Split the kipper: snowfall thoughts of breakfast, fish and childhood games

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Karin and I had kippers for breakfast this morning, a satisfying and warming treat on this cold Sunday as we watched the snow fall into the garden, softening the edges and hedges:

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I do like a nice kipper! Smoking fish to make it last longer has been repeatedly discovered and transmitted as an idea across cultures, and represents a fascinating intersection where wild biodiversity meets human ingenuity. The north east of England, where I grew up, has a great and ancient tradition of smoking herrings to preserve a portion of the catch, a practice that may have originated with the Vikings who colonised that part of the country over one thousand years ago.

Of all of the North Sea’s edible biodiversity I feel most comfortable eating herring; although there were issues with over-fishing in the 1960s and 70s, current stocks look to be being managed sustainably. The most up to date information I’ve found is in a Norwegian government report from which I took this graph:

Kippers have had subtle, but interesting, influences on culture, spawning phrases, songs and games. To be “done up like a kipper”* is to be taken advantage of by someone or bamboozled, whilst a “kipper tie” is a fashion hangover from the 60s and 70s, named for its broad proportions. Of course Supertramp sang about having kippers for breakfast, particularly in Texas “cos everyone’s a millionaire”. That strikes me as an odd line as herrings (in whatever form) have always been considered a cheap dish. Though I suppose importing them from Craster to Dallas could be quite expensive.

Back to the north east and my childhood, where we played a game called “Split the Kipper”. This involved standing opposite a friend on a grassy field and taking it in turns to throw a knife near to your opponent’s foot. If it stuck into the ground then your opponent had to slide their foot to that point. This continued until one of you had your legs so far apart that you fell over – the kipper had been split! Not the safest game for kids but I never knew anyone to get injured playing it. Like all the best games the point was not just to win but to win beautifully: inching your adversary’s legs apart with accurate knife throws gradually ramped up the tension of the game. I wonder where the game originated? Is it too fanciful to imagine that it was brought over by the Vikings?

The snow is still falling – wonder what’s for lunch….?

*Whatever you do, don’t search the Urban Dictionary for the definition of the word “kippered”….

Something for Blue Monday – the only known blue flowered asclepiad

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Tweedia caerulea - OBG 2014-11-06 11.33.14

Today is Blue Monday – reckoned to be the most depressing day of the year, though I’m in a very good mood: just back from a great 9am seminar with my final year students taking the Biodiversity & Conservation module. They presented some really interesting, diverse and thought provoking papers as part of their assessment for this module; it’s a great group to teach.

But if you are suffering from the blues this morning, here is a photograph to cheer you up. As far as I am aware Tweedia caerulea (also known as Oxypetalum coeruleum) is the only known blue flowered asclepiad (that’s to say, a member of the family Apocynaceae subfamily Asclepiadoideae – what used to be the family Asclepiadaceae*).

No one is sure why blue is such a rare colour within the asclepiads (and indeed the Apocynaceae as a whole) and it may be connected to the pollination system of this plant. However we don’t know what pollinates Tweedia caerulea in the wild so it’s hard to test that idea; other species within this group are variously pollinated by wasps, bees, flies, moths, etc. Truly blue flowers (as opposed to some shade of purple or violet) are relatively uncommon generally amongst the flowering plants and the source of much interest and excitement in those groups where they do occur, for example the Himalayan Poppies (Meconopsis).

Tweedia caerulea is easy to grow from seed but not so easy to get through the winter in the UK, so in the past I’ve grown it as an annual in the garden. Apart from the colour, one of the other reasons I like this plant is that it’s named after the 19th century plant collector John Tweedie whose life I’ve been researching over the past 20 years or so – see this paper for example.

*The asclepiads are my favourite group of plants, and one that I’ve published quite a bit of research on, so I was a bit miffed when the taxonomic rank of the family was relegated to subfamily. But it makes evolutionary sense and now gives me a much larger family of plants on which to research, so every cloud etc. etc.

Vermicide: how do you deal with earworms?

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Warning: biodiversity content almost nil; bad language content significant.

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Language fascinates me, and one of the things that I find particularly intriguing is the way in which metaphors and analogies from the natural world find their way into our writing and speech. We talk of a “bird’s eye view” or being as “slow as a snail”; say that “from little acorns large oaks grow”, and we are as “ravenous as wolves”.

Which leads me to earworms. Nothing to do with real worms of course, but fragments of music that worm their way into your consciousness and stay fixed there, repeating over and over and over and over…….

According to Wikipedia other names include brainworm, sticky music, stuck song syndrome, and Involuntary Musical Imagery, but I’ve always known them as earworms. And I’ve suffered from them for as long as I can remember; typically every couple of days I’ll have part of a song stuck in my head that I can’t get rid of. In recent days it’s been “Long-haired Lover From Liverpool” by Little Jimmy Osmond (which I heard on a Top of the Pops Christmas Special); Joni Mitchell’s “River”; and “The Rain Song” by Led Zeppelin that featured on a YouTube playlist on New Year’s Day.

Earworms get worse when I’m stressed or when I have a hangover: indeed if I have drunk too much the night before (a rare occurrence these days) I will wake up with a headache, nauseous, AND SOME FUCKING SONG BOUNCING LOUDLY AROUND IN MY BRAIN LIKE A KANGAROO* ON AMPHETAMINES!

At their worst these earworms can last for days and be very hard to shift. They can also wake me up in the middle of the night and stop me from getting back to sleep. The only method that I’ve found that can suppress them is to sing another song to myself that masks the offending song. After much experimentation I find that “In My Time of Dying”, another Led Zeppelin track, is the most effective, perhaps because it’s slow and not especially catchy.

(Bugger, my son James is tidying his bedroom and playing music and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” has just come on – almost guaranteed to get stuck in my head!)

If you also suffer badly from earworms I’d be interested to know what methods you use to shift the little blighters: what works for you?

*See what I did there?

The holly, the mistletoe, and the pollinators: an update on an old story

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Holly and mistletoe are two of Europe and Scandinavia’s most iconic plants, steeped in folklore and cultural significance, and redolent of the dark days of mid-winter and its festivities. Last year, together with my colleagues Jim Rouquette and Tom Breeze, I published a study of the value that pollinators add to the wholesale auction prices of these two plants using data from the UK’s largest holly and mistletoe auction that has been held in the town of Tenbury Wells for 160 years.

Holly and mistletoe are excellent subjects for a study of the added value that pollinators bring to a crop as they are 100% reliant on pollination by a range of wild bees, flies and other insects. This is because both species are dioecious with separate sex plants, therefore any berries produced on a female plant must be due to the activities of pollinators.

Here’s a link to last year’s blog post about that paper and here’s the reference for the paper itself, with a link to the journal where you can download it for free:

Ollerton, J., Rouquette, J.R. & Breeze, T.D. (2016) Insect pollinators boost the market price of culturally important crops: holly, mistletoe and the spirit of Christmas. Journal of Pollination Ecology 19: 93-97

The data set in that paper only developed the story up to 2015 as the 2016 auctions took place too late to include within our analyses. However I’ve collected the auction reports for 2016 and 2017 and added them to the data set. The results are graphed below*.

The auction price for holly with berries is rather volatile, but on average over this time period, berried holly has twice the commercial value of holly without berries. Indeed in the last auction of 2017, holly without berries failed to sell, hence the value of £0.00. The very wintry weather on the auction day reduced the number of buyers, but nonetheless, to have no one bidding for the unberried holly was unprecedented.

Holly auction prices plot

The pattern for mistletoe is rather similar, but in this case the value of berried material is less volatile than that of holly, and the average value is around three times greater than for auction lots of unberried plants.

Mistletoe auction plot

This data set offers a unique insight into the value of pollinators for two culturally important crops (all other such studies have focused on food or, rarely, fibre crops). I’ll continue to archive the auction reports and to update these analyses every few years in the run up to Christmas. If anyone is interested in accessing the data, please drop me a line.

If you want to learn more about the botany of different types of mistletoe follow this link to Mike Fay’s blog post on the Kew website.

Also worth checking out is Manu Saunders’ recent piece highlighting some old Christmas-themed blog posts.

Yesterday was my last day in the office, I’m now officially on leave and looking forward to a restful Christmas and New Year break. Season’s greetings to all of my readers and thank you for your continued support and interest in biodiversity!

*There are three auctions each year and therefore three data points per annum, except for 2016 when only two auction reports were produced.

Local and regional specialization in plant–pollinator networks: a new study just published

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Euphorbia canariensis pollinators 2016-04-29 17 58 00

A fundamental feature of the natural world is that no species exists in isolation: all organisms interact with other organisms during their lives. These interactions take many forms and the outcome varies with the type of interactions. For example predator-prey interactions are clearly negative for the prey species, but positive for the predator. Other interactions result in positive outcomes for both species, including relationships between pollinators such as bees, birds and flies, and the flowers that they pollinate. An important feature of such interactions is how specialized or generalized it is; that is, how many different pollinators are actually involved in pollinating a particular type of flower, or how many types of flower does a specific pollinator visits.

In a newly published study, I have collaborated with colleagues from Denmark and Brazil to assess how local specialization (within a community) relates to regional specialization (across communities) using two separate data sets from the Brazilian rupestrian grasslands and Canary Island/North African succulent scrub vegetation.

Here’s the citation with a link to the paper (drop me a line if you can’t access it and need a PDF):

Carstensen, D.W., Trøjelsgaard, K., Ollerton, J. and Morellato, L.P.C. (2017) Local and regional specialization in plant–pollinator networks. Oikos (in press) doi:10.1111/oik.04436

The abstract is as follows:

“Specialization of species is often studied in ecology but its quantification and meaning is disputed. More recently, ecological network analysis has been widely used as a tool to quantify specialization, but here its true meaning is also debated. However, irrespective of the tool used, the geographic scale at which specialization is measured remains central. Consequently, we use data sets of plant–pollinator networks from Brazil and the Canary Islands to explore specialization at local and regional scales. We ask how local specialization of a species is related to its regional specialization, and whether or not species tend to interact with a non-random set of partners in local communities. Local and regional specialization were strongly correlated around the 1:1 line, indicating that species conserve their specialization levels across spatial scales. Furthermore, most plants and pollinators also showed link conservatism repeatedly across local communities, and thus seem to be constrained in their fundamental niche. However, some species are more constrained than others, indicating true specialists. We argue that several geographically separated populations should be evaluated in order to provide a robust evaluation of species specialization.”

This is what those two different habitats look like:

If you would like more information on plant-pollinator networks, including details of an edible game for Christmas (!), follow this link to the standingoutinmyfield blog.

Pollinators, flowers, natural selection and speciation: a virtual conference

Pollinator biodiversity and why it’s important: a new review just published – download it for free

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In a new review paper that’s just been published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics I have looked at the question of just how diverse the pollinators are, and why pollinator biodiversity is ecologically important and therefore worthy of conservation. I’ve taken a deep time and wide space approach to this, starting with what the fossil record tells us about when animal pollination evolved and the types of organisms that acted as pollinators in the past (the answer may surprise you if you’re unfamiliar with the recent paleontological literature on this topic). Some of the most prominent biogeographical patterns have been highlighted, and I have tried to estimate the global diversity of currently known pollinators. A conclusion is that as many as 1 in 10 described animal species may act as pollen vectors.

As well as this descriptive part of the review I’ve summarised some recent literature on why pollinator diversity matters, and how losing that diversity can affect fruit and seed set in natural and agricultural contexts. Extinction of pollinator species locally, regionally, and globally should concern us all.

Although I was initially a little worried that the review was too broad and unfocused, having re-read it I’m pleased that I decided to approach the topic in this way. The research literature, public policy, and conservation efforts are currently moving at such a fast pace that I think it’s a good time to pause and look at the bigger picture of what “Saving the Pollinators” actually means and why it’s so important. I hope you agree and I’d be happy to receive feedback.

You can download a PDF of the review entitled Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation by following that link.

Pollination ecologists should also note that in this same volume of Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics there’s a review by Spencer Barrett and Lawrence Harder called The Ecology of Mating and Its Evolutionary Consequences in Seed Plants. If you contact those authors I’m sure they’d let you have a copy.

Who was the father of biogeography? Let poetry decide! UPDATED

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Over at the Dynamic Ecology blog yesterday, Jeremy Fox posted in the weekly Friday Links feature a piece about clerihews – four line poems about an eminent individual that follows a strict AA BB rhyming structure. Jeremy’s challenge of “+1000 Internet Points for anyone who writes a clerihew about an ecologist in the comments”, of course, was like a proverbial red rag. The clerihews came rolling in, including some great contributions, and some dodgy rhymes… I contributed a couple:

Darwin’s natural selection
Was received with circumspection
But with development of society
Evolution replaced piety

and

Following the theories of Darwin
Science and religion were a-warrin’
But after natural selection
Came more balanced introspection

But then I suddenly found myself in a clerihew face-off with Brazilian ecologist Rafael Pinheiro, which is too good not to preserve for posterity:

RP:

Look to this poor man called Wallace
He was not born and raised in a palace
But don’t get fooled by this misleading photography
The man is the father of biogeography

JO:

Von Humboldt travelled and mapped plants
When schoolboy Wallace wore short pants
So in a more accurate historiography
Von Humboldt’s the father of biogeography

RP:

Humboldt came first, I will not deny
But Wallace is the father and I’ll tell you why
He was not the first to study species distribution
But the one who explained it through evolution

JO:

Sure, Hooker embraced Darwin’s evolution
And came up with a very modern conclusion
But fatherhood is not about interpretation
It’s about the initial insemination

Jeremy award us 10,000 Internet Points and we agreed to call it a draw 🙂 Thanks to Jeremy for the initial challenge and to Rafael for being such a good sport. It was a lot of fun.

UPDATE:

Jeremy has also highlighted the contributed clerihews with this post on Dynamic Ecology, to which Rafael has commented:

Jeff Ollerton studied pollinators and plants
When graduateboy me read his papers wearing short pants
So, I must admit, I am happy to be the one
Who faced him in the first clerihew slam

To which there’s only one possible response:

Rafael Pinheiro it’s been my pleasure
To trade these clerihews at leisure
But your last one, truth be told
Makes me feel old

One of the effects of joining Twitter is that I post on my blog less often

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Back in November 2016, following a lot of soul searching and weighing of pros and cons, I joined Twitter. I was worried about spending too much time on social media, getting into conflicts with trolls, etc. In any event I thought I’d give it a go and have enjoyed it much more than I expected to. As much as anything else it’s opened up opportunities for new contacts, and highlighted research and ideas that I’d probably not have otherwise known about, plus Twitter is very amusing on occasion. So I’ve stuck with it for about one year and don’t imagine that I’ll give it up soon. However there has been one negative aspect to my use of Twitter: the rate of posting on my blog has gone down substantially, as you can see on this graph:

Although the number of posts per month on my blog has always been a bit erratic, until about a year ago it was trending upwards. After I joined Twitter, however (marked by a red dashed line on the graph above) my rate of blogging has fallen a lot.

The reason for this is, I think, that it’s now easier and faster for me to tweet about a topic than it is to write about it in a post. I can think of a number of cases where what would normally have been developed into a post has been dealt with in far fewer words. One recent example is a tweet I put out about the difference between pollinator “effectiveness” and “efficiency”, which some pollination ecologists are still using as interchangeable terms years after the field decided that they were two different things – see Ne’eman et al. (2010) Biological Reviews.

That tweet came out of frustration with a manuscript that I was reviewing and normally I would have written four or five hundred words on the topic. This time, however, a short tweet, linked to that paper, was enough to get my message out.

The problem is, of course, that I can’t develop my ideas and arguments in sufficient detail on Twitter and I think that’s a drawback, for me at least. Plus my blog is becoming a storage area for writing and ideas that I’m recycling in various places, including review articles, and it concerns me that I might be storing up less and less material.

I’m not sure what I can do about this other than try to post more often, but it’s ironic that my blogging seems to be tailing off over the same period where I and some colleagues wrote a paper on the importance of blogging. Hopefully writing this will give me a kick in the ass to post more and tweet less: time will tell.