Interesting Papers: Inadvertant management, dissolved organic matter in large rivers, and other cool studies

• Sometimes management with the best intentions can result in active detriment to an intended beneficiary.  Take this example of supplemental feeding for a European eagle:  The supplemental feed contained pharmaceuticals, so the eagles that were given the supplemental feed were actually worse off than those who weren't. 
• I haven't read this paper on DOM dynamics in large rivers yet.  But I wouldn't exactly be true to my dissertation work if I didn't get it read in the next couple of days.  I'm not aware of other studies that have followed the dynamics of DOM in such a large system with anything like this kind of detail, so this seems like it could be very interesting.
• I don't often see social and economic studies in the journals I follow, but this study on the cost and distribution of benefits associated with heat relief is fascinating.  I think environmental justice is a really interesting topic (I'd love to teach a course on this) and this paper is a perfect example of how it fits in with ecosystems services.
• I don't usually dig through Nature or Science directly, but last week's Nature Podcast made me realize I'd missed an essay co-authored by one of my favorite researchers, Jim Elser.  The essay is about peak phosphorus and I think it is fascinating that nobody, or at least almost nobody talks about phosphorus in the mass media.  I kinda wonder if we'll solve this problem more efficiently and effectively because it isn't a popular press story, as opposed to the other big biogeochemical problems (our over-production of C and N). 
• In case anyone was wondering, here's the list of journals that show up in my feed reader.  You won't see Nature or Science on there, because the number of things those journals put into their feeds are just overwhelming, and much of it isn't very interesting to an ecologist (not that I'm just an ecologist).  I keep up with the Nature and Science stuff from the podcasts and word of mouth.  I also get L&O's table of contents delivered to my inbox.  I'd like to get the Journal of Great Lakes Research easily, but every time I subscribe to the feed, I end up getting every journal published by their publishing company.  I also get Frontiers in print, because it comes with the membership to ESA.  Anyway, if your article comes out in one of these journals, and I randomly think it looks cool, I'll try to mention it here:
• Oecologia
• Journal of Ecology
• Fundamental and Applied Limnology
• AFS Transactions
• Biogeochemistry
• Hydrobiologia
• Environmental Science and Technology
• Aquatic Sciences
• NABS (actually NABS is now the Society for Freshwater Science...not sure if I updated the feed or not!)
• Freshwater Biology
• Functional Ecology
• Journal of Animal Ecology
• Ecology
• Ecology Letters
• Aquatic Ecology
• Proceedings of the National Academies of Science
• Proceedings of the Royal Society (B)
• Oikos

I'm so confused: Comments and Rebuttals in ES&T

So on October 5th, this article by Liao and Kannan entitled “Widespread Occurrence of Bisphenol A in Paper and Paper Products:  Implications for Human Exposure” popped up in my google reader (from the journal Environmental Science and Technology).  Hmm... I glanced over the article, there’s a bit more exposure risk than I thought apparently.  Then, October 10th...5 days later...a comment/rebuttal (warning .pdf) and a reply to that comment and rebuttal appeared in my reader.  So, I’m amazed this comment and reply system happened so quickly.  The actual publication dates are slightly different than the dates the articles appeared in my reader (September 23rd for the article and Sept. 28th for the comment), but are we supposed to seriously believe the journal reviewed the original comment, solicited a reply from the authors, and then reviewed that in 5 days?  
If you actually read the comment you might have a hard time understanding why it was published at all.  I’m not sure the comment makes any sense.  The author of the comment essentially makes two points:  1) the authors of the paper refer to an exposure as being “several orders of magnitude” lower than a reference, when in fact the exposure is “140 thousand fold lower” than the dose and 2) the authors cite a WHO report in saying that some studies have reported adverse responses to extremely low doses of Bisphenol A, but in fact the WHO report doesn’t include those studies as part of its hazard characterization.  
Really?  Neither of these criticisms makes any sense!  Point number 1 is really just an issue of semantics:  140 thousand fold lower is several orders of magnitude lower.  Would the commenter be content with “many” instead of “several”?  The exposure is a lot lower, and marginally different methods of calculating the exposure simply show the same thing.
The second criticism completely misses the point.  Just because the WHO report doesn’t use those studies in its hazard assessment doesn’t mean those studies don’t exist (and apparently they are referenced in the WHO report).  Maybe it would have been better to cite those papers individually:  Is this really worth the publication space to point out?
Even if these were legitimate concerns (and I can’t understand how they are), they are completely irrelevant to the point of the paper (these are merely details discussed in setting up the context of the findings).  
The thing is, this comment is not about science and it isn’t even directed at the authors.  This comment is clearly for the benefit of the “various activist groups” referenced in the last line of the comment.  Why is this comment published again?  I get that there are groups out there who are going to use this article to re-enforce their belief about how the world works and the dangers of Bisphenol A, but those people aren’t necessarily interested in reality anyway, and they probably aren’t reading the minutiae of a technical journal like ES&T.  
Are these guys going to count this on their CV?  Can I just add a few publications to my CV by writing weak criticisms of published papers?  
Or should I just keep this stuff on my blog that nobody reads?

Liao C, & Kannan K (2011). Widespread Occurrence of Bisphenol A in Paper and Paper Products: Implications for Human Exposure. Environmental science & technology PMID: 21939283

August 9th notes

• This story about "DNA" being found on rocks from space is really hard to wrap my head around.  The headlines generally seem to be wrong:  They didn't find DNA on a space rock.  If they had, that would have been really amazing.  What they found was molecules that go into building DNA.  Is that even surprising?  Even the official release from NASA is pretty unclear as to why this is so amazing.  Maybe I just don't get it.
• I've also been following this story about the weird orange goo in Alaska.  What they've found now is that it is eggs (duh?), but they really don't know what kind of eggs.  Surely someone is doing a DNA test right?  The weird thing is the eggs were found in buckets and random places on shore as well as the ocean itself.  I could absolutely see that some species that normally doesn't produce a lot of eggs randomly did and they washed ashore.  I don't understand how they would have gotten into the areas that aren't near shore.  Some kind of storm event?
• My interest in analyzing things extends beyond science, believe it or not.  I'm always fascinated by the comments left on internet articles.  The comments from this one, an article about the impressions of two people seeing the last Harry Potter movie without having ever seen anything about the series previously, are particularly hilarious.
• Humans simply overwhelmed Neanderthals with raw numbers.  Poor near-humans.

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.