Month: January 2012

Why I love 140 characters

/ Chris Buddle / Leave a comment

As the Editor-in-chief of The Canadian Entomologist (TCE), I have recently joined the twitter-verse. This is an interesting experiment and I’m only a couple of weeks into it, but it is proving fascinating enough that I wanted to write this blog post about the experience.

The Canadian Entomologist on Twitter

I have long had mixed feeling about the role of Twitter in science. There are many arguments both ways - Twitter can be a way to help promote good science, bring neat ideas to a larger audience, and initiate productive and exciting collaboration. It can, however, take the most limiting resource away: time. The Twitter-verse is also full of unusual, non-reviewed, speculative, non-scientific opinions, and often the same stories just gets repeated dozens of times. All of this is the very stuff that concerns me. In my professional world of publications, peer-review, and critical scientific analysis, is there a place for Twitter….how can 140 characters do any of this justice? (I am, obviously, a fan of blogs - these can be a great forum for thoughts, ideas and opinions in a longer-format)

Well, after some lively exchanges with graduate students, friends, colleagues, and the marketing team at Cambridge University Press (TCE’s publisher), I have started tweeting for TCE. Initially I was worried that coming up with tweets would be a big challenge but as I came up with lists of ideas for future tweets, I realize that there is an unbelievable amount of rich and fascinating content associated with the Journal. For example, exciting papers that are getting published, interesting stories about entomology and entomologists in Canada, links to events and opportunities within the Entomological Society of Canada, and information about past papers within the journal. And, perhaps most importantly, I think twitter can be a way to promote the discipline to a different audience.

Pique your interest? You can follow @CanEntomologist

The Lab Logo

/ Chris Buddle / 1 Comment

I have decided to start a feature called ‘where are they now?’ - this will be about past students, and what they are up to these days. A few years ago we had a keen, enthusiastic, and talented undergraduate student in our laboratory - Brigette Zacharczenko. Many of you many know her by her popular on-line persona “weird bug lady” - the blogger and seller of amazing plush creatures. She is AKA “the caterpillar wrangler” I have one of her creations next to me in my office (yes, I am very lucky):

Pseudoscorpion by Weird Bug Lady

Brigette is now doing graduate school at the University of Connecticut in David Wagner’s laboratory. Although we were sad to see her go, she left us a wonderful gift - our very own laboratory Logo. You can go to Cafe Press at this link: http://www.cafepress.com/ecologylab and buy your very own t-shirt, mug, mouse pad, etc with our logo in place. Really, we all MUST own a piece of Arthropod Ecology branding. Perhaps a tattoo next? Any takers?

McGill's Arthropod Ecology Laboratory Logo

The “Comps”

/ Chris Buddle / 1 Comment

The “comps” or “qualifiers” are a stressful experience for PhD students. Here is PhD student Dorothy Maguire behind a stack of reading (yikes!):

Dorothy behind some required reading

The comprehensive examination is a process by which PhD candidates defend their research proposal in front of a committee of Professors. In our Department, this process typically occurs within the first year and a half of a student entering the PhD program. The format is as follows: the student presents their proposal to the committee, and this is followed by a couple of rounds of questions. The first line of questioning typically focuses on the candidate’s research proposal, and a second round is typically broader in perspective. Sometimes this can be very broad - from everything from the philosophy of science, to underlying theoretical foundations of a discipline. Although I try to stress that these exams should be treated as “fun” discussions about science, they remain an intense process for PhD students, and often there is a pretty big sigh of relief when they are over! I still remember vividly my own comprehensive examination - and that one question that I flubbed still haunts me! (maybe I’ll share my experience in a future blog post)

Are the exams some odd relict of academic institutions and serves no purpose anymore? Is it an archaic rite of passage that merely reminds PhD candidates that they are still below Professors in the academic hierarchy? What are the benefits of these exams?

Well - I actually believe the comprehensive examination is an important step in the academic process. It is very important that PhD students are on a road to success, and the comps helps to ensure this - their examination committee is typically made of experts in their discipline, so they are in the best possible position to judge the quality, scope, novelty and depth of the PhD student’s proposed research. The exam also helps to ensure there is consistency (e.g., year-to-year, Department-to-Department, Faculty-to-Faculty) in what we call a “PhD” degree. Some would argue the process can be too variable, but by at least having the exam, with its academic memory, there is a chance of having standards.

I also think the comps help students to think about their work critically, and in the context of their larger field of research. This exam is often one of the first times we really force students to do this, and these future academics must do this over and over again in their future (e.g., writing papers, grant proposal). Finally, it is very important that students are able to effectively defend their work. This process, which also involves a lot of critical self-appraisal, helps to refine a research project and pave the road to success.

PhD student Dorothy Maguire is going to have her comprehensive examinations later this winter. This means that she is currently editing her proposal, reading a lot of primary literature related to her research area, and I have encouraged her to also spend a little bit of time reading secondary literature - hence the stack of books.

The Arctic Circle

/ Chris Buddle

On Tues, 10 January, PhD student Crystal Ernst delivered a talk entitled, “Arctic Arthropod Ecology and the Northern Biodiversity Program”, at the annual general meeting of the Arctic Circle, a group of Arctic researchers and aficionados that meets monthly in Ottawa, Ontario.

The talk provided some background information on the importance of arthropods to biodiversity and in ecological research, and some examples of recent changes in the biodiversity of arthropods in northern Canada were explored. There was a discussion of the history of arthropod collection efforts in the Arctic, including the Northern Insect Survey of the mid-1900s. The presentation finished with an overview of the research being undertaken by the Northern Biodiversity Program and some interesting data coming out of an 8-week study of the beetle fauna in Kugluktuk, Nunavut (part of Crystal’s PhD research).

The 45-minute presentation was very well received by an enthusiastic audience of 50+; many thoughtful questions were asked at the end (and again after the meeting had been formally concluded!). Crystal was grateful for the opportunity to work on her lecturing skills with such a receptive group and has been invited to return with an update at a future meeting!

Spiders after snow melt

/ Chris Buddle / 2 Comments

Speaking of the Journal of Arachnology - a big congratulation to Raphael Royaute for getting his first paper accepted in JoA (the acceptance notice came this morning). As mentioned in a previous post, the hard work in manuscript preparation had paid off. This work was a product of Raphael’s ‘internship’ in the lab quite a few years ago. Raphael spent about six months with us prior to beginning graduate school, and during this time, we devised a little project with a goal of understanding what happens to spiders in agroecosystems immediately after snowmelt. Working at the Macdonald Campus Farm (a working farm, located just a couple of km from our campus) Raphael and I dug in traps in the very early spring - here are a couple of photos of the event:

Raphael (left) and Chris (right), working hard.

Raphael studied the effect of distance (i.e., to a forest border) as well as effects of agronomic disturbance (i.e., tilling, planting) on spider assemblages. He also looked at directional movement of spiders by having ‘drift fences’ around pitfall traps - to see whether spiders are moving from the border into the corn fields, or vice versa. Raphael collected over 70 species of spiders with this project, and he found a significant effect of “border”, and has strong evidence that spiders are very active in cornfields immediately after snow-melt. This is something that arachnologists often anecdotally observe, but Raphael’s research provides data to back up the observations. This work, titled “Colonization dynamics of agroecosystem spider assemblages after snow-melt in Quebec (Canada)” is now accepted in Journal of Arachnology and will likely appear in print sometime in 2012.

Subterranean Spiders

/ Chris Buddle

A neat paper has just appeared in the Journal of Arachnology (2011, Vol 39: 393-398), titled “Vertical distribution of spiders in soil” by Laska et al. (you can visit the Journal by clicking here). The authors studied spiders in soil by using a modified subterranean trap that collected animals up to depths of 95 cm. They studied in six different sites in the Czech Republic, and in all but one of the sites, they collected spiders at depths greater than 90 cm. Although I was not surprised that Linyphiids were among the deepest-dwellers, they also found at Nesticidae and Dysderidae inhabiting the deep. Although some of the sample sizes were small, their habitat coverage was broad, and the evidence of soil-dwelling spiders is strong - and they also suggest that in some habitats, the spiders likely had to arrive there by means other than vertical movement - this means there is a vast and fascinating “subterranean environment created by a system of voids”. This is pretty interesting and has caused me to rethink my own long-held assumption that spiders seldom move into the soil, and instead largely occupy the organic matter above soil. I may just have to tackle this kind of project in my local forests and see if similar results are found this side of the big pond!

Happy New Year

/ Chris Buddle / Leave a comment

After a relaxing break, the start of a new academic term is about to begin. January, like September, represents a fresh start. It’s time to clean off the desk, and archive the old e-mails. Just today I dumped several thousand e-mails from my in-box into an archive folder - if nothing else, this gives the impression of a clean slate!

In October, I became the Editor-in-Chief for The Canadian Entomologist, and in this role, I noticed some interesting human behaviour over the past couple of weeks. A LOT of new manuscripts were submitted at the very end of 2011 - confirming that many researchers see the end of the calendar year as an opportunity to get things done before a fresh start in the New Year.

I spent much of the day today getting my course outlines organized. The winter term is a busy teaching term - I will be teaching two undergraduate courses (Population and Community Ecology, Environmental Research Design) as well as my graduate class in Forest Entomology. I have always tried to include a class project as part of my graduate class, and in the past we have had some luck in getting these projects published. Much depends on the project idea, and this depends on the skills and expertise of the students in the course. I currently don’t have any great ideas for a project…but some brainstorming during the first meeting of the term will help. I’ll keep you posted.

So, just around the corner will be a busy, but productive and enjoyable term.

Happy New Year.