Academic job interviews: don’t feel obliged to do everything you said you’d do

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Interview transparencies 2018-07-17 17.14.59

Last month I cleared out my office in preparation for our move to the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus.  Going through files I’d not opened in decades was a cathartic and occasionally emotional experience.  In one file I came across a box of OHP transparencies from the presentation I gave at my job interview in 1995!  (For younger readers, OHPs were just like PowerPoint, but you carried them around in a box….)

Anyway, the presentation (see photo above) at what was then Nene College of Higher Education set out what my research plans were going to be if I was offered the job. It’s interesting to look back on these research themes and consider whether I did actually do what I said I was going to do (go to my Publications page for details of the papers I’m referring to):

“Flowering phenology” – This was a large part of my PhD, which I had completed two years earlier.  At Northampton I did a bit of work,  including a big meta analysis with Mexican colleagues Miguel Munguia-Rosas and Victor Parra-Tabla, but nothing further, though I do have a lot of unpublished data that one day may see the light of, err, day….

“Pollination systems in the Asclepiadaceae” – I’ve done a lot of work on this plant family, including field work in South America and Africa, particularly with my German colleague Sigrid Liede-Schumann.  However Asclepiadaceae no longer exists as a separate family (it’s now a subfamily of Apocynaceae).  I have a large paper in press at the moment which assesses the diversity of pollination systems in the Apocynaceae; more on that when it’s published.

“Specialisation and generalisation in pollination systems” – yes, done lots on this too, including contributing to the Waser et al. (1996) Ecology paper that’s now racked up >1550 citations, plus assessing latitudinal trends in specialisation.  Still a major focus of my research, it’s an area where there are lots of questions still to be answered.

“Reproductive output [in plants]” – very little done since my doctoral work, though questions of annual variation in reproductive allocation were a big part of my PhD.  Has fallen by the wayside rather.

“Seed predation” – ditto – it was a major component of my PhD and I published a couple of things but then hardly touched the topic.  A shame in some ways as I still think it’s a fascinating topic.

“Pollinator behaviour” – I’ve done some work, mainly on birds and bees rather than the butterfly model system I proposed at the time, which was to work with Dave Goulson on a follow-up of a paper we published on floral constancy in Small Skipper butterflies.  This field has moved on hugely though, with some extremely sophisticated work being done with captive bumblebee colonies for instance.

Overall I think I’ve worked on about 50% of what I said I would do, which I’m more than comfortable with.  Because I’ve also done a whole bunch of stuff I never mentioned at interview, including work on pollinator conservation and interaction network analyses, both of which were hardly thought about in 1995.  There’s also research on the history of science that I was thinking about in the early 90s but which I didn’t present as a major research theme.

The moral of this story for anyone preparing for a job interview for an academic position is: Don’t think that you have to do all of the research that you say you’re going to do in the presentation.  Opportunities come and go, and interests wax and wane.  What is currently seen as exciting research may well, in 10 years time, be seen as old hat or a dead end, or have evolved in ways that provide you with fewer opportunities to contribute.  Prepare to be flexible, but don’t lie about your intentions.  In fact, as recently highlighted on the Dynamic Ecology blog, don’t lie about any aspect of getting an academic job!

One other thing: be realistic.  In retrospect I was too ambitious in the range of areas in which I wanted to do research, though they were all linked.  But over the course of 23 years it’s impossible to say how your research career will develop.  I’m looking forward to the next 23…. 🙂

 

The impact of building a new university campus on urban bird diversity and abundance: a seven-year study

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Over the past few years I’ve posted several pieces about how colleagues, students and myself have been monitoring one aspect of the environmental impact of the University of Northampton’s brand new 22 ha, £330 million Waterside Campus development.  Specifically we have been looking at how the construction work has affected bird diversity and abundance in and around the site: see my posts “An interim report on the Waterside bird surveys” and “Monitoring the impact of the new Waterside Campus“.

Our approach has been to repeat the baseline bird surveys (three winter and three spring) that were done in 2012/13 as part of the environmental impact assessment prior to work taking place.  The new campus opens this summer and, following our most recent set of surveys in April/May, it’s time to reveal our findings so far.  Here are the headlines:

The baseline surveys recorded a total of 52 bird species.  In the following graphs birds have been categorised according to their RSPB Red, Amber, Green status.  Four species from the original surveys remain unrecorded:  Marsh tit, Bullfinch, Collared dove, and Lesser whitethroat.  However at least two of these (Bullfinch and Collared dove) are still found within 1km of the site.

During the repeat surveys we have recorded an additional 25 species that were not found in the baseline surveys.  This is not surprising – bird assemblages are dynamic, given that most species are very mobile – but it’s still interesting to find that so many more species are finding homes in the area.  If the four “missing” species return then the potential full diversity of the site is at least 77 species:

Waterwide birds - RAG

However this overall good news story is more complex than it first appears.  In the graph below I have plotted the Simpson’s Index for each survey, with a LOESS regression showing 95% confidence limits.  Simpson’s Index combines the data on both the number of species and their abundance to provide an overall measure of the impact of the construction work.  It’s clear that during the main phase of construction the average bird diversity per survey dropped significantly.  Following the completion of the noisiest and most disruptive activities, diversity has started to return to its pre-construction levels:

Waterside Simpsons

This overall assessment hides a lot of detail; as you can see below, Green status birds have fared best, Amber status birds have done ok; Red status birds have fared worst, especially in spring, but better in winter:

Waterside red amber green

The bird diversity is not quite back to what it was, but overall our findings are very encouraging.  In the initial phases of the development we talked with the landscape architects about adding ecological value to Waterside by including more native trees, reed beds, wild flower meadows, etc.  We’ve yet to assess how these features will affect biodiversity on the site, including birds, but we might predict that the final diversity exceeds that of the original brownfield site.  With that in mind we will be doing at least one more cycle of three winter and three spring surveys during 2018/2019.

Long-term monitoring of this kind is almost never undertaken for infrastructure projects of this nature. Universities, I would argue, need to take a lead in promoting such activities and making then a common component of the planning process.  From this work I think that our main conclusion is that redevelopment of peri-urban brownfield sites such as this doesn’t have to mean a loss in biodiversity, at least not as far as the birds are concerned.  We also plan future surveys of mammals, plants and invertebrates to assess how they are doing.

My thanks to all the colleagues and students who have been involved in the work so far: Duncan McCollin, Janet Jackson, Joanne Underwood, Kirsty Richards, Suzy Dry, Charles Baker, Pablo Gorostiague, Andrew Hewitt.

To finish, here are some photographs that we took of the work being carried out so you can see the scale of what has been achieved at Waterside:

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An inordinate fondness for “an inordinate fondness for”: origin of an over-used title element

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Soldier beetles

There is an oft-told story about the biologist JBS Haldane.  Sitting with a group of theologians over dinner he was asked what his studies of the natural world had led him to conclude about God.  After a pause, Haldane replied “He has an inordinate fondness for beetles”.  The story is almost certainly apocryphal, though Haldane was fond of saying similar things – see this dissection of the evidence for example. 

True or not, it’s a nice story that does in fact say something profound about the Earth’s biodiversity: beetles (Coleoptera) are far more species-rich than almost any other Order of insects.  I say “almost” because the Dipterologists are convinced that the true flies (Diptera) have more species.  And they may well be correct given that flies are less well studied than beetles, and a 4 ha area of tropical forest in Costa Rica can support an astounding 4,332 species, with the prediction that many more would be found with further sampling.

Regardless of the accuracy of the quote and of the statistics underlying it, the phrase “an inordinate fondness for” has inspired quite a number of titles of academic papers, chapters, and books – here’s some examples:

Fisher (1988) An inordinate fondness for beetles. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

May (1989) Ecology – an inordinate fondness for ants. Nature

Evans & Bellamy  (1996) An inordinate fondness for beetles. Henry Holt & Co.

Rouse et al. (2018) An inordinate fondness for Osedax (Siboglinidae: Annelida): Fourteen new species of bone worms from California. Zootaxa

Sochaczewski (2016) An inordinate fondness for beetles. The hero’s journey of Alfred Russel Wallace. In: Naturalists, Explorers and Field Scientists In South-East Asia And Australasia. Book Series: Topics in Biodiversity and Conservation

Thomas et al. (2015) Charles A. Triplehorn: an inordinate fondness for darkling beetles. Coleopterists Bulletin

Vieira et al. (2014) Toward an inordinate fondness for stars, beetles and Lobophora? Species diversity of the genus Lobophora (Dictyotales, Phaeophyceae). New Caledonia Journal of Phycology

Clare et al. (2014) An inordinate fondness for beetles? Variation in seasonal dietary preferences of night-roosting big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus). Molecular Ecology

Dyer et al. (2014) New dimensions of tropical diversity: an inordinate fondness for insect molecules, taxa, and trophic interactions. Current Opinion in Insect Science

Kasson et al. (2013) An inordinate fondness for Fusarium: phylogenetic diversity of fusaria cultivated by ambrosia beetles in the genus Euwallacea on avocado and other plant hosts. Fungal Genetics and Biology

Mann et al. (2013) An inordinate fondness? The number, distributions, and origins of diatom species. Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology

Chase (2013) An inordinate fondness of rarity. PLoS Biology

Harmon (2012) An inordinate fondness for eukaryotic diversity. PLoS Biology

Hamuli & Noyes (2012) An inordinate fondness of beetles, but seemingly even more fond of microhymenoptera!  Newsletter of the International Society of Hymenopterists

Eide (2012) An “inordinate fondness for transporters” explained? Science Signaling

Snider et al. (2012) An inordinate fondness for rocks: roosting habits of bats at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Bat Research News

Longino & Snelling (2009) An inordinate fondness for things that sting. Journal of Hymenoptera Research

Maderspacher (2008) Genomics: an inordinate fondness for beetles. Current Biology

Sandvik (2006) An inordinate fondness for Mecopteriformia. Systematics and Biodiversity

Grove & Stork (2000) An inordinate fondness for beetles. Conference: Celebration Symposium on A World of Beetles: Canberra, Australia.

Ashworth, Buckland & Sadler (1997) Studies in Quaternary entomology: an inordinate fondness for insects. John Wiley.

Bamber & Błażewicz-Paszkowycz (2013) Another inordinate fondness: diversity of the tanaidacean fauna of Australia, with description of three new taxa. Journal of Natural History

I’m sure there’s other that I missed, but you get the idea.  The phrase “an inordinate fondness for” seems to be a bit over-used now and I wonder whether some of these papers might have benefitted from a more descriptive title?  The title one chooses for a paper or a book really matters – see this old Small Pond Science blog post on the topic.  I’m sure that there’s research published showing that papers with titles which describe their findings are more frequently cited but I can’t immediately find it.  Perhaps one of my readers knows?

Hunting the Chequered Skipper: an encounter with England’s latest species reintroduction project

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If you have been following recent conservation news on social media you’ll know that this week was an important one for invertebrates.  The Chequered Skipper, a butterfly last seen in England in 1976, has been reintroduced to the country as part of the Back From the Brink initiative.  The Chequered Skipper project is led by Butterfly Conservation and a team travelled to a site in Belgium earlier in the week where about 40 skippers were captured.  These insects were transported back to the UK where they were held overnight in mesh cages at a secret location in order to acclimatise them, then released into the wild.  The release was filmed as part of next week’s BBC Springwatch series – look out for it.

The exact location of the reintroduction is secret.  However I can tell you that it’s occurred in the Rockingham Forest area of north Northamptonshire, in habitat that (over the past couple of years) has been managed specifically for this reintroduction, in order to create a network of sites across which the species could disperse in the future.  This area was the last stronghold of the species in England prior to its extirpation.  No one knows why it went extinct here, but hung on and did well in Scotland, but it may relate to climate: 1976, as many of the middle-aged will remember, was a very hot, dry summer, and this butterfly likes it warm and humid.

Yesterday I had the privilege of seeing this reintroduction first hand when I visited the site with my colleague Dr Duncan McCollin.  Duncan and I are supervising a PhD student, Jamie Wildman, along with Prof. Tom Brereton, Head of Monitoring at Butterfly Conservation (BC), and the University of Northampton’s Visiting Professor in Conservation Science.  Jamie’s project will focus on understanding the habitat requirements for Chequered Skipper, and monitoring the success of the reintroduction.  I’m also hoping that it might be possible for Jamie to assess the role of this species as a pollinator of the plants it visits.  Butterflies as pollinators is a very under-researched area.

Here’s a shot of the Four Mus-skipper-teers* just before we set off to help BC volunteers to locate the skippers and record their behaviour:

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The day started unpromisingly.  It was cool and overcast, and little was flying except some hardy Common Carder Bees.  But around lunchtime things began to warm up and gradually the sun broke through and we started to see flying Lepidoptera that we excitedly chased, only to be disappointed by yet another Mother Shipton or Silver Y.  But no skippers.

As we encountered some of the BC volunteers who were also tracking the insects we were told that we had “just missed one” or that they “saw one down that ride, we marked the spot”.  One volunteer wanted to show me a photo of a Chequered Skipper that he’d just taken “so I could get my eye in”.  I politely refused; I wanted to see the real thing and didn’t want to jinx it with a digital preview.

Finally, our efforts were rewarded and we found the first skipper of several we later encountered.  The image at the head of this post is that butterfly, a sight that has not been seen in England in more than 40 years.  An exciting and privileged encounter.  The county Butterfly Recorder, David James (on the right in this next shot), is ecstatic that the reintroduction has occurred “on his patch” but also nervous at the responsibility it represents:

Skipper crew 2018-05-26 13.15.06

Later we spent time helping Jamie follow a female skipper who was showing egg-laying behaviour, moving slowly for short distances along a shrubby edge, occasionally nectaring on Bugle, and diving deep into the vegetation to (we hope) oviposit on grass leaves:

 

Skipper watching 2018-05-26 15.10.18

Although I’ve over-cropped this next image of the skipper on Bugle, I thought I’d leave it as I like the different textures and patterns, and the slightly blurry ambience:

Skipper nectaring 2018-05-26 13.06.08

The primary aim of Butterfly Conservation’s project is to return a small part of England’s lost biological heritage.  But it’s about more than just the Chequered Skipper.  It’s also about understanding how managing a network of sites for this flagship species can benefit other organisms.  The wide woodland rides that have been created are packed with plant species, amongst them at least five grasses that could be used as caterpillar food sources for the skippers, plus more than 20 nectar sources were flowering that they (and other flower visiting insects) could use.  Those other insects were plentiful too: over the day I spotted five species of bumblebees, several different day flying moths, lots of Dark-edged Bee Flies, and a few different solitary bees and syrphids flies.  We heard calling cuckoos, and four different warblers: chiffchaffs, garden warbler, whitethroats, and blackcaps.  Red kites (another incredibly successful species reintroduction) floated overhead skimming the treetops as they their cried to one another.

Rockingham Forest is a lovely part of Northamptonshire, well worth a visit.  The Chequered Skipper will be a wonderful addition to its biodiversity.  Of course there are no guarantees that the reintroduction part of the project will be a success, but if it isn’t it won’t be because of a lack of commitment from the people involved.  If the population does become established then in the future the location will be made public and butterfly enthusiasts will be able to come and pay homage to one of the few butterflies with a pub named after it.

 

*You get the puns you deserve on this blog…..

 

The explosion in orchids as houseplants: what does it tell us about how flowers evolve?

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One of the major trends in horticulture over the last 20 years or so has been the rise in popularity of orchids as house plants.  Orchids used to have a reputation as being delicate, choosy, costly things that needed expensive glasshouses, heating, and humidity systems to grow.  Some groups of orchids are certainly like that, but many are not (Orchidaceae is one of the two largest families of plants, after all).  These days it’s impossible to walk into any supermarket or department store and not see orchids for sale at a reasonable price, orchids that are tough and can withstand the relatively dry, centrally heated houses in which most of us in Britain live. 

The majority of these orchids are varieties of Phalaenopsis, the moth orchids.  Intensive hybridisation by commercial growers has meant that there is an almost inexhaustible range of flower colours, shapes, sizes and patterning available.  Take a look at this gallery of images and you’ll see what I mean, or go into a shop that sells such orchids and observe that almost no two are alike.

This is the stuff of natural selection: genetic variation in the phenotype that can be acted upon by a selective agent.  In this case it’s the growers of orchids who choose the most attractive types to sell and discard the others.  If this variation emerged in wild populations most of it would disappear over time, but some, just occasionally, would be selected for by a different group of pollinators and go on to form a new species.  This is much more likely to happen if the individuals with this variation are isolated from the rest of the population in time or space, for example if they flower later or have been dispersed to a distant valley or mountaintop (termed allopatric speciation).  But it can also happen within populations – sympatric speciation.

Back in 1996, near the start of this orchid explosion, one of my earliest papers was a speculative commentary in Journal of Ecology called “Reconciling ecological processes with phylogenetic patterns: the apparent paradox of plant-pollinator systems”.  It generated some interest in the field at the time and has picked up >250 citations over the years, mostly other researchers using it as supporting evidence for the discrepancies we see when trying to understand how flowers evolve within a milieu of lots of different types of potential pollinators selecting for possibly diverse and contradictory aspects of floral form.  In that paper I made a passing comment that I expected the reviewers to criticise, which they did not.  Once it was published I thought that perhaps other researchers in the field would critique it or use it as a jumping off point for further study, which has not really happened either.  This is what I wrote:

         “It appears that pollination systems are labile and may evolve quite rapidly….plant breeders can obtain a fantastic range of horticultural novelties through selective breeding over just a few generations.”

This is horticulture holding up a mirror to the natural world and saying: “This is how we do it in the glasshouse, look at the variety we can produce over a short space of time by selecting for flower forms; can nature do it as quickly, and if so what are the mechanisms?”  

I still believe that pollination ecologists could learn a lot from horticulture and there’s some fruitful (flowerful?) lines of enquiry that could be pursued by creative PhD students or postdocs.  Here’s one suggestion: part of the reason why these Phalaenopsis orchids are so popular as house plants is that they have very long individual flower life times, often many weeks.  Now we suspect that floral longevity is under strong selection; see for example research by Tia-Lynn Ashman and Daniel Schoen in the 1990s.  This showed that there is a negative correlation between rate of pollinator visitation and how long flowers stay open.  Plants with flowers that are not visited very frequently stay open much longer, for example the bird-pollinated flowers of the Canary Islands that may only be visited once or twice a day, and which can remain open for more than 20 days.  Is the floral longevity shown by these orchids (or other groups of plants that have been horticulturally selected) beyond the range found in natural populations?  If so, what are the underlying physiological mechanisms that allow such extreme longevity?  If not, does this mean that there is an upper limit to the lifespan of flowers, and if so, why?  

In the mean time I’m going to enjoy the orchids above that sit on our kitchen windowsill.  They actually belong to my wife Karin who has developed something of an interest in them in recent months.  The big spotty one is a late birthday gift for her that I picked up this morning from a local flower shop, and which stimulated this post as I was walking home.  I’d bet that we never see another one like it!

Speaking about plant-pollinator research and science blogging in Wageningen in May

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If any of you are near Wageningen University on 31st May I’m giving a talk about some of our recent research called “The macroecology and macroevolution of plant-pollinator interactions”.  It’s preceded by a workshop on the whys and hows of science blogging.  Details are in the poster.

Here are the abstracts for the talk and the workshop:

Macroecology and macroevolution of plant-pollinator interactions

Plant-pollinator relationships are an ecologically critical form of interaction that ensures the long-term survival of the majority of the world’s plants species, and contribute to a large fraction of global agricultural output.  In additiondiversity and abundance of biotically pollinated plant species can be an important determinant of the diversity of animals at higher trophic levels.

Despite that global significance, most studies of plant-pollinator interactions are done at a local level, involving populations and communities of species, over modest time scales.  The ways in which these local sets of interactions scale up to produce global macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns, and the processes underpinning them, will be explored using two case studies.

The first is a data set of 67 plant communities, ranging from 70ºN to 34ºS, with which we investigated the roles of biotic and abiotic factors as determinants of the global variation in animal versus wind pollination.  Factors such as habitat type, species richness, insularity, topographic heterogeneity, current climate and late-Quaternary climate change were investigated. The predictive effects of these factors on the proportion of wind- and animal-pollinated plants were examined (see: Rech et al. 2016 – Plant Ecology & Diversity 9: 253-262).

Since these results were published  we have increased the number of plant communities in our database to >90, and our findings seem to be robust to these additional data.  The dominant influence of contemporary climate on the relative importance of wind-pollinated species suggests that communities may be sensitive to future climate change.  Communities in areas that are predicted to become drier may in time contain more wind-pollinated plants which may in turn reduce the diversity of pollinator species that are present.  There may also be implications for the prevalence of human pollen allergies.  Future work will focus on these two areas.

The second case study uses a newly assembled database of pollinators of the family Apocynaceae (one of the ten largest families of flowering plants), supported by a molecular phylogeny of the major clades.  This database has been used to explore phylogenetic and biogeographic patterns of pollinator exploitation (Ollerton et al. in review).  The findings from this study challenge some long-held assumptions about convergent evolution, the role of rewards such as nectar, and the notion that some specialised pollination systems are evolutionary “dead ends”.  It also highlights the function of novel floral features in determining pollinator type and behaviour, such as the fused gynostegium and pollinia found in the subfamily Asclepiadoideae.  In summary, Apocynaceae is emerging as an important model family for understanding the ecology and evolution of plant-pollinator interactions.

 

Blogging for EEB: why bother?

A growing number of scientists in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) have their own blogs or post as guests on others’ blogs.  In this workshop we will explore motivations and strategies for blogging, and its advantages for early career researchers.  Why blog?  What does it do for one’s career?  Is it a distraction from actually doing science?  How does one build a blog readership?  We will also focus on two aspects that are sometimes seen as mutually exclusive: blogging as science outreach to the general public (sci-communication), versus blogging with other professional scientists in mind (sci-community).  As preparation for the seminar please read Saunders et al. (2017) Bringing ecology blogging into the scientific fold: measuring reach and impact of science community blogs

Why conservation is like paella: thoughts and photos from our Tenerife field trip

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A couple of days ago I posted a photograph on Facebook with a comment that “after a hot day of collecting data there’s nothing better than a nice big Tenerife paella!”:

Karin and the paella.jpg

My wife Karin and I had ended up in the small town of Candelaria, tired and hungry after sweating our way through the Malpais de Guimar  counting and measuring plants.  Big plates of hot food were just what we needed!

After I posted the image a Spanish colleague commented that the dish was “closer to being an arroz con cosas than a paella”.  The term translates as “rice with things” and is used to convey the fact that the original Valencian dish of paella has been bastardised and changed across the Spanish-speaking world, and no longer reflects its culinary tradition.  Knowing nothing of that culinary tradition I took a look at the Wikipedia entry for paella.  It makes for interesting reading, not least the fact that in the original dish one of the main ingredients was the meat of water voles and that the dish was cooked on an open fire fuelled by wood from orange and pine trees to give a distinctive smoky flavour.  There was also a lot of geographic variation in the dish, so what constitutes an authentic paella is debatable.

Although there was no sign of rodent flesh or naked flames in the dish that we ate, it was certainly delicious!  But the comment about arroz con cosas got me thinking about shifting baselines in cooking and conservation.

The idea of a shifting baseline is that expectations of what is “correct” or “normal” or “natural” change over time depending upon what each generation has experienced.  It’s been mainly applied in conservation; for example, the Lake District of England is seen by many as a “natural” landscape of rolling hills and low mountains, but originally it would have been covered in deciduous forest.  Likewise large parts of Tenerife contain a high proportion of alien plants (such as agave and prickly pear) but local people and visitors see this as natural.  The baseline of “naturalness” has shifted for people.  Returning these landscapes to their original condition would mean a drastic shift in the composition of the vegetation.  And what point do we return that condition to?  One hundred years ago?  One thousand?  Ten thousand?  It’s an issue that is widely debated in the conservation literature, especially in relation to rewilding.

Likewise, over time paella has evolved and been adapted by different chefs, and what is currently cooked in restaurants only partially reflects how the dish was originally cooked.  Other than for epicurean purists, our culinary expectations have changed.  There’s been a shift in the paella baseline.

Anyway, enough metaphorising, here are some photographs from our trip.  To set the context, University of Northampton students and staff, including Pablo Gorostiague who is visiting from Argentina, and colleagues from the University of Sussex (Maria Clara Castellanos and Chris Mackin), were out with us last week.  Then we bade them farewell on Sunday before moving on to do some field work.

Field work on the lava fields at Santiago del Teide:

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The landscape of Malpais de Guimar, which actually probably hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years:

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How many people can you fit around Pino Gordo, the largest Pinus canariensis on the island:

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The endemic Tenerife Blue Chaffinch:

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The cold, damp laurel forest:

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Team Nicotiana!  Helping Chris with locating Tree Tobacco populations for his PhD work:

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Pablito takes a break:

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The flowers, the bees, and the tractor: a true story

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Yesterday I was up and out early with colleagues and students to carry out the first of this season’s spring bird surveys of the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus – see my previous post on this topic.   We had finished one stretch of the survey and were walking back along the path next to Midsummer Meadow when I spotted a huge expanse of Red Dead-Nettle (Lamium purpureum), mixed in with some While Dead-Nettle (Lamium album):

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Both species produce a lot of nectar; as kids we would often suck it from the flowers of White Dead-Nettle, and they are just as attractive to bees and other pollinators:

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Sure enough, a quick survey showed that there were at least two species of bee working the flowers, Common Carder Bees (Bombus pascuorum), and male and female Hairy-footed Flower Bees (Anthophora plumipes) – here’s a shot of the female:

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Suddenly there was an exclamation from one of my colleagues: whilst I was focused on the bees he’d seen a tractor pulling a grass cutter coming towards us:

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It got closer…:

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…and closer…:

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…and we were sure it was going to mow this beautiful patch of wild flowers, and the bees, into oblivion:

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But it didn’t!  The driver carefully mowed round the patch and headed back the way he’d come:

Tractor 9 - 2018-04-18 08.26.33

A big relief!

Urban recreational grasslands like this clearly need to be managed by regular cutting, but this should be done strategically as these sorts of wild flower patches are important nectar and pollen sources for urban pollinators.  They are especially critical at this time of year when resources are needed to build up colony numbers in the social species like Common Carder Bee.  I don’t know who manages Midsummer Meadow – presumably contractors working on behalf of Northampton Borough Council?  But I hope that this is a conscious strategy by them to conduct “smart mowing” whereby they cut around flower patches like this even when they are not planted.  The bees (and I) thank you for it.

What to do with plastic plant labels? Here’s one idea.

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This spring Karin and I are continuing to develop our garden which I have previously talked about in relation to the Big Garden Birdwatch and Renovating a Front Garden, for instance, as well as various posts about the pollinators I’m recording (search the blog for “garden pollinators” and you’ll see what I mean).

The main task over the past couple of weeks has been to demolish the old chicken run and plant it as a mixed border that will give interest all year round.  We’ve put in some plants that have been hanging around in pots for a few years waiting for a space to open up, plus bought clearance-area bulbs and perennials such as crocuses, narcissi, hyacinths and hellebores at knock-down prices (they look a bit scrappy at the moment but will be great next year).  Plus we’ve spent a bit of money on some nice flowering shrubs and small fruit trees.

The plants we’ve bought invariably come in a plastic pot which we re-use for propagating and giving plants away to friends.  However they usually also come with a plastic label that tells us at least the name of the species and variety, plus often cultivation details and a colour image.  The question is: what to do with these labels?  The obvious thing is to leave them on the plant or push them into the ground next to it to remind us what it is.  The problem with this is that (in my experience) the labels never last more than a year or two before the ink fades.  Over time the plastic starts to break down and you end up with fragments of the label in the soil.  There’s a lot of discussion online about how harmful different types of plastic can be, but there’s no doubt that some types can release toxins into the soil.  Regardless, it seems to us a bad idea to allow these plastic labels to disintegrate in the garden.  It also feels like a waste of resources: those labels took oil and energy to produce.

This year the BBC’s Gardeners’ World series is looking at ways to reduce the use of plastic in the garden, which is a good idea and another reason why I love the programme, as I’ve previously written about on the blog.  That got me thinking about the best way to deal with plastic plant labels, what else can you do with them other than leave them in the garden?

I suspect that if we put them out with the weekly plastic recycling they’ll just be landfilled, so that’s not an option.  However, like a lot of gardeners we keep a log book of what we’ve been planting, but we’re a bit lazy about keeping it up to date.  So we’ve taken to slipping those labels between the pages of the log book to remind us of what we have put into the garden.  The book is one of those with an elasticated retainer to keep it closed, so the labels don’t fall out when we move it on and off the shelf.  Hopefully the labels will last for years in there away from damp and light, and be a useful source of information for us in the future.

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If you’ve curious, here’s how that part of the garden looked before we started working on it; everything you see here has been re-used or recycled in one way or another:

20180330_105640.jpg And this is what it looks like now; we still have more plants to add and hopefully the border will fill out come the summer:

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Advice to students: choose your email address carefully (and think about changing it)

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At symbol

Some years ago a first year undergraduate emailed me from his personal email address which began “iwillrapeyou@xxxxx”.  I’m sure the student and his mates thought this was hilarious when he set up his first email account as a young teenager.  I politely suggested to him that maybe now, as a grown-up interacting with other grown-ups who were supporting his education, it might be time to change it.  “Do you really intend to submit applications for jobs using that address?” I asked.

To his credit he agreed and did change it.  That’s the only time I’ve said to a student that they probably ought to change their personal email address, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that students need to consider what their email addresses are saying about them to the wider world.  However it’s not a topic I see discussed very often

Looking at the addresses of some recent students I see things such as “buttercup123@xxxx”, “reds360@xxxx”, “halilulyah247@xxxx”, “canadiankckrz@xxxx”, “MAXSAMJAM@xxxx”, “beaniethemanmusic96@xxxx”, “iamwoody22@xxxx”, “SAVETHEPANDAS@xxxx”.  Now none of these addresses are as obnoxious or inflammatory as the first example I gave, but all of them say something about the person behind the email address, whether they are aware of it or not.  These addresses tell the wider world that the person who sent an email is a football fan, or an environmentalist, or a music fan, or has a wacky nickname, etc.  And it’s fine to be all of those things.  But what they lack is any kind of professionalism, they all sound like they are emails from teenagers, not grown ups.

So my advice to all students (undergraduate and postgraduate) would be: think carefully about your email address and what it is saying about you, and consider whether that’s the perception you wish to give to prospective employers.

And while you’re at it you might also want to reconsider including your birth year in the address: that’s an important piece of personal information that could be of use to unscrupulous cyber criminals.