In defence of gulls, skuas, and giant petrels

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conservation, giant petrels, gulls, skuas

I’m a lariphile. I love gulls, skuas, and their ilk. I think they’re gorgeous, intelligent, highly adaptable, and I will always have a soft spot for them in my heart. It will not likely come as a surprise to know that this is a minority view.

Gulls, skuas, giant petrels and other predatory seabirds (i.e., those that eat other birds) are often maligned, both in terms of management and in culture. They’re called flying rats, flying garburators, disgusting, and lacking in any redeeming qualities. So what? They can’t understand us, so presumably are immune to humanity’s slanders and insults. We, however, are not.

A Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) on Gough Island

Gulls, skuas, and giant petrels are seen as horrendous things that eat cute fluffy things which we see as being “better” (in an anthropomorphic sense) than these cruel predators. Newsflash: all birds are predators. None of them can photosynthesize, so they gotta eat. Fish, krill, squid, berries, dead things… you name it. Why then do we cast aspersions upon these species, but not the puffin when it eats herring, or the albatross when it snares a flying fish? Because flying fish and herring are cute and fuzzy and easily portrayed as defenceless individuals by nature documentaries.

Take the BBC’s Planet Earth 2 series, wherein skuas are shown haranguing Chinstrap Penguins on Zavadovski Island. A friend, mostly tongue-in-cheek, asked if the skuas had any redeeming qualities. Why should their foraging mode impact our evaluation of their “worth”?

Lest we believe this is an issue for far-flung islands of the Southern Ocean, consider the plight of gulls in North America and Europe (particularly the UK). They’re seen as pests, a nuisance, and in many areas were historically subjected to extensive “control” (i.e., culling). The result? European Herring Gull is now listed as Red in the UK’s Birds of Conservation Concern. I helped co-edit a special issue of the journal Waterbirds focusing on gulls, and in paper after paper we see the same thing – precipitous declines in both American Herring Gull and Great Black-backed Gull over the last 30 years.

Four Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus) on Gull Island, Newfoundland

On Gull Island, Witless Bay, Newfoundland, for example, there were <30 pairs of Great Black-backed Gulls when I was there in 2011-12 (compared to 115 in 2000-01). In the last 15 years, the islands in Witless Bay have lost >50% of their breeding gulls (read our paper here).

So why aren’t we doing anything about it? Gull control still takes place (though now on a smaller scale than in the 80s and 90s), but if there was “control” of a rapidly-declining albatross, the conservation world would be up in arms. Because gulls are also seemingly ubiquitous in urban environments, they’re also seen as being common (so much so that multiple species are lumped into the highly inaccurate term “seagull”).

After a kerfuffle about a debate on gulls in Aberdeen that took place in the UK House of Commons, I suggested that the following question be a highly relevant one (for conservation and policy) for wildlife management/conservation students:

When it comes to gulls in the UK, it’s a question of how does one manage a threatened species that could easily get multiple ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders)?

And this is highly relevant today, right now, because what we’re doing at the moment clearly isn’t working for the conservation of these species, or the public’s perception of them.

A Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus) on Gough Island

Just another example of how species’ ecology and behaviour influences our perception of their conservation need.

In praise of researching (and publishing) “local” conservation science

Tags

conservation, local, publishing

If you’ve published a scientific paper in a journal, you’ll know that part of the challenge is making it relevant to a broad audience. Why should a conservationist in Outer Mongolia, Zambia, Murmansk, or Baton Rouge care about your study? Chances are they study )or are concerned with/interested in) different species in different places. The pressure, therefore is to wrap much of our conservation science in global policy and priority frameworks: the Aichi Targets, multilateral environmental agreements, globally threatened species, or highly imperilled habitats. Which is good and fine and has resulted in lots of policy relevant science and conservation action.

But conservation also operates on a much smaller, more local scale, and with individuals on the ground in communities who can influence local, regional, and national policies and conservation actions. And this requires the science underpinning these actions to be, at least in part, local in nature. Sure, we all know that global warming is driving our planet further down the 6th Great Extinction, but most people will only take action when they see this manifest in their own backyards. Why have the doves returned a month early? Where did all the swifts go? Weren’t there fish in this lake?

And this is where “local” conservation science comes in. And it’s some of the most rewarding science with which I’ve been involved, even though it can be some of the most difficult science to publish. Providing the evidence base for local problems gives scientists and conservationists a better bargaining chip when holding governments to account, to speaking with the public and with media. A local story is usually more relatable than one from a seemingly abstract land far away.

Local conservation needn’t be novel, ground-breaking, cutting-edge, or revolutionary. It’s purpose is rather different, though from an implementation perspective just as important (if not more so). But this very nature makes it a more difficult problem for academic researchers to tackle as it’s unlikely to be of global significance, gain copious citations, or end up in a journal with an impact factor >4. It therefore often falls to scientists in government agencies, independent researchers, and non-governmental organizations to contribute to this science.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a couple of these kinds of studies, and have a few more in the pipeline. We showed migratory patterns and geographic distribution of a Flesh-footed Shearwaters in the northeast Pacific Ocean (Bond & Lavers 2015), and described the current status & threats facing Streaked Shearwaters in the Korean peninsula (Hart et al. 2015). In these papers, we learned a heck of a lot about the species involved, and hope that these will become go-to papers when someone compiles details into whole-species assessments of status, distribution, and threats.

Overall, the key to success with local conservation science is the involvement of local people. The paper on shearwaters in Korea was only possible because of people in Korea. The same is true of the other (as yet unpublished) bits of work I’m involved with. These local connections make the work more likely to be well received (if received at all) by the people who matter (those who will enact policy or implement conservation interventions on the ground). The days of colonial science, where outsiders (often from the UK, US, or other countries with an advanced state of scientific inquiry) come in, do something, leave, and then issue what amount to scientific edicts (which are often promptly ignored) are over (or at least should be).

But, for me, the bottom line is that I find this kind of science fun. It’s adding a piece to a puzzle, and I find it very rewarding, especially when it’s highly driven by local collaborators (I usually just provide some stats, and editing… they do the real work of data collecting, and then working with the community to influence change). And at the end of the day, I like to think that it has some benefit for the species and sites we’re trying to look after.

On finding an error in my own published paper

Tags

correction, publishing, scoters

Dan Bolnick (on Eco-Evo-Evo-Eco) and Meg Duffy on Dynamic Ecology have both posted stories of how they were confronted with, and subsequently addressed, the need to retract or correct their published papers. This fall into the “scientists are humans; humans make mistakes; therefore scientists make mistakes” logical tenet, and they both addressed it wonderfully. Sadly, that’s not always the case.

So to further demonstrate that scientists, as all humans, make mistakes, here is my tale of finding a fairly significant error in my first ever paper.

In my undergrad, I spent a spring at the Point Lepreau Bird Observatory in southern New Brunswick. Yes, past the nuclear exclusion zone and next to a 19th-century lighthouse was a little hut with electricity, a portable heater, radio, and view of the majestic Bay of Fundy. As a one of the more southerly points in the area, it was also a hotspot for migratory birds, mostly seaducks, on their way north to breed. My job: figuring out how many scoters (3 species of mostly-dark seaducks: the Black, Surf, and White-winged Scoters) passed the site in April and early May. I was also generously allowed to analyse the previous 8 years’ data (and have since heard through the grapevine that a student may be updating this work soon!).

The Point Lepreau Bird Observatory in 2004.

I was, at the time, terrible at data analysis and statistics. I had more pivot tables than I knew what to do with, graphs were made in Excel, and I think I used JMP for the various ANOVAs.

But I, and my supervisors, were able to churn out some basic stats on the timing of migration, the peaks, and come up with a crude estimate of how many birds passed the point each year. I would almost certainly analyse the data completely differently today (and I hope the aforementioned student does!). After some fairly minor revisions, it was published in 2007 in Waterbirds, and I was elated – my first publication!

One of the challenges was that the counts were done in 15-minute stints (15 on, 15 off), so in essence I had to double all the counts with the assumption that the number and composition of birds was identical in the counted and uncounted periods.

Except I forgot to do that.

Is that one Black Scoter?

Or two?

I got an email from a member of one of the naturalist club’s members (the observatory was run by the Saint John Naturalists Club at the time) in 2009 pointing out that he thought my numbers were too low. I dug into the terribly formatted awkward files, and realised what we had done (or rather, not done).

I was devastated.

I immediately wrote my supervisors, contrite, and apologetic. We quickly prepared a correction (which essentially doubled the population, so not that insignificant), and emailed the editor who agreed a correction was in order, which we subsequently published.

Unlike Dan or Meg’s stories, this wasn’t a high profile paper, but it was my first one, and one of the very few for which I have a printed issue of the journal on my shelf. But everyone understood it was an honest mistake, and we did what we could to fix it.

I’ve opined before about why there are so few retractions or corrections in conservation biology/ecology, and I don’t see this changing, or being any different. But in the meantime, if anyone finds an error in any of my other published papers (I’m sure there are some floating around), I will happily try to set the scientific record straight.

Why the #LGBTSTEMinar succeeded & was needed

Tags

conferences, LGBTQ

I’ve just returned from a conference, but it was unlike any other conference I’ve attended. The attendees weren’t drawn together because we share similar research interests, or work in similar places, or are from similar institutions. We had physical chemists, medical physicists, medical geneticists, engineers, mathematicians, and conservation biologists from academia, industry, and NGOs. What drew us together was that we were all (or >90% of us were) LGBT* scientists attending the LGBT STEMinar

I’ve written before about the need for LGBT scientists to make links, the challenges we share, regardless of discipline, and how conferences can help that. Which is why, when Beth Montague-Hellen raised the idea of a conference targeted specifically at LGBT scientists, I was quite keen to see how it would turn out.

The actual event in Sheffield on Friday blew me away.

There were more than 80 LGBT scientists attending from all over the UK (and one from Sweden!), plus a few expats living in the UK, such as myself. In addition to amazing high-quality science, it was a chance for us to, frankly, be ourselves. Never have I been to a conference with such a wonderful sense of humour, camaraderie, and palpable excitement among those attending. We didn’t have to worry about awkward coffee break small talk about partners, reactions of colleagues, or be guarded about which pronouns to use. All of these coping mechanisms that hide our true selves are exhausting, and the sense of liberation around the room was infectious.

We opened with Dave Smith’s talk ’No Sexuality Please, We’re Scientists’, based on some of the research he did (and that I highlighted) a few years ago, on the lack of visible LGBT science role models. It was an excellent primer for the day to come, and a video will be up on Youtube in the near future is on Youtube.

What followed were around 15 oral presentations from other scientists, ample time to socialize during long coffee breaks / lunch, and an opportunity to view about a dozen posters.

The day wrapped with an inspiring talk by Elena Rodriguez-Falcon, who highlighted the challenges many LGBT folk in STEM still face – the feeling that by being ’out’, it might impede career progression. But the message that I took away was much bigger. A number of surveys have revealed that even though departments of workplaces may be accepting, though not overtly so, LGBT staff and students still feel a lack of support. It’s not good enough to be accepting, we have to be encouraging.

I’m of the belief that by being an out visible LGBT scientist, it will, in however small a way, be useful for others to see. Not everyone is necessarily comfortable with this role, but I’ve chosen to own in a bit. And since I started blogging about being an out gay academic back in 2013 (though I’ve been out in my personal and professional life for more than a decade), several other LGBT scientists have gotten in touch to discuss the challenges we face as a group, or their own personal journey. I don’t necessarily have all the answers, but the starting point for the conversation is further ahead than many, or all of their straight mentors.

So bringing together all these LGBT scientists who would otherwise not encounter each other (or at least not in nearly so large a number) is a Good Thing.

One of the other most amazing things about this conference is how Twitter-driven it was. Many of us knew each other via Twitter, though had never met in real life. Before Friday, I had only met 3 or 4 other out LGBT scientists. I can now add so many more. More than a few people commented at the end of the day how many new Twitter followers they’d received simply though other attendees. I’ve added as many as I could recall to the QueerSTEM Twitter list, so follow along if you’re interested (or let me know if you’d like to be added!). The conference hashtag apparent trended during the day, and there were more than 500 tweets (which will eventually be organized into a Storify).

There were also many other LGBT scientists (both in the UK and elsewhere) following along on Twitter, and many expressed a wish to attend such a conference. My advice is to just do it. It’s a non-trivial amount of work to pull off, and is likely more challenging in Canada or the US owing to distances between universities, but it is so, so worthwhile. And Beth (and her wife Kate, and all other other helpers from Sheffield) pulled off an amazing day.

Following the official wrap-up function, several of us headed out for a drink and bite to eat. Now, everyone has their own journey when dealing with their sexuality, and had the conference happened during my MSc 10 years ago, I likely wouldn’t have been too $%!&-scared to attend. And many folks live or go to university or work in places where there aren’t that many other queer folk around so the idea of or ability to go out socially with other out LGBT people isn’t possible. So this was clearly a case where the non-science part of a conference could be equally important, and highlights, at least in my mind, the importance of being out and visible.

Lack of diversity in science is a hugely important issue, and our conference was by no means an exception. The vast majority of attendees were white, most were male. I have no idea how this reflects the population of LGBT scientists in the UK, or UK scientists in general, but as we move forward to discussing both visible and invisible diversity, it’s something that we need to keep in mind.

It looks like this might become an annual-ish thing, so I hope to see more of you at the 2017 LGBT STEMinar.

 

*A shorthand, I admit, for any non-straight person

Canadian government postdocs: revived (well, sort of)

Tags

government, postdoc, postdoctoral fellowship, postdoctoral research pilot program, visiting fellowships

I wrote before about the demise of the Visiting Fellowship program, which placed postdocs in Canadian government research labs, and used NSERC as a middleman (middle-agency?).  Recently, the employment practices around this arrangement, particularly whether postdocs were entitled to benefits.  An employment tribunal reasoned that they were, and the program shuttered (though all current VFs were fine through the remainder of their tenure).

Now, it comes to my attention that an open-ended competition for the Postdoctoral Research Pilot Program (PRP) has been posted on the Government of Canada jobs site.  My guess, and those of some informed government colleagues, is that this is the replacement for the old VF program.  But there has been no announcement, no information page, nothing.

Some other interesting queries… all government jobs are classified based on the broad category and salary scale.  Two important ones for our purposes here are RES and EG.  RES is a Research Scientist, and there are 5 levels (RES-5 being the highest). EGs are scientific technicians, with EG-7 being the highest level.  How are PRPs to be classified?  The old VF program scaled salary to n% of the entry level RES-1 (I think it was 85-90%).  If the new PRPs are to be classified (and they would be, as government employees), an entry RES-1 seems most likely.  This is huge, as the base salary in 2013 (the last year of the current collective agreement) is $53,161 (link; search for “SE-RES-1”).  That’s a big improvement on the $49k of the VF program.  It’s even bigger if it includes benefits, which are quite significant in a government job (pension, medical/dental, etc).  So the actual cost goes up considerably.

Where will this new money be found?  Previously, the VF program paid postdocs from their immediate supervisor’s operational budget.  I wonder if the benefits side of things will be similarly covered, or whether that comes from higher up in the department.  And what about unionization? RES positions are represented by PIPSC, and the current agreement is up for renewal.  Granted PIPSC isn’t known to strike as often as the other major federal government labour union (PSAC), but who knows what the future will bring.

One last, yet troubling, word.  The advertisement linked above excludes two of the most science-heavy departments: Fisheries & Oceans Canada, and Environment Canada.  Sources have told me that there continues to be no internal / government postdoc option in these departments, and no indication that one will be appearing soon.  With an already limited pool of postdoc funding, the loss of the VF program, and unavailability of the PRP in all departments puts further strain on PhD graduates in Canada, and especially those who want experience in the public service.

Conservation of species: is there a publishing gap?

Tags

conservation, journals, publishing

This post was prompted by two recent/submitted papers, one of which I’m involved with, and the other of which a colleague published.  They both concern what I consider the fundamental building blocks of ecology and conservation: how many of species X are there, what external forces affect those numbers, and how have they changed over time?  The conservation of species is, for better or worse, the basic unit of biodiversity and the main purpose of the IUCN Red List.  Ecosystems consist of species, and the number of their individuals.

Such “status, distribution, & threat (SDT)” papers are often relegated* to “natural history” journals. In the rush to be appeal to a broader audience, many taxon-specific journals (and here I’m referring primarily to ornithological journals) eschew such submissions.  Conservation journals (e.g., Biological Conservation, or Conservation Biology) are more interested in umbrella or big-picture ideas, or at the least, novel methods/approaches (this is  just my interpretation, and I’m happy to hear otherwise!). Not to mention a bias against marine organisms. As someone who works primarily on marine birds, this is particularly bothersome.

SDT** papers generally take the form of reviewing past population estimates & threats, adding in some new data, maybe an analysis, and at the end of the day, should provide the information needed by conservation authorities (international, national, or subnational; more on that below) to adequately know what’s going on. Very often, the historical data relating to seabirds’ distribution and abundance is… how shall I put it?… wrong.  Errors on the ground (or, frankly, just wild guesses) get propagated in monumental (and exceptionally well-cited) tomes, and taken as the Gospel Truth. So SDT papers can be a chance to correct the record, which is crucial for effective (and sound) management and mitigation of things like bycatch. If you thought there were 300,000 of species X, then annual bycatch of 2000, though not good, wasn’t terrible. But if it turns out that a misplaced decimal here, and a poor survey there meant there were only 60,000, that allowable bycatch level becomes very worrying.

As a consequence, SDT papers tend to have lots of information, and some of it is messy. Lots of it is probably from grey literature, government reports, or unpublished data, and a SDT paper is a chance to get that information out into the wider world.  But this is problematic for journals because they thrive on brevity. In one of my case studies, we were advised recently to cut the results section by 90% because “people do not want that level of detail”. Utter bollocks. In the other case study, the paper went through at least 4 formal revisions, and 2 with the handling editor, resulting in a paper that didn’t have a bunch of information in it.

The problem is only compounded when working in the non-English-speaking world, where much of the information is in “foreign literature” that is less accessible to the broader scientific community (that doesn’t mean you should ignore it, though!).  SDT papers are a chance to get information in that Russian technical report, or that Korean government document into the English-speaking world (and let’s face it, science is an enterprise dominated by English, for better or worse).

Conservation is also practiced at a huge range of spatial scales – from global (think the IUCN Red List) to national (think COSEWIC in Canada, or the ESA in the US, or the Nature Directive in Europe), to subregional (states, provinces), or even local levels (individual breeding colonies).  These all, ultimately, matter for conservation because these are the levels at which decisions that will affect species and populations are made.  So if we have a species that has 90% of its population in Country A, and 10% in Country B, it’s important to know what’s going on in Country B because its policies, implementation, and national interest will affect that part of the population, and these can be different from Country A (arguments about genetic distinctiveness and “evolutionary significant units” aside).

 

So I hope I’ve now established why we need SDT research. The question is how to disseminate it, particularly at the national or subnational level? When I posed this question on Twitter, there were some excellent answers – Endangered Species Research (though when working with species that are globally Least Concern, I’m not sure how well that would go down. And there’s the €1050-1500 fee), and a variety of fish journals.  In the bird world (where there is no shortage of journals!), there are 3 obvious choices.  Avian Conservation and Ecology (of which I’m on the editorial board) generally doesn’t accept SDT papers. The Condor focuses on “the application of scientific theory and methods to the conservation, management, and ecology of birds; and the application of ornithological knowledge to conservation and management policy“, which in my mind doesn’t really fit SDT papers (or my experience with the journal).  Bird Conservation International looks for papers on the “conservation of birds and the habitats upon which they depend“, which is the closest fit I’ve seen, but isn’t known for its speed (it’s also the one with which I have no experience, so again, I’m happy to hear otherwise in the Comments).

 

Given that the conservation of the natural world is really a broad way of saying the conservation of individual species (and the ecosystems they comprise), which depends on knowing the status, distribution, and threats these species face, I wonder why there isn’t a Journal of Species Conservation? Online-only (so no worries about length or colour figures or number of tables, etc.), of minimal cost to authors, ideally Open Access, and with relatively rapid publication. The focus would be on the conservation status, distribution, and threats to species (or groups of species) at any spatial scale. I know that’s a lot to ask, but a conservation biologist can dream, right?

I’m certainly not offering to start one up, but if an enterprising publisher were looking for an obvious niche to fill*** I’d strongly suggest this one, and would gladly help edit, review, and submit to such an outlet.

 

 

*Natural history journals shouldn’t be seen as a lower tier, but they are sometimes less likely to be online (and so more concerned with length and publishing costs), less widely available, and read/cited, and often take long times from submission/acceptance to publication.

** Yes, I chose the order of the words purposely

*** Let’s hold off on the debate about whether niches can, in fact, be empty.

Fancy collaborating? My list of languishing projects

Like just about every other scientist out there, I have far more data than I can write up into wonderful shiny papers.  Meg Duffy and drugmonkey have a nice series of posts on this, and I thought I’d add another perspective.  I work with a conservation NGO, so my “work” work really has an applied direction, and I’m tasked with specific projects (though with some latitude to develop my own research questions).  On the whole, I like it, but there are some key differences to working in a university environment.  One of the biggest is that I don’t have any students (unless I co-supervise with someone).  Again, not a bad thing, just different.  But whereas a prof could turn some of these unfinished projects into grad projects, or hand it off to a postdoc, I don’t have that luxury.

Earlier today, I took to Twitter in an attempt to resuscitate on of my languishing projects:

Anyone out there with experience analysing geographic variation in body size (preferably in birds) & interested in collaborating?

— Alex Bond (@thelabandfield) December 27, 2014

So in an attempt to get some of these projects to see the light of day, here is a list of in-progress-but-stalled projects (and a more permanent page that will be kept updated here).  Depending on the project, the amount of work needed could be a little, or a lot.  Some need more analysis, and others more writing.  None of them have any money attached (at least right now – if there’s a pressing case, we can discuss something).  So if any of these tickle your fancy, drop me a line with some background (nothing fancy, but I’m looking for folks who can get the work done, or faculty with students in need of term-long projects that can become papers).

This page will be updated from time to time as projects progress (or languish).

Body size variation and subspecies validity in puffins

• Data: an exhaustive summary of (I’m almost certain) every published measurement of Atlantic puffins, and their eggs.
• Looking for: someone with experience analyzing geographic patterns of body size, and using morphometrics to look at subspecies designations
• Progress: all the data are collected. No analysis or writing.
• You can provide: analysis, writing
• I can provide: writing, editing

Subspecies validity in Whiskered Auklets

• Data: measurements of adult birds across their breeding range in Alaska & Russia
• Looking for: someone with experience analyzing geographic patterns of body size, and using morphometrics to look at subspecies designations
• Progress: most data collected; some additional museum specimens could be useful to fill some gaps.
• You can provide: analysis, writing
• I can provide writing, editing

Miscellaneous data

I also have bits and pieces of data (mostly breeding biology-type data like measurements, but also stable isotopes) for a variety of seabirds from:

• New Brunswick (Arctic Tern, Atlantic Puffin, Common Eider, Common Murre, Common Tern, Leach’s Storm-petrel, Razorbill)
• Alaska (Least Auklet, Crested Auklet)
• Newfoundland (Atlantic Puffin, Black-legged Kittiwake, Herring Gull, Leach’s Storm-petrel)

If something tickles your fancy, drop me a line.

Tristan Adventure 4: an island without birdsong

Tags

albatross, Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross, TdCadventure, Tristan da Cunha, Tristan Thrush

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last 10 years working on seabird islands.  During the breeding season, birds look for the safest spot to raise their young, and this often means they find themselves on coastal cliffs, offshore islands, and remote parts of the world.  This natural order of things is thrown on its head when novel predators like mice, rats, or cats are introduced.  The birds, having evolved over millions of years in the absence of ground-based predators on breeding islands, are prime targets because they have no behavioural defences.  In some cases, like I wrote in my last installment, the birds are, in a word, screwed.

 

The main island of Tristan da Cunha had rats and mice introduced in the 1880s, about 75 years after the island was settled permanently, and had cats from the early 1800s until about 40 years ago.  Today, Tristan is an island without birdsong.

 

When the UK established a garrison on Tristan in 1816, Captain Dugald Carmichael, Fellow of the Linnean Society, accompanied the voyage, and recounted his journey on December 16, 1817, recorded in the Transactions of the Linnean Society as “Some Account of the Island of Tristan cla Cunha and of its Natural Productions”.  It offers us a unique perspective on what this island was like almost 200 years ago before rats, mice, cats (now absent), dogs, livestock, and people arrived on the most remote inhabited island in the world.

 

“Further on, the ground becomes more firm, but is perforated in all directions by the various species of Petrel, which resort in myriads to the island during the season of incubation, and burrow in the earth”

 

Here, Carmichael is referring to the habit of many seabirds to nest in burrows underground.  These are chiefly petrels and shearwaters, which abound on other islands in the Tristan group, like Nightingale, Inaccessible, and Gough.  But today, there are scant few burrowing petrels, and those that remain are on steep cliffs, offshore sea stacks, or suffer low reproductive success and survival thanks to the rats and mice.

 

“As we walked down the mountain on our return, we passed among flocks of albatrosses engaged in the process of incubation, or tending their young. There are four species of them that breed on the island, none of which hatches m0re than one egg at a time ; the Diomedea spadicea, exulans, chlororynchos, and fuliginosa”

 

In modern parlance (and with the benefit of a better understanding of albatross plumage changes and taxonomy), these are three species: D. exulans and D. spadicea are Tristan Albatross (D. dabbenena, male and female respectively), D. chlororhynchos is the Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross (Thalassarche chlororhynchos) that I’ve written about before, and the last is now Phoebetria fusca, the Sooty Albatross.  There are few places now where the albatross could be said to form flocks, and Tristan Albatross has been extirpated from the island entirely.  Sooty Albatross breed on steep cliffs, and the density of Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross nests is surely lower than that even 40 years ago.

 

Just last week, we went with staff from the Tristan Conservation Department to the Atlantic Yellow-nosed Albatross study colony at the top of Hottentot Gulch, about 800m above the settlement.  After a 3-hour climb, we found ourselves at the edge of this “colony”.  About 10 person-hours later, we had found a grand total of 30 nests, and covered an area I would estimate to be around 30 hectares.  Clearly many fewer than in Carmichael’s time.

 

This is to say nothing of the landbirds.  There is one native landbird remaining, the Tristan Thrush (Nesocichla eremita).  A finch (or more properly, a tanager), and moorhen (Gallinula nesiotis) are gone, and the Gough Moorhen (Gallinula cormeri) was introduced in the 1950s, but exists mainly above the settlement plain.  The result is that around town, the sounds of birds singing, calling, courting, and otherwise announcing their presence is absent.

 

So how did this come to be?

 

Like many other remote islands, there is a history of harvesting birds on Tristan, though today this is no longer permitted on the main island (there is a small subsistence harvest of shearwater chicks on Nightingale).  Cats on South Africa’s Marion Island consumed more than 400,000 birds a year when they were present (from the early 1950s until officially eradicated in the early 1990s); cats were present on Tristan for much longer (early 1800s through the 1970s), and likely exacted a massive toll on the breeding seabirds.

 

But disentangling the role harvesting played from the catastrophic effects of introduced predators is practically impossible.  Regardless of their relative importance, the result is the same – when we’re out hiking and we see a slope, a hill, a cliff, a plain and think “there MUST be birds there!” we are nearly always wrong.

 

What we do know, though, is that the conservation ethic on the island is as high as it has ever been, and the folks we work with in the Conservation Department are dedicated, resourceful, and fantastic to work with.  With about 3 weeks left for me on Tristan, I’m already looking forward to coming back.

Tristan Adventure 3: Mice predation causes devastating Tristan Albatross breeding success

Tags

Diomedea dabbenena, TdCadventure, Tristan Albatross, Tristan da Cunha

The third installment of my Tristan Adventure series is over at the RSPB Saving Species blog:

 

“One of the most important tasks during takeover is the Tristan Albatross (Diomedea dabbenena) chick count. These wanderer-type albatrosses breed only on Gough (with one pair on Inaccessible Island; they were extirpated from Tristan over 100 years ago) where mice – yes, mice! – are the main predator of their chicks. You might be wondering how a 25 g mouse can take down a 9 kg albatross chick, but I can assure you that a) it does happen, and b) it’s a big problem.”

 

Read the rest over at RSPB’s Saving Species.

“Old” meets “New”: the role of preprints in natural history

Tags

Aleutian, cackling goose, glaucous-winged gull, natural history, PeerJ, preprint, publishing

The title of this post is a little tongue-in-cheek because preprints are a relatively recent adoption in ecology, conservation, and environmental science, and natural history is, of course, the foundation of ecology, conservation, and environmental science.  Regardless, though, I think preprints have a huge role to play in natural history.

Preprints are non-peer-reviewed documents that are posted in online repositories where others can comment on them, authors can upload revised versions, and most importantly, get information out.  Preprints are often submitted to journals, and their ultimate version usually contains the same text as the journal article.  Importantly, the preprint is archived, is citable (with a DOI), and gets the information into the world and out of our filing drawers (or more likely, computer folders and field books). The case for preprints in biology is fairly strong, and I’ll add one more: natural history and conservation.

Natural history, I’ve argued (as have many, many, many, many, many others) is an important part of modern science. Sadly, not everyone agrees (but this is my blog, and they’re wrong). But there are still journals that value (and are dedicated to!) natural history, and rightly so.  But even putting together a “natural history paper” isn’t trivial. There are still hypotheses, observations, analyses, and interpretation.

Now, maybe it’s a particular proclivity of ornithologists, but we tend to write a heck of a lot of reports – to government agencies, for permits, and to funders.  These often have some preliminary analyses, lots of methodological detail and background, and in the case of most of my field studies, heaps of “ancillary information”.

During my PhD, my primary field site was Kiska Island, a lovely volcanic island in the Rat Islands group of the Aleutian Islands, Alaska.  It’s a fantastic spot, and cumulatively over the four years, I spent nearly 300 days there (probably the 2nd largest amount of time of anyone alive right now).  Each year, we filed a summary report with the US Fish and Wildlife Service that detailed the effects of introduced rats on Least and Crested Auklets.  But we also did much more than that.  In particular, we (and the other 3-6 ornithological research camps in the Aleutians each summer) compiled an annotate list of bird sightings.

“Hey!” I hear you exclaiming, “That’s some pretty awesome natural history data form a neat part of the world! When will you write it up?”.  Sadly, the answer is not anytime soon.  This makes me sad, but my current job doesn’t allow for Natural History Fridays.  What if you were interested in the distribution and effect of introduced predators on Aleutian Cackling Geese? Or were examining range-wide variation in Glaucous-winged Gull egg size?  You would have no way of knowing that I collected useful data because it’s in an unpublished government report (or other “grey literature”), and doesn’t merit a paper or note on its own.

If I had deposited my annual reports in a preprint repository like PeerJ PrePrints, or bioRxiv, not only would these data be out there, but others could cite my report/preprint.  Furthermore, the publicly available copy wouldn’t just be the one on my old lab’s webpage, but it would be available after I’m long gone, and since it would have a DOI, it would be easy to find.

Tracking down grey literature is a royal pain.  Reports are rare, are often poor black-and-white reproductions, and usually hard to find in the first place.  Citations of grey literature also tend to be more prone to errors, which exacerbates the whole process of finding them.  And, I think most importantly, the information they contain doesn’t always make it into a paper.  All solved if they were deposited on a preprint server.

We are, after all, already producing these reports, and more importantly, they’re already cited frequently, and data appearing in these reports is also in published papers.  So the reality is that nothing would really change, except that the information would be more widely available, better curated, and citable.  I don’t see a downside.

So if you are, in fact, interested in the distribution and effect of introduced predators on Aleutian Cackling Geese, or variation in Glaucous-winged Gull egg size, you will hopefully soon be able to add my wee bits of data to your analysis.  When my various colleagued return from the field, I’ll convince them that we need to deposit our annual reports in a preprint archive.  In the meantime, you can see them on the “Downloadable reports” section of the Kiska webpage.