(photo news on standaard.be)

I was searching WoK for some reference articles on ‘desert pavement’ and found a paper in Human and Ecological Risk Assessment (2008, 14:919-946)¹ with a methods section that was quite different from the ones I am used to:

‘The focus was a testing program at Cibola Range that involved an Apache Longbow helicopter firing Hellfire missiles at moving targets, that is, M60-A1 tanks’.

Helicopter, missiles and tank in one sentence. Impressive.

¹ DOI assigned but not functional.

The research highlight ‘Biomes bounce back’ in Nature (459:755) about an article published in PLoS ONE (4, e5653) reports that “ecosystems damaged by human activities […] may be quicker to recover than was thought”:

“Holly Jones and Oswald Schmitz at Yale University found that even severely damaged ecosystems could recover within decades” and “the longest average recovery time — found to be taken by forest ecosystems — was no more than 56 years.”

It would have been more correct to write “the longest average recovery time observed in their dataset of 240 scientific studies”, because many ecosystems take much, much longer to recover after disturbance. There is absolutely no way for a primary (tropical) forest to recover in 56 years after being logged. The same is most likely the case for shallow water coral reefs, after being bleached, shelled or lifted after an earthquake. If the disturbance caused local, regional or global extinctions, recovery times may even approach infinity, as the original ecosystem will never recover.

This reminds me of the earlier buzz stories of ‘rainforests claiming back deforested land at amazing speeds’, a report initially sent out by the Smithsonian and widely covered by the media with much too positive perspectives¹. True, trees will recolonize land once it is abandoned, and yes, secondary forest may develop within a few decades, but that does not provide evidence for the recovery of the original ecosystem.

¹ See also the NY Times

The Endangered Wildlife Trust and the South African National Parks organize photographic censuses of Wild dogs and Cheetahs in the Kruger National Park. It is a nice example of how participation of the general public helps to gather scientific data on population sizes and home ranges of endangered species, and thus assists in their conservation.
While this year large cats stayed a bit further away from my lens as compared to my previous trip, lion, leopard and cheetah all were kind enough to allow us to spot them. Two cheetahs even showed their left and right flanks, allowing me to capture images of their distinctive spotted coat patterns. As photographic evidence of cheetah is generally poor throughout the park, I was particularly happy to be able to assist EWT and SANParks in the conservation of this wonderful animal.

Spot pattern record of cheetahs in Kruger National Park

One of the articles I particularly liked when catching up on three weeks worth of papers (have been in the bush for a while), is the recent letter on bird song dialects (Nature 459:564). In the introduction, the authors cite other work that showed that “geographically separated [bird] groups have local song dialects”. We have a very particular example of this in Belgium, that small country in Europe divided into a Flemish speaking northern region and a French speaking southern region. Near Leuven, the ‘language border’ crosses Meerdaalwoud forest. Interestingly, finches in the Flemish part of the forest sing the proper “suskewiet” song, while Walloon finches in the southern part of the forest have a much shorter, atypical song. Bird groups indeed have local song dialects, and the groups do not have to be separated physically.

Singing Chaffinch (Image source: Herzkasper on Flickr)

¡nfluenz-ay caramba!

“Open Access publishing is widely believed to increase the visibility, dissemination and, eventually, the citation and impact of research findings.” With this statement, I summarize the acclaimed benefits of OA publishing in a recent letter to the Editor of Nature (Nature 458, 967; DOI).

Philip M. Davis, of the Department of Communication, Cornell University, Ithaca, reacts:

“Last year, we reported in the first randomized controlled trial of Open Access publishing¹ that OA may increase article downloads, but doesn’t appear to increase citations. The study, done when articles were 9-12 months old has been replicated in many other science journals, and the results still hold now that all articles are 2 years old.”

Davis and colleagues illustrate that not all acclaimed benefits to OA publishing are true. OA may increase access (downloads and number of unique visitors), but not necessarily citation.

While there are many possible reasons for this, I want to highlight one that may be related to the wide availability of online scientific databases and even online reference managers:

You don’t necessarily need full text access to cite subscription papers.

It is perfectly possible to cite directly from the abstract without accessing the original publication. Abstracts are often available for free, and can be seen as the open access part of subscription articles. If citing directly from the web or databases is something that is occurring widely, this may be a particular reason why OA articles are not cited more than subscription articles.

¹ BMJ 2008;337:a568 (DOI)

When I am reviewing manuscripts, I usually have to look up certain plant species I have never seen or specific terminology that is not part of my expertise.

Today I was looking for possible reasons why some goats kneel down on their front knees for browsing and grazing, something I have observed quite regularly during the dry seasons I spent in Tigray and Afar in Ethiopia (and more recently, I have seen warthogs do pretty much the same in South Africa). For goats, this behavior seems to be associated with CAE, Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis, a viral neurological disease in the spinal cord and brain of young kids and a joint infection of older goats resulting in arthritis.

From the same source, I also learned what’s left and right on a goat – pretty obvious I would say, but the illustration is priceless anyway.

Man and goat, earlier today, synchronizing their lefts and rights

The research highlight ‘The thief within’ (Nature 458:810) reports the effect of a drug on a group of kleptomaniacs who ordinarily steal at least once a week: ‘Within 8 weeks, the 11 volunteers receiving the drug reported a significant reduction in their compulsion to steal compared with the placebo group.’

Researchers later recovered two laptops, five wallets and a ham sandwich from the control group.

Today is day 100 of the year, which is the unofficial Egg-laying Day for Great tits (Parus major). It marks the start of the breeding season, at least for the early birds, as the mean lay date of P. major is 24 April (day 114) (DOI).

We’ve had two tits patrolling and inspecting the nest box on our front wall, a three-in-one unit originally designed for sparrows, but with all the tit action we may soon be calling it the Parus Hilton.

Parus major, with caterpillar or grub, both favorite prey items during the nestling period