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”

Understanding ecological systems takes time. While some experimental ecological work, performed under controlled lab conditions, can be conveniently fitted into the short-term periods beloved of funding bodies, much of ecology requires a longer-term perspective. Why is that? First, life-histories frequently operate at generational scales approaching decades. To have any hope to make sense of patterns of inheritance, selection or demography we need data spanning multiple generations, and that may mean multiple decades. Second, almost all ecological studies reveal heterogeneity among individuals – frequently in terms of vital rates, or detection probability, or other aspects of life-histories. Such heterogeneity makes it very hard to extrapolate from cross-sectional observations to understand the true sources of variation driving a population. Continue reading “Begging for funding?”

As a scientific journal, we are in the business of independently assessing the rigour of work conducted by the research community, including the methods it uses to collect, analyse and interpret appropriate data. We are therefore well placed to judge the merits of relevant scientific endeavour and to provide constructive feedback. On October 30^th 2014, the UK’s Shadow Farming Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, called for an independent review of the methods being used to assess the outcomes of the ongoing pilot badger culls in England ¹. Such a review requires a detailed understanding of the behaviour, dynamics and management of wild animal populations – disciplines that are at the heart of the field of animal ecology. As the UK’s leading animal ecology journal, we hereby offer our services to the Secretary of State to provide an independent assessment of the methods and data collected as part of this year’s badger cull. Continue reading “Transparency and Evidence-Based Policy: An Open Letter to Defra from Journal of Animal Ecology”

In 2003 Milner-Gulland et al. wrote a paper on extreme adult sex ratios in saiga antelope. Males had become so rare in some years that the behavior of the system became dysfunctional and population performance suffered catastrophically. The only other environments where I know of heavily skewed adult sex ratios are university science faculties. Except here the skew is in the other direction, with females being rare. Social scientists have shown that skewed sex ratios in the workplace can negatively impact many performance metrics (e.g. Fenwick and Neal 2001).

Many scientists are rightly concerned by the paucity of women on the faculty of many science departments, and there has been much contemplation on the causes of attrition as more men progress from Ph.D. to post-doc to a faculty position to full professor than women. There are hypotheses proposed to explain this ranging from men being more likely than women to express the traits thought to aid success in academia including self-belief and an ability to brush off criticism, through to a lack of adequate home life provision. However, identification of these causes does not seem to be having much of an effect on reducing the skewed sex ratio. For example, of 43 researchers offered prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowships this year, 41 were men (see here). I am not entirely surprised by this. Many ‘solutions’ I have heard proposed to address the skewed sex ratio problem seem unlikely to succeed. For example, one popular call is for women’s groups to be set up. No one has ever succeeded in explaining to me how that is supposed to lead to change. Continue reading “Solving the skewed sex ratio problem in science”

Recently, we commissioned one of Journal of Animal Ecology‘s most experienced Associate Editors, Simon Leather, to compile a Virtual Issue on his great passion – insects. The journal has published many classic insect ecology papers over the years and Simon does a great job of highlighting some of these as well as many new papers that we hope will go on to become classics themselves. In his preface to the VI, Simon bemoans the fact that back in the 1970s, when he first began subscribing to the journal, there were many more papers on insects than there are now and that the journal has perhaps become vertebrate-centric in recent years.

This got me thinking – is this really true? And if it is, then why do we publish fewer entomological papers now than back then? Are we alone in this trend or is it common across other general ecological journals? And, either way, should we be worried about the taxonomic distribution of our papers? Continue reading “Where have all the insects gone?”