When I grow up, I'm going to work at Hogwarts !

When I first went to university, it was to an ancient one with towering spires and gargoyles, looking like Hogwarts, without the grim Scottish weather. Now I'm in a modern university, no cloisters or wood paneled dining rooms, but none the less there are still many features like Hogwarts...

Dumbledore: We have at least two in our department at the moment. Gracious gentlemen (or gentlewomen) patriarchs who quietly help and guide the young faculty and grad students to reach their potential.  But the Dumbledores are beset by the Lucius Malfoys who want them removed because they are 'behind the times', or always butting head with the Ministry who try to force intemperate political decisions on them, that would subvert the quality of teaching.

MacGonnegal: the Matriarch(s) who knows where everything is, and really who is ensuring that everything is running correctly, because quite frankly, Dumbledore is too caught up in his own head. Come to think of it, several of my grad students treat me like that.

Snape: The quiet schemer. Could describe a lot of faculty. Outwardly quite quiet and does their job, but who are actually  secretly scheming behind your back to oppose your new position/funding/tenure approval etc. because for some reason, completely unbeknownst to you, they hate you with a passion.

Delores Umbridge: Seems harmless on the outside, but on the inside is evil incarnate. Offers polite suggestions at faculty meetings, that will actually lead to staff being fired, pay cuts, disenfranchisement of junior faculty, harder conditions for TAs etc. Often end up becoming a Dean, VP or Provost.

Gilderoy Lockhart: Great at promoting themselves and are always in meetings with the Deans or the President and/or posting to the university website about their slightest accomplishment (post to everyone:  Gilderoy Lockhart has given a talk at a conference !) disguising the fact that they actually have precious few ideas or achievements of their own. May even produce materials with  ideas actually stolen off of better minds, usually their grad students or fellow faculty, and claim credit. Probably will end up being a Dean in charge if something special, yet hand-wavingly nebulous so they can never be called on how little work they actually do.

Sirius Black: When you arrive at the university, this is the one faculty member you hear all the bad gossip about. When you get to actually know them you find out that they are in fact, pretty awesome people, but they have been the focus of a lot of spiteful malicious gossip over the years by jealous Snapes and Umbridges. If there isn't someone in your department like this, it's probably because it is you who is the Sirius Black and everyone is gossiping about you.

Dobby and the House Elves: Otherwise known as Adjunct faculty. Tragically grateful  for the tiny stipend the university gives them, and the fact that they are allowed to teach, whilst not realizing they are being hideously exploited.

Howlers: The faculty member who has a melt down tantrum over email over something or other - 90% of the time because  they misread or misunderstood something.

Owl Mail: let's face it, strapping a form or memo to a passing owl would probably be more reliable than internal mail.

Arrival at Hogwarts: Because just simply stepping off of the train would be too easy, students have to sail across a monster-infested lake, or be carried by invisible creatures from your worst nightmare. Likewise entrance into the university is strange, unusual and terrifying - whether it be the admissions office, being called for interview or GREs. The arbitrary nature of many decisions that will effect the rest of your life make riding on the back of an invisible thestral  seem tame in comparison.

Health and Safety: Classes at Hogwarts often have sometimes the topsy-turvey attitude to health and safety that  universities do. On one hand the university requires a 60 page document and committee review for a somewhat innocuous substance that might pose minor health problems, but they don't care about factors that could actually kill or injury  - e.g. dangerous field trips, unsupervised labs, serviced minibuses with brakes that don't work, pedestrian crossings that are death traps and (in the US) ensuring students are drunk driving because there are no campus bars or public transport into town (because that would encourage drinking...). Compared to some of the activities at universities zooming around at high speeds on a broomstick at a Quidditch match, seems pretty safe in comparison.

Dementors: nebulous creatures that circle your department and drain your away happiness and even your soul. We call them university administration. Any one of those administrative departments that are set up to 'help' you but actually result in three times as much work than if you had done it yourself because of convoluted forms that make taxes seem simple and staff that make the DMV look chipper and perky.

The Houses: Let's face it, all university Departments aren't created equal. Some have all the power players, all the full professors allocations, and new staff positions, better funding for faculty and TAs/RAs, and the most expensive toys. Departments of Conservation/Environment - OK we're Hufflepuff, need I say any more.

Goblet of Fire: Otherwise known as Tenure. You have to perform a series of strange, unusual and artbitrary tests, that finishes with everyone who was involved being scarred, with even the winner being traumatized, and potentially even one or more corpses. 

Costa Rica

Two weeks back from Costa Rica and I'm still wading through photos from this pretty awesome trip. If you haven't every been, you really should go. To paraphrase Bubba Gump... it's got rain forest, it's got dry forest, it's got cloud forest... Really a plethora of biodiversity and pretty easy to access. Here's a few animal highlights form this most recent trip:

Coming out of the nerd closet

I should have known at an early age, when I was not attracted to Daphne in Scooby Doo, unlike all my hot blooded male friends, that there was something different about me, because I had the hots for ....Velma.

Despite her wearing the same orange outfit all of the time, it was the little nerdy know it all who got  prepubescent me hot under the collar, not the stylish and elegant Daphne. Looking at my later TV crushes reveals a similar pattern - Willow in Buffy, Dana Scully in the X-files. My biggest crush in my formative years was Anne (of Green Gables) Shirley. The imaginative, awkward redhead who got top grades and scholarships, coming first in math while getting into scrapes, and ended up becoming a teacher and writer <Sigh> She was my dream girl. Had I been born a couple of decades later, it would have probably been Hermione Granger. Thinking on it, I realize I've sequentially dated, befriended and surrounded myself with nerdy female friends in a quest to find and hang out with a modern day Anne Shirley or Velma - an impassioned discussion on the behavioral ecology of some animal species ("wow a nudibranch - how cool is that"); a debate on the problems of international marine conservation treaty law; or a science-based joke that you need 6+ years of college to get,  are guaranteed ways to capture my attention, my friendship and, occasionally even, my heart. Others need not apply. Jinkies !

Anne of Green gables Reading Anne of Green Gables...still my beating heart...

Missing the warm sunshine ...

Last week I was in Costa Rica surrounded by people and wildlife, now I'm sitting in a cold dark room, surrounded by "to do" lists that aren't getting to done. I'm missing the warmth of Costa Rica... so here's some sunshine....

Don't diss the dolphins

I was at a meeting of marine biologists recently where a speaker made a comment  that they hated dolphins. This got a big cheer from the audience, and seething from the small group of dolphin conservation scientists that were there with me. This got me thinking about issues related being a dolphin biologist and some of the prejudices and biases we face, and my friends over at southern Fried science encouraged me to do a guest blog. So without further ado - here it is:   "Don't diss the dolphins"

Are dolphins intelligent ? Of course they are duh!

I've been very lax in keeping this blog up to date, oops.


Recently I've been involved in a lot of arguing about the ethics of keeping captive dolphins, mainly in the wake of the documentary Blackfish. My grad student and I organized a workshop at the recent Society for Marine Mammalogy conference on the science behind intelligence in dolphins, and what it means in terms of ethics and laws. For example, studies showing that they are self aware and have other cognitive skills equivalent to a 4-6 year old human child, yet the US government can allow permits for capturing, harassing and these injuring animals with little consideration for implications of this level of intelligence. The primate science community has been addressing similar concerns, and laws have been passed that basically shut down much invasive great ape research, and requires the retirement of great apes to "sanctuaries". But not so with cetaceans.


Just prior to this a book came out that basically posits that dolphins are not especially intelligent - at least that's what all the press coverage claimed. I had to weigh in:


http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=15458


And encouraged my friend Mel to write a critique of the book: http://www.southernfriedscience.com/?p=16532


So if you have any thought about saying that dolphins are dumb, you'd better think twice.

Noah's Ark snark

Coming from Somerset, England, a large swath of which is currently under water (including the house I spent my tweenage years), floods have been on my mind. So my blog entry to day is about probably the most famous “flood”.  

The infamous creation museum - where dinosaurs walk peaceably with humans in the Garden of Eden and visitors are told that the world is just a little over 6000 years old (for a review by a scientist see) is planning to build a Noah’s Ark exhibit (http://arkencounter.com/).

Although the story of a great flood pre-dates the bible and is referred to in Mesopotamian tablets dating back as far as 1800BC (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/11/noahs-ark-round-ancient-british-museum-mesopotamian-clay-tablets-flood), biblical literalists (for example http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/caring-for-the-animals

and http://icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=2465 for just a couple of examples) including the above mentioned creation museum treat the Noah story as historical fact (based on Genesis 6-8), that all the species of animals in the world were carried in the Ark, and that this is a valid and equal explanation for the existence of current biodiversity as evolution by natural selection.

Let’s for the moment overlook that fact that biblical scriptures does not agree on the exact story of Noah’s Ark, for example in one version of the story of the flood, it lasted 40 days whereas a second says 150 days, and likewise in one version version Noah sent out a dove three times to look for dry land, and the other a raven is sent out once, yet Christian fundamentalists are adamant about the version that appears in Genesis is the literal truth. Let’s look at the nature of the Ark.

The ship was six times as long as it was wide, with three decks and an opening in the side 450 ft long X 50 by 30 ‘ high or  521 ‘ x  87’ by 52’ high, depending on what version of cubit you use for determining the size.

The largest wooden ship built to date was the six masted schooner Wyoming, which was built in 1909, and which was 450’ long. This ship sank, because at that size wood is not an effective building material, and it twists and warps. Bear in mind that Noah and his sons were building a vessel that was actually slightly larger, with bronze age tools, and were not experienced boat builders with university trained engineers structurally designing the vessel.

Now, inside this vessel all the creatures of the earth would be placed two by two. Genesis 7, mentions that 7 pairs of birds and “clean” species were put upon the ark, with one pair of each ”unclean” species (there are currently 10,000 bird species, which would mean 140,000 animals, which would be a tight squeeze as the generally given dimensions of the ark would allow as  average 1 ¾ foot cube per individual bird) and so conditions would have been pretty cramped. At the moment there are an estimated 8.7 million species, not including bacteria etc (Mora et al. 2011; http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001127). The biblical literalists talk about the Ark holding 7,000 to 16,000 species, including dinosaurs, and to get around the issue of size, it has been posited that the animals were all babies, in order to fit. In order for those species to have <I can see biblical literalists shudder at the thought> evolved into the number of species recorded today, approximately 6 species of animal would have had to have spontaneously arisen every 24 hours since the flood. Don’t get me started on the genetic bottlenecks involved.

Logistics of space and species diversity aside, Noah must have spent a long time travelling post flood, to, for example, taxi kangaroos from the middle east to Australia,  kiwi’s to New Zealand, and must also have repopulated North America with wildlife.

So to biblical literalists I say – WTF guys?!

Now if you wanted to take the biblical stories as folk history, the Mediterranean region has had a history of earthquakes and volcanic activity, and a tsunami or other geological event that may have led to a regional flood (hey perhaps there were minor earthquakes and Noah in his wisdom preempted an upcoming biggie on its way), and Noah built a preemptive boat to carry a diversity of agricultural livestock, and perhaps some local wildlife, well maybe that makes logical and scientific sense. But increasingly biblical fundamentalists are trying to crow bar a literal interpretation of Genesis 6-8 into science classes (for example see  http://ict.aiias.edu/vol_26A/26Acc_057-077.htm , http://noahsdinosaurs.wordpress.com/, http://christiananswers.net/kids/lesson-plans.html#noah, and for what to do if you encounter this issue see http://ncse.com/rncse/20/1-2/search-noahs-ark-science-curriculum for starters). It a literal interpretation of the Noah’s Ark story is to be included side by side with evolution in terms of validity you would have to disregard our current understanding of not only biology, but geology, paleontology, geography and quite frankly engineering and mathematics to boot.