Oxford 101: How to get that PhD in zoology without losing the plot.

November 25, 2018

As headline grabbers go, any young person considering a long-term career in ecology, zoology, conservation, wildlife biology or anything to do with the environment and climate change couldn’t help but be drawn to the recent heading on Nature.com (official website for the journal Nature), titled: “Twenty things I wish I’d known when I started my PhD.”

The writer, Lucy Taylor, wasn’t banging on about Kwantlen College or the Mary Magdalene School of the Unrequited Sisters, either, but rather the University of Oxford — better known to plebes, proles, tourists and avid fans of the popular Inspector Lewis and Endeavour TV crime series as Oxford University.

Taylor earned her PhD from Oxford this year, in 2018, so her advice is both topical and au courant.

Helpfully, she curated a to-do list, including don’ts, by buttonholing fellow PhD students and post-doctoral researchers at her alma mater in the Dept. of Zoology, partly to help new graduate students and partly — no doubt — to rationalize, justify and come to terms with decisions she made, or didn’t make, in pursuing her goal.

Her post came to me in a roundabout way from a medical doctor and trauma surgeon I once interviewed in a past life, who had been serving at the time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with Médecins San Frontières (MSF). I was writing about the National Geographic anthology documentary Doctors Without Borders at the time, and did the interview by satellite phone (he was in Goma, in the middle of a war zone; I was in Vancouver, on the other side of the world).

We’ve stayed in touch, through the miracle of social media (and Twitter), and he’s taken it upon himself to mentor and help advise any young person willing to give up a comfortable life back home for a career post in the developing world — though he would be the first to draw the line at sending someone, anyone, into a war zone without first knowing exactly what they’re getting into. (Among his other observations, the sound of distant mortar fire coming through faintly but clearly over the satellite phone, was that he missed watching NHL hockey games on TV in his home town of Toronto.)

He thought enough of Taylor’s advice to share her list with his followers on Twitter. I won’t burden you here with all 20 (I’ve included the link here, so you can find out for yourself, if you’re so inclined), but I have included a handful that jumped out at me.

• “I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it,” is the biggest lie you can tell yourself. Write down everything you do, even if it doesn’t work. This includes notes from meetings, code annotations, method details, everything.

• It’s never too early to start writing your thesis. Write and show your work to your supervisor as you go. Even if you don’t end up using your early work, it’s good practice and a way to get ideas organized in your head.

• Back up your work. You can avoid grief by doing this at least weekly.

• Aim to publish your research. It might not work out, but drafting articles and submitting them to journals is a great way to learn new skills and enhance your CV.

Have a life outside work. Although your lab group is like your work family, it’s great for your mental health to be able to escape work.

• Don’t compare yourself with others. Your PhD is an opportunity to do original research that reveals new information. All PhD programs are different. Just do what works for you and your project.

• Enjoy your PhD. It can be tough, and there will be days when you wish you had a ‘normal’ job. PhDs are full of wonderful experiences, though, and give you the opportunity to work on something that fascinates you. Celebrate your successes and enjoy yourself.

Taylor’s article was from the Nature Careers Community, a place for readers of the journal Nature to share their professional experiences and advice. Since there’s less money in a career in nature and conservation than, say, being a hedge fund manager, bonhomie and community is what it’s all about.

And, unlike a hedge fund manager, you’ll be helping to save the planet.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07332-x

Tourism and cheetahs: When too much of one can lead to too few of the other.

June 24, 2018

Think of it as an “eco” challenge for uniquely modern times.

Recent research by Oxford University shows what wildlife behavioural scientists have long suspected — and told anyone who will listen. Namely: Unchecked, unregulated wildlife tourism can be detrimental to those animals most vulnerable to having their hunting and breeding cycles disrupted by swarms of safari vehicles all jostling to get an ideal position from which to get that perfect picture.

The four-year study, authored by Oxford zoologist Dr. Femke Broekhuis from 2013-2017, focused on cheetahs in Kenya’s world-renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve, site of the annual wildebeest migration that moves through the protected wilderness area every July, August and September.

(The rest of the year, the migration winds its way through the larger, more expansive Serengeti National Park, across the border in Tanzania.) The Mara, as Kenya’s part of the park is known to locals and area residents alike, is especially popular with overseas tourists because Kenya is more conducive than its neighbour to mass tourism, thanks to better facilities, more competitive pricing.

Also, the aptly named Mara River, for which the reserve is named, provides the sight of yearly “river crossings,” featuring some 1.3 million wildebeest in total, which in turns acts as a magnet for the reserve’s resident predators, including big cats like lions, leopards and cheetahs.

©Pixabay/Cheetah Conservation Fund-CCF Namibia

Most predators are nocturnal, but cheetahs are diurnal, meaning they hunt during the day.

Cheetahs are easily intimidated, because of their light build — they’re built for speed, as befitting nature’s fastest land mammal — and show a tendency to flee from a perceived threat rather than stand and fight. Lions will kill cheetahs whenever they can, as nature has conditioned lions to see cheetahs as competition for a finite supply of food. Cheetah cubs are especially vulnerable, as they’re born basically defenceless.

Cub mortality is exceedingly high among cheetahs — it’s one reason they have such large litters — but it’s especially high in the wide, flat, short-grass savannahs of East Africa, where the very terrain that makes it easy for cheetahs to find and chase down food also makes them vulnerable to being spotted by other predators.

The crisis comes when too many tourists — Broekhuis’ study cited as many as 30 vehicles crowding around a single cheetah at the same time during one sighting — disrupts a cheetah’s hunting pattern.

If a mother cheetah doesn’t make a kill during daylight hours, the time when tourist vehicles are most active — obviously — she may starve.

Also, because cheetahs often have their kill stolen by larger, more aggressive predators, including hyenas, large numbers of tourist vehicles crowded together often sends a signal to other predators that an easy meal may be in the offing. Cheetahs may even be intimidated by packs of jackals or vultures in large enough number.

Since even a slight injury to a leg is tantamount to a death sentence for an animal that relies on speed to chase down food, nature has conditioned cheetahs to back down rather than stand and fight. The hungrier a cheetah is, however, the more it might be inclined to take foolish risks, especially if hunting has been hard and it has cubs to feed.

“Studies from about 10 years ago by the Kenya Wildlife Service showed an average of 19 vehicles,” Dr. Laurie Marker, founder and director of the Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund (https://cheetah.org) told Dispatches in a Facebook message. “So, yes, this is very bad for cheetahs.”

None of this is new to anyone who has studied cheetahs in the wild, or even read about them and seen them in animal documentaries. What makes the Oxford study different, though, is that this time researchers have hard numbers to back up their claims.

The study found that the average number of cubs raised to independent adulthood in the Maasai Mara was just 0.2 cubs per litter, meaning a mother cheetah in the Mara would have to give birth to five litters just to raise a single cub to adulthood. The average birth-to-adult success rate in more remote, less heavily touristed wilderness areas is 2.3 cubs per litter.

The Maasai Mara is renowned for its big cat populations; it’s one of the reasons so many tourists choose that park over any other. The Mara has been featured in countless TV documentaries, and provided the setting for BBC-TV’s popular Big Cat Diary series, which followed specific family groups of lions, leopards and cheetahs every year over a period of a dozen years between 1996 and 2008, creating a snapshot view of individual cats’ entire life cycles, from birth to death.

Big Cat Diary promoted and popularized the Maasai Mara as a travel destination for wildlife enthusiasts, more so than any other park in Africa, including the Serengeti and South Africa’s world famous — but very different — Kruger National Park.

Broekhuis is enough of a realist — and honest enough — to know that wildlife tourism does a great deal to help endangered animals, especially icon species like cheetahs. Catching even a glimpse of a cheetah in the wild is a more stirring and profound experience than a lifetime of seeing them in zoos. One of the more overlooked, less-reported unintended side effects of wildlife tourism, especially in Africa’s magnificent game parks, is that it can shape a child or young person’s outlook and future career choice for life.

The question, Broekhuis argues, is not whether tourism is a benefit or a hazard, but a matter of degree.

The Maasai Mara is popular for a reason, but 64 vehicles over a two-hour period — the most vehicles Broekhuis recorded at a single cheetah sighting during her four-year study — is untenable.

Broekhuis says the solution is strict viewing guidelines and enforcement of the rules, whether it’s a ban on off-road driving (in effect in the Mara, and in virtually every other official national park on the African continent) a limit on the number of vehicles around a cheetah at any one time (Broekuis recommends five) at a minimum distance of 30 metres.

The study’s timing could not be more apt: July, just days away, is the beginning of high season in the Mara.

https://www.wildcru.org/members/dr-femke-broekhuis/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.4180

©Wildlife Conservation Research Unit/University of Oxford

‘The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away.’ Now for the hard part — keeping it that way.

March 07, 2018

Hearing of that super-colony of Antarctic penguins spotted from space, I immediately thought about The Lost World.

Not the part about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s band of Victorian explorers discovered a lost world of dinosaurs and early humans hidden on a towering mountain plateau in the jungles of Venezuela, but rather the part about how, having stumbled over a find of extraordinary and rare beauty, they weighed whether or not to tell the outside world.

Late last week, the journal Scientific Reports announced the discovery of a previously unknown “super-colony” of Adélie penguins in the east Antarctic peninsular.

The find was dramatic, the “how” somewhat less so.

The colony numbers more than 1.5 million birds, a sizeable number by any reckoning, but especially in the facts-challenged world of 2018.

The penguins were spotted living among and around a rocky archipelago in east Antarctica known as the Danger Islands — aptly named, as it turns out — after gargantuan patches of their guano appeared in images taken by the US Landsat satellite.

This was one satellite picture of the polar regions that wasn’t all about the melting ice cap. For that reason alone, it immediately caused a stir.

Researchers used a computer algorithm to scan images for signs of possible penguin activity. The scientists were genuinely surprised by the scale of their find, as University of Oxford researcher and science team-member Dr. Tom Hart told BBC News.

“It’s a classic case of finding something where no one really looked,” Hart told BBC. “The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn’t really try that hard.”

As Heather Lynch, a researcher with Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, told BBC.

“The sheer size of what we were looking at took our breath away,” she said. “We thought, ‘Wow, if what we’re seeing is true, these are going to be some of the largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world, and it’s going to be well worth our while sending in an expedition to count them properly.’”

Knowing how many penguins there are is one thing.

Ensuring their survival for future generations — future generations of people, as well as penguins — is another entirely.

The discovery will only truly mean something if a long-proposed marine protected area is signed into international law, a super-protected area, if you will, for the super-colony of penguins, and other Antarctic species.

It’s a big deal because, continent-wide, Adélie penguin populations have fallen by more than 65% in just the past 25 years, according to some estimates.

Just in the last seven years, thousands of chicks died in an unexplained mass die-off of chicks and stillbirths in the west Antarctic peninsular.

Some conservationists are concerned that the discovery will lead people to think that the Antarctic isn’t in so much trouble, after all.

To most people’s minds, endangered animals are either endangered or they aren’t. Mid- and long-term factors like habitat loss caused by climate change, which manifests itself in the form of warmer, more acidic waters, loss of sea ice and mass die-offs of krill, plankton and other micro-organisms that underpin the entire ecosystem, are harder to weigh in the mind than waking up one morning to learn that all the penguins have suddenly disappeared.

The Danger Islands lie in an area of the Weddell Sea that has yet to feel the effects of climate change the way other parts of Antarctica have.

That doesn’t mean the Adélie penguins, all 1.5 million of them, are out of danger, though.

As conservation writer Lucy Siegle noted this past weekend in the UK Sunday Observer, “Enthusiasm for this (discovery) needs to translate into a legally enforceable marine protected area, so that the penguins, left undisturbed for 60 years, remain that way.”

It was Einstein, after all, who said that whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/adelie-penguins-colonies-discovered-antarctica-environment/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/12/penguin-catastrophe-leads-to-demands-for-protection-in-east-antarctica

Just how much is 17 trillion gallons of water, anyway?

September 01, 2017

Can you visualize 26 million Olympic swimming pools? Actually, you can.

That’s the amount of rain dumped on Houston and southern Texas these past few days by Hurricane Harvey, the “weather event” that triggered catastrophic flooding and continues to wreak havoc on one the U.S.’s fourth-largest city in terms of population (6.5 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's July 1, 2010 estimate).

The existential media question — what’s the difference between a meteorologist and a climatologist? — is mirrored in big-picture terms with Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath.

It’s no longer a question of weather vs. climate, or even nature vs. engineering, but rather the status quo vs. the future of the planet.

©U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The political winds are shifting in Washington, DC and other national capitals, as it becomes more apparent — to those who follow science and pay attention to the news — that rising man-made emissions are pushing the global climate deeper into uncharted territory.

As widespread as the flooding in the Gulf of Mexico is, it pales in comparison to what is going on in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, where overnight accounts from BBC World estimate that nearly half of Bangladesh — the entire country, not just regional pockets — is underwater, due to unseasonably heavy monsoon rains.

Coupled with deadly mudslides in Sierra Leone last week and last month’s overflow of a key tributary to China’s Yangtze River, climate scientists warn that weather extremes are likely to be the norm in the near future, not the exception. As The Guardian global environment editor Jonathan Watts noted in an article earlier this week, we are now living in an era of unwelcome records.

The science is in. Since the advent of climate records, each of the past three years have registered steadily rising records for high temperatures. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is the highest it’s been in four million years. We know this from geological carbon readings. This isn’t fake science, in other words, just as Hurricane Harvey and its devastating after-effects aren’t fake news.

Climatologists note that high amounts of carbon dioxide do not cause storms, per se, but they do make storms more volatile and violent — and more destructive.

Again, science is the key. As seas warm, sea water evaporates faster. Warming air holds more water vapour than cold air. For every increase in air temperature of just half-a-degree Celsius, atmospheric water content increases by three percent, give or take. The skies fill more quickly, and hold more water. Scientists call the Clausius-Clapeyron effect. The plain truth is that the surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico is more than a degree higher than it was just 30 years ago.

Climatologists estimate that sea levels have risen more than 20 centimetres in 100 years of man-made global warming. Melting glaciers and the calving of massive ice shelves off Antarctica expand the volume of seawater.

The result is not worldwide floods or worldwide droughts so much as it is climatic extremes in regions already prone to flood and drought.

Friederike Otto, deputy director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, told The Guardian that the world can expect to see extreme rainfall amounts and record-setting temperatures “for the foreseeable future.”

Effects will vary from country to country. Bangladesh, for example, is particularly susceptible to ocean flooding, as are large swaths of the southern coastal U.S., because the topography is essentially flat and only slightly above sea level.

Recent storms have shown a tendency to stall, rather than blow through. One reason why Hurricane Harveyhas taken so long to clear Texas and Louisiana’s Gulf coast is that a massive high-pressure ridge over the northwest U.S. and southeastern Canada has blocked the storm from moving on its traditionally north-northeasterly track, if only temporarily. The longer Harvey lingers over flat lowland areas of coastal Texas and Louisiana, the more rain it will dump — and the worse the flooding will get.

Climate researchers have cited dramatic warming in the Arctic as one reason why high-pressure ridges keep building over British Columbia and Washington State in the summer months, and why it takes weeks rather than days for those pressure ridges to break down and allow the jet-stream to resume its normal track along the U.S.-Canadian border.

Hurricane Harvey is not a local story, in other words, or even regional, but rather international. That’s why climate change is a global concern, and not just a one-time local news hit on the nightly news.

One thing is becoming abundantly clear — and not just because of Harvey. This is no time to play politics with climate change. It’s basic science.

Poorer nations doing more than their affluent cousins to protect large mammals.

May 16, 2017

Where special requirements meet spacial requirements, it’s the poorer countries that do more for the conservation of large mammals, not the wealthy western nations.
That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent survey by the respected Panthera organization, a respected NGO renowned for the scientific study of the world’s remaining big cats, and Oxford University.
Of course, one can say that the world’s remaining critically endangered large mammals — from rhinos and elephants to lions, leopards and cheetahs — are more apt to be found in African countries than those in the northern hemisphere.
Even so the idea that, say, Tanzania has done more for its indigenous wildlife — in terms of setting aside wide open spaces for the animals to roam— than the U.S., which is considering removing protections from several national monuments, many of them established under Barack Obama, is not just sobering but worrying to anyone who cares about the planet.

Recent surveys show that 59% of the world’s remaining predators and 60% of the world’s largest herbivores are facing extinction square-in-the-face.
You can argue the numbers if you want, but some truths are obvious to anyone willing to look past next quarter’s profit statements.
Large herbivores like rhinos and elephants need large spaces in which to find enough water and food to sustain them. Rhinos have a gestation period of 16 months, and only give birth to one calf at a time; it’s easy to see how their numbers could dwindle rapidly in a relatively short period of time, even without the recent spike in poaching that has seen their numbers crash in just the past five years.

Apex predators such as lions and tigers need both space to find enough prey animals to hunt, but also find suitable mates that are genetically diverse enough that inbreeding doesn’t become a problem.
Naturally, the bigger or more dangerous the animal, the harder it can be for people in the area to live with them. Human-wildlife conflict is inevitable where towns, villages and big cities rub up against ecologically sensitive wilderness. Carnivores and herbivores alike can and often do pose a direct risk to human life, crops and livestock.
Panthera researchers created a “megafauna conservation index” in which to measure 152 countries, based on three factors: the percentage of land occupied by large species; the percentage of that land set aside for protected, officially recognized conservation areas; and the amount of money spent by each country on conservation, relative to that country’s GDP.
Interestingly — crazily, you might say — African countries in general make more effort toward the conservation of large mammals than any other region on the planet, despite facing, in many cases, poverty and social instability, whether caused by drought, famine, flooding, tribal conflict, war or bad governance.

Of the five top performing nations, four are in Africa: Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.
There’s a lot of negative reportage about conservation efforts around the world, and with good reason: The planetary environment is a mess, and the current U.S. administration is going to do little to change that.
Even so, the Panthera survey found small but bright beacons of hope. The survey isn’t just an exercise in numbers crunching: Researchers sought to find out why the top-performing countries are doing as well as they are in the battle to save the planet’s remaining megafauna.

These beacons of hope include “rewilding” of landscapes, by reintroducing large mammals to areas where they had disappeared — the desert-adapted rhinos and elephants of Damaraland in northwestern Namibia, for example, or Kenya’s recent reintroduction of critically endangered rhinos into Lake Nakuru and Nairobi national parks.
Other beacons of hope include setting aside more land as protected areas — in other words, the exact opposite of what the current U.S. administration is considering — and investing more in conservation, both at home and abroad. (Germany and the U.K., despite facing ecological and environmental pressures of their own at home, have always punched above their weight overseas; many of the most pro-active conservation organizations in Kenya and Tanzania are financed in large part from northern Europe.)

Yes, planet Earth is a mess right now — there’s no way top sugarcoat it — but as the Panthera survey points out, and as Jane Goodall keeps saying, there’s reason for hope.

More information about the Panthera-Oxford study can be found here, and by following Panthera on Twitter at @PantheraCats:

https://www.panthera.org/affluent-countries-commit-less-conservation-large-mammals-rest-world-panthera-and-oxford-university