Home Sick Notes (July 28th)

• Bad Astronomy brought to my attention the discovery of an asteroid in one of the Earth's stable Lagrangian points.  At some point in the future, I imagine these points are going to be valuable real-estate.
• Sport hunting is considered a very minimal impact to lots of North American game species that are in need of conservation (e.g., Lesser Prairie Chickens), but apparently the role of hunting is substantial in highly endangered big cats, and the more you try to conserve them, the more attractive they are to "trophy" hunters.  The authors suggest this is non-intuitive, but this is exactly what I've observed from wealthy people who travel to hunt.  (Palazy et al., 2011, PLoS ONE 6(7): e22424 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0022424)
• I've talked about the light:nutrient hypothesis before, and now there's a new paper investigating this in stream biota.
• Hey look!  Canada has become the United States during the Bush era!
• As if it wasn't difficult enough trying to do wetland restoration, there's now evidence that the obvious (that these wetlands are sometimes nutrient sources instead of the sinks we tend to assume they will be) is in fact true.  (Steinman and Ogdahl, 2011, Does converting agricultural fields to wetlands retain or release P?, Journal of the North American Benthological Society)
• If you're like me, and didn't even know wood-grazing fish existed, then this article will probably blow your mind.  (Lujan et al., 2011, Do wood-grazing fishes partition their niche?: morphological and isotopic evidence for trophic segregation in Neotropical Loricariidae, Functional Ecology)
• And finally, my favorite scientific society changed its name a few months ago:  The North American Benthological Society will now be the Society for Freshwater Science (despite Dom Chaloner's excellent article that makes a compelling case for bringing together marine and freshwater disciplines).  I think the last time this was voted on by the membership, the argument was that nobody knows what "benthological" means.  At the same time, ASLO changed from being the "American Society for Limnology and Oceanography" to the "Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography," clearly indicating that keeping the same initials is as important as having a name that doesn't sound ridiculous.

Interesting weekend posts

• When it comes to the bounty of the ocean, the only thing that appears to be capable of causing the collapse of fisheries is human appetite.  As humans, we've managed to eat our way through a massive assortment of marine species.  So it is no surprise that when it comes to invasive species, people tend to put two and two together and decide:  "Hey, maybe we can eat all the invaders to reduce their numbers!" We're there again.  All I can say is that this is a scheme unlikely to be ultimately successful.  The bigger concern is that if create a market where an invasive is worth money, then there is a financial incentive for people to expand the range of that invasive, which creates a new version of the exact problem you're trying to eliminate in the first place.
• The situation in Montana is not good.
• Mist netting birds.  Everyone assumed it was ok...and apparently it is (a grrlscientist review)?  Seems a bit complicated, and the actual paper (pdf) is a bit caveat-ish.  Still, compared to methods used for mammals and herps I think this is pretty good evidence that mist netting is minimally damaging.
• Tetrapod Zoology is dead.  Long live Tetrapod Zoology!
• Not sure how I missed this blog previously, but Highly Allochthonous seems pretty cool.

Interesting stuff (6/29/2011)

• Every day, we seem to learn more about animals that lived tens of millions of years ago.  Including the approximate body temperature of sauropods.  This feeds into the story about dinosaurs being warm blooded or cold-blooded, but to me the real question is how an organism so large kept its body heat down.  
• I think hyenas are really interesting (and apparently so do others).  Did you know they are more closely related to cats than dogs?
• The neat thing about Tet Zoo, is that every now and then an animal comes up on there that is contemporary, and yet I didn't even imagine such a thing existed.  Like a bearded pig.
• A lot of people complain about scientists over-stating climate change (IMO, a lot of people who don't know anything anyway).  In reality, climate models are very, very conservative in terms of the rate at which actual climate change happened in the past.  Apparently I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
• I'm fascinated by cases of scientific fraud and not only is this an interesting case of which I wasn't previously aware, but it reminded me of the Baltimore case (mentioned in the comments of that article).  Which is a case of fraud where the participants were eventually exonerated (sort of), even though everyone (including that commentator) seems to feel like someone was guilty and things aren't quite right.
• I just get the feeling that bugs (the non-technical term) just sprang, fully-formed from the earth.  I mean, there are really old fossils of, essentially, gnats and Hey look.  They had fully functional and sophisticated eyes 515 million years ago.

Internet Paths

I don't know if anyone else does this, but when I get online, there's a certain sequence of sites that I run through. My way of getting to know what's happened in the world that I care about.

So in case anyone else is interested, here is my "Science Path" for exploring science news online:

The New York Times Science Section:  Started reading this because of Carl Zimmer's articles.  I think eventually NYTimes is going behind a pay wall.  I haven't been reading this one as much lately.

The Los Angeles Times Science Section:  Pretty much all the big stories are the same between these two source.  But each have blogs and 'local' stories that are interesting as well.

Research Bloggers "Ecology and Conservation" Index:  This site compiles all those blogs who are publishing articles reviewing or discussing recent articles.  There's some good stuff and some mediocre stuff on here.  I often dig around other categories, but the ecology and conservation category is the one I read most frequently.  I used to link my own stuff on there a lot, but I haven't (obviously) been contributing much lately.

Science Subreddits:  I usually try to look at the Science, Biology and AskScience subreddits on reddit.com.  I'm a panelist for the AskScience subreddit, although there aren't usually questions that I am qualified to answer there.

Tetrapod Zoology:  I generally am bored by taxonomy, but every time I read Tet Zoo I get interested again.  I've learned and forgotten more from reading this blog than I could possibly have imagined.  The articles are long-ish, so I end up spending a lot of time in the Tet Zoo archives.

The Loom:  I like Carl Zimmer's writings a lot.  I don't get this far down my path very often, but when I do I'm always impressed.  I also like some of the other Discovery blogs (especially Bad Astronomy).

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

The long exhale

Once again, my blog went defunct!  Let me give a quick explanation:

1.  I changed jobs.  I decided to get out of regulatory work and back into research.  There are a lot of reasons for this, which I would be happy to discuss in person if we ever meet.  The short version is:  I missed research.

2.  I'm now working for the U.S. government.  I'm not totally clear on how this affects my ability to post thoughts/opinions online.  However, I am totally sure that I don't have a lot of time to do that.

3.  And finally, I got stressed out.  Rather than write series of crappy posts, I decided to just watch three seasons of "Heroes" and then play with my kids for two months. 

So what am I going to do with this space now?

I might start posting more paper recaps.  I've read a lot of papers recently, so there's plenty of good material to re-distribute. 

I also will be adding descriptions of my research.  When I took the plunge back into research, I didn't take a permanent position, so I'm job hunting.  I'm going to post detailed explanations of my research ideas here (and permanently link to them) so that people will be able to see what I'm about. 

So expect a few changes in the coming days/weeks.

Notes for July 8th

• Happy Birthday Sis!
• This isn't exactly a wonderfully fun story.  
• Squirrels are actually pretty interesting.  Although we typically think of invasive species as annoying and frustrating, there's something sorta amazing about a species that can be this successful.
• Humans where in Europe a lot longer than previously thought.  Or maybe just a lot earlier?
• I'm just going to repeat the title of this article and then gasp in terror:  "Gallbladder removed through mouth in new-" (stops to vomit, deep breath).  Ok, so actually that's probably a good thing, but judas monkeys!

Notes for July 7th

• More about perennial grains.  I agree, it would be great if we could have them.  I don't know why we don't.  
• A fairly interesting look at the food preferences of man-eating lions (obviously, they don't only eat people).
• Ants with worms...broadly speaking ants with mind-control worms.
• Holy cow, I can't believe this is a problem.  Because of some unexpected storms, a hydro plan in the Pacific NW was making so much power that other facilities in the region had to shut down (gas and coal plants).  I'm not a huge fan of hydro because the impoundments associated with them are usually bad for streams, but some strategic use of hydro is certainly going to be helpful.  In this case, they have so much power being generated that they don't know what to do with it (literally).