The dwarf of Nosy Hara

While constructing a timetable of sorts on how to manage selection experiments and ensuing measures of fecundity and metabolic rate, I realised that the updates for PLoS ONEs releases from yesterday had not been checked in my emails' inbox. While scanning through the journicle titles, the key words "dwarf", "chameleon" and "Madagascar" captured my interest. It's always a pleasure to read about the new and interesting fauna being discovered in Madagascar, and even moreso when the alternative is to frown and fret over mistakes in ones' timetabling of experiments.

The newly discovered leaf chameleon has been declared as "an extreme example of island dwarfism".  For the record, island dwarfism is common; the limited space on islands typically place pressures on its' inhabitants to reproduce faster and deal with limitations in resources in order to survive as a species. The new miniature leaf chameleon was found on a very small islet called Nosy Hara in the north of Madagascar. The animal, endowed with the name Brookesia micra, has a total length in both sexes that is less than 30 mm, making it the tiniest amniote vertebrate in the world. Thankyou, says the Guiness Book of Records.

The tiniest amniote vertebrate in the world is incidentally the cutest as well.

It also turned out that once I had finished my timetabling of my experiment plans, I had also mixed up my fertility and metabolic rate experiments with the wrong generations. I had a very busy afternoon and am at least glad for the chameleons that they never have to endure the self-induced torture of a PhD.

Citation: Glaw F, Köhler J, Townsend TM, Vences M. (2012). Rivaling the world's smallest reptiles: discovery of miniaturized and microendemic new species of leaf chameleons (Brookesia) from northern Madagascar. PLoS ONE 7(2). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031314.

Image: Glaw F, et al. (2012). PLoS ONE. (A) Adult Brookesia micra, (B) and (C) are juvenile B. micra, and (D) is typical habitat on Nosy Hara, Madagascar.

Loose ends are tied!

Loose ends always need tying-up. Not that I have any serious loose ends, unless you call a $35, 000 HECS debt a loose end, but since the annual biosafety test for our school has become available, I've been meaning to complete the online assessment. And register for the Evolution conference that is being held in July. Not to mention all the administration forms I have yet to complete, and replying to multiple people about availabilities for tutoring this semester.... ok, so I have had a lot of small things building up over the last 4 months that needed to be done. But today I did it all, and I feel very relieved and happy. Seriously, if you're having a bad or unproductive day, tie-up those loose ends and you will have achieved something for the day and feel a lot better for it.

I also met up with another person who works with Drosophila fruit flies, to see what feeding protocols are used and how to distinguish between different larval stages. Conveniently, larval development is divided into four logical stages: L1, L2, L3, and L4. That much was easy to understand. I was surprised to learn just how fast generation time was in these guys; in 10 days an egg will become a sexually mature adult fly, given it was reared at 25 degrees C. To encourage females to lay their eggs, simply dye an apple juice-based medium blue, introduce to the female fly, then lo and behold, little white eggs will appear. Apparently, this only works for Drosophila melanogaster, not for other species like D. simulans.

Imagine little white eggs on a blue (in this case purple) medium. At least, I hope the eggs are actually white, because if they are clear I'm in trouble!

Now that I am officially registered for it, I am really excited about the Evolution conference to be held this year! It is going to be in Ottawa, Canada, and runs from 6-10th of July. My supervisor and I haven't really been to an international evolution conference before, so we aren't sure what to expect, and whether my research thus far is even worthy of presentation, seeing as we aren't even sure if it suits the draw crowd for the talk sessions. To spare the on-lookers the pain of being told what they already know, we agreed that I will just present a poster for this conference, and focus on learning and getting ideas for my own research. What am I most excited about for this conference? Definitely the networking!

Image: http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=drosophila+melanogaster#/d148ear

Timing is everything, or, Just ask

Today is Friday, the 10th of February, 2012 AD, Epoch: Holocene. I have spent the last few days planning what methodology to employ in my selection experiments, and how best to manage time. Timing is everything. In the past I would have not bothered trying to timetable specifics for lab experiments, I would have just winged it and see how I fit everything in given 24 hrs in a day. That was part of the adventure in research, cramming an immense amount of work into the space of just 2 days due to poor planning. Ultimately, this led to disaster as organisms were forced to adapt to different conditions within stringent timeframes, giving me dicey data at best. Nature will always refuse to cooperate with my planning, so I need to change the way I think and cooperate with nature. Thankfully, that happened in Honours research, and now I am in my PhD with just a little more wisdom in my belt.

Drosophila kicking back and enjoying a cold one: nature's suggestion for Friday afternoon activities

I have never worked with Drosophila, so when I read papers about the types of correlates used to assess fitness in different lines of selection, I imagine that the work and time involved in performing these assessments is relatively easy and short. I mean, the methods section is easy and short to read, and Drosophila are small animals, so the process is likely to be easy, right? But, knowing my usual 'flawless' train of logic, I thought that this assumption is potentially detrimental to my research and it was time to talk to people who actually do this kind of stuff, to get a real answer. Lucky I did. Apparently, the logistics associated with what I was planning to do were insane - too much work for one person with time constraints. Even better: the people in this lab were very helpful and gave me some great suggestions for time-managing my experiments. I now have contacts who are also happy to train me in Drosophila husbandry and managing lines of selection. By simply asking people with experience, I have saved myself a lot of time and heartache. Drosophila, you guys are crazy!

Image: http://browse.deviantart.com/?q=drosophila&order=9&offset=24#/d2ynv1p

Glorious technology

Breakfast: a crumbed sausage and coke. I know that deep-fried food is probably not the best way to start the day but I could not help the food-urge. I had to indulge. On other news, in my quest to understand selection and what words like "isofemale" mean, I wondered at the simple yet effective piece of equipment I frequently read about that can be used to separate out fruit flies that have different tolerances to heat or the cold: the Weber column. Put simply, flies are dumped into the top of a tube, and water that is either heated or cooled to a desired temperature is pumped into a jacket surrounding the tube to control the air temperature experienced by the flies. As flies are KO'd by extremes in temperature, they fall out the bottom, meaning the last flies to fall out the bottom are the most tolerant to the temperature. Brilliant. If only all the equipment I have used in the past were that simple. 

Weber's gift to science: a column of awesomeness. Image based on that of Huey et al. (1992)

Apart from admiring simple technology, I found most of the afternoon drift along as I mined Google Scholar for journal articles (which I lovingly refer to as "journicles"). I am looking for what are worthy correlates for fruit flies that are selected for cold tolerance. So far, it seems the classic life-history angles of fecundity, development time, egg viability, and ageing, are the reasonable options. When it comes to physiological correlates, there is chill-coma recovery time and tolerances to heat (which would also involve using Weber's column!), but some measure of "willingness" to be active is, according to a paper by Latimer et al. (2011), probably worth my time as well. Because most people could not be bothered sitting around watching fruit flies walk around, there's some sexy "laser" technology on the block that can determine activity of fruit flies, referred to as DAMs (Drosophila Activity Monitors). I know that there is one of these DAMs in the biology school, so it would be cool to examine differences in activity in selected lines of fruit flies versus control lines. If I am able to play with these bits of equipment, then at this point in time lab work is going to be fun!

References:

Huey RB, Crill WD, Kingsolver JG, and Weber KE. (1992). A method for rapid measurement of heat or cold resistance of small insects. Functional Ecology 6:489-494.

Latimer CAL, Wilson RS, Chenoweth SF. (2011). Quantitative genetic variation for thermal performance curves within and among natural populations of Drosophila serrata. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 24:965-975.

A whole new direction

I've spent the last two years of my PhD floundering. It seems that every time I have found a new direction to take my research, some ethics or collection permit will stone-wall progress and I end up doing some statistics or correlative analysis in order to be remotely productive. Originally, I intended on looking into how pH affects fish metabolic rate, but collection permits fell through. So, then I decided to develop some correlative models for reptile and amphibian metabolic rate, which worked out well, only that I spent the whole time learning phylogenetics and advanced statistics and how to use the lovely R program without producing publishable results. The next plan was to do some lab-based work (which I wanted to do in the first place!) with reptiles and energetics. Ethics took their time to inform me I can essentially keep reptiles, but I'm not allowed to really do anything with the animals. In the end, I decided I needed to do some real lab-based science. I had worked so hard to stay away from things that don't have spines, but I swallowed my pride and decided the best model organism for me now to do some good hard-hittin' science is the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. I am going to look at how selection for a specific physiological trait may involve a metabolic cost - the first study of its kind! Things are starting to look up!

1 Fish, 2 Fish, 3 Fish, No Fish

If you're a fan of seafood like me, I'm sure that you are aware by now that there seems to be a push in Australia to buy wild-caught marine produce, rather than what is farmed or less popular, or "less palatable". The most obvious aspect of purchasing wild-caught fish is the price; farmed and more sustainable produce are by far the cheapest sources of seafood, however, people are actually preferring the more expensive, less sustainable options. This might have something to do with providers flying a banner of "FRESH!" over all the overfished keystone species, a marketing scheme to encourage sales of more expensive seafood that I'll admit I am often tempted by. I mean, sure, if the other stuff is NOT fresh I will pay more for the fresh product out of fear of food poisoning.

Bluefin tuna: "FRESH!"

Why is farmed seafood considered less fresh? Of course, it is against food handling and safety regulations for suppliers of seafood to provide any potentially old or poorly fish for human consumption. Quite often I hear of the public misconception of farmers raising stressed animals, over-using antibiotics, and rearing animals in cramped conditions in fouled water. Having studied aquaculture and biotechnology in Australia, this is definitely not the case. Farmers are very concerned for the well-being of their livestock, and will go to great financial lengths to fund researchers to find the best ways to keep fish calm and happy even during the harvesting process. The belief that farmed produce is less fresh is a a fallacy; there is no difference between flesh quality of wild-caught and farmed seafood, if any, it is the wild-caught seafood that is of lesser quality. And this leads to the next question, why is it that farmed produce is always cheaper? The real reasons farmed seafood in Australia is so cheap is because it is struggling to compete with public misconceptions and the prices set by fisheries that catch their product from the wild.

There are also a myriad other reasons why wild-caught stock are relatively expensive. Feel free to post any questions below, but essentially I want to make the point that there is no reason why people shouldn't buy farmed seafood unless they are concerned about water pollution or the sustainability of fishmeal used to feed aquatic livestock. There are, of course, seafood that is not farmed and can only be wild-caught. In this instance, I recommend that before you buy seafood from anywhere it is worth asking a a few questions about it. You could ask when buying seafood "Is this species overfished?" to assess how vulnerable the desired product is in the wild, "Where was this animal caught?" as local produce does not always mean that it is not vulnerable, and "Is it a deep sea or a long-lived species?" to see if it may be a species that is potentially vulnerable to fishing (long-lived and/or deep sea species tend to reproduce slowly, so overfishing of sexually mature adults could lead to major drops in population size).

Orange roughy is a deep sea, long lived fish. They don't become sexually mature until they are between 30-50 yrs old!

There is also a free iPod app called Australia's Sustainable Seafood Guide compiled by the Australian Marine Conservation Society. For more information on what is sustainable, a good place to first check out is GoodFishBadFish.

Images:
Bluefin tuna image accessed 18.10.2011, URL: http://thewe.cc/thewei/_/images10/valued_life/bluefin-tuna_greenpeace.jpe
Orange roughy image accessed 19.10.2011, URL: http://australianmuseum.net.au/Uploads/Images/3298/255%20Hoplost%20atlanticus%20S07_.jpg

Dance your PhD!

When asked about what my PhD is about, I'm not really sure where to begin. Should I start providing background information about the field so that when I start garbling jargon they'll understand? No, that takes too long and I honestly couldn't be bothered. Lately, when non-scientists ask I just say I look at metabolism in lizards and frogs. It's not the whole story but it is a whole lot more easier to say than "oh, just the evolution of metabolic rate in lepidosaurs and amphibians", to which I am always asked, "what are metabolic rates?"

Recently, I came across a competition that calls for scientists doing their PhDs to turn their thesis into an interpretive dance. First thoughts? How much easier will it be to refer people to this dance than bothering to explain in words! As such, I have entered the competition with my interpretive dance of what I think is my PhD...