining ones grumble. They rarely raise any scientific objectives that cannot very easily be dealt with. They often criticize the research team, complain that some key literature is missing and request additional methodological details. A colleague of mine once told me that he had had several grants rejected at NERC that were better than everything he had ever been asked to review, and consequently always wrote grumpy reviews. He is a little delusional. Anyway, once reviewer comments are received, a response can be written. The committee assesses all grants, reviewer comments and responses, ranks proposals and the top few get funded. Continue reading “A Call for Pre-Proposals”