When whales die and sink to their watery graves, they bring to the seafloor bones rich in those fatty lipids. Thousands of bone-eating females, each just few millimeters high, will infest a whale carcass. So many will accumulate, the whale bones will appear to be covered in a circa 1970’s red shag rug-a rug that eats bones, has harems, and secretes acids, but otherwise a normal shag rug.  Originally, and with good reason, it was thought that Osedax was clearly a whale-fall specialist. The core of whale bones consists of a matrix rich in lipids – up to 60 percent.

But what about something wholly different?  Before the age of large marine mammals, large marine reptiles dominated the oceans. During the Mesozoic Era, rising to dominance in the Triassic and Jurassic periods, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and nothosaurs represented a diverse group of large marine predators terrorizing smaller creatures in the dark depths. The ichthyosaur Shonisaurus may have reached lengths of up to 21 meters in the Late Jurassic and Plesiosaurus may been 12–15 meters in length. The ancient sunken carcasses of these massive marine reptiles may have hosted ancient Osedax. We do know that prehistoric ichthyosaur falls are known to support communities similar to modern whale falls. 

Not to be outdone by other scientists in throwing random things on the seafloor to see what will eat it, in early 2019 I placed not one but three dead alligators on the seafloor in the deep Gulf of Mexico.  Alligators are nice modern analogues of the giant reptiles that once lurked in paleo-oceans and in my current state of Louisiana…well…readily available. And because we could, we place a packet of cow bones down there as well. 53 days later, my team and I visit the alligator carcass to find nothing but bones.  The reddish hue of fuzziness on them indicates Osedax are present.  On May 3, 2019, we overnight some of the collected bones out to California so Greg Rouse can inspect them in his lab and confirm their presence.  We wait patiently for an email from Greg.  On May 23, we get an email from him with the subject “Two new species :-)”. We are elated! Indeed, he finds females with well-developed ovaries and eggs.  Using genetics, he determines that the Osedax on the alligator and cow bones are both new species, previously unknown to science.

Fast forward to today when I get an email with the subject “Your species”. That Osedax from the alligator is named after me.

Osedax craigmcclaini n. sp. is named for Dr. Craig McClain, an esteemed deep-sea biologist and colleague who led the experimental alligator fall project (McClain et al., 2019) and provided the Osedax specimens for this study.

New Species of Osedax (Siboglinidae: Annelida) from New Zealand and the Gulf of Mexico

The post Introducing a New Species: My Namesake, a New Bone-Eating Worm first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The video is the actual video from my research group’s dive with a remotely operated vehicle in the deep Gulf of Mexico. The background on all this alligatorfall project and why a bunch of scientists would sink an alligator in the first place is in our previous post. You can also read Atlas Obscura’s great write up on our work.

The post The Video of Giant Isopods Eating an Alligator in the Deep Sea You Must Watch! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

And now I’m wondering if my lab and research group should adopt the same. I’ve worked hard to try to establish a specific lab culture for my group and to give us focus but this remains far from a set of operating principles.

As far as the research mission, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration recently from the Hedgehog Concept and hitting the sweet spot.

Three Circles of the Hedgehog Concept. pic.twitter.com/F4hQuRw31Q

— Blufrog Studios (@Blufrog_Studios) July 9, 2014

Adapted for scientific use…

1. Understand the science and research you are truly passionate about.
2. Identify the science and research you do better than anyone else or perhaps better the science and research that is unique to you
3. Determine the science and research that leads to the greatest impact as you choose to define it (e.g. publications, citations, conservation or policy impact, public knowledge, significant contribution to knowledge, etc.)

And to be honest, scientists most often focus 2 and 3 and forget completely to fully engage what they are passionate about. By the way, I am thinking my sweet spot is resarch at the interstection of energetics, body size, and biodiversity.

As I set squarely in the middle of my scientific career, I am thinking more about re-engaging my passion for science. With this thinking, I have set toward developing a set of core values for my research group, a set of operating principles that drives the actions and behaviors of myself, research scientists, graduate students, technicians, and undergraduates who all work in my lab.

As a first crack, I came up with these

1. Do awesome science with awesome people. And to make that happen…
2. Awesome science requires safe spaces for awesome people.
3. Awesome science is open and inclusive. Awesome people are diverse.
4. Awesome science stems from being hard on ideas but easy on awesome people.
5. Awesome science require playfulness.
6. Awesome science stems from the pursuit of answers above the pursuit of papers, prestige, and payment

And now I want your feedback! What are your lab’s core principles? What is missing from this list?

Hedgehog Photograph By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=950134

The post What Are Your Research Group’s Scientific Core Values? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The early years

1. Could your parents afford to live on the good side of town? The one with the right schools? Did they send you to that elite private school?

There are clear advantages to attending a top-tier high school as is evidenced in a study of college admissions data. The Harvard Crimson recently reported that in Harvard’s Class of 2017, 6 percent of admitted students came from only 10 high schools. Eleven percent of high schools with students admitted to Harvard sent 36 percent of students, while 74 percent of schools sent only one student. [link]

2. For Christmas, your birthday, or because, did you get your own computer?

In every country, students reporting “rare” or “no use” of computers at home score lower than their counterparts who report frequent use…gains in educational performance are correlated with the frequency of computer use at home. [link]

3. Could they afford for you to participate in all those afterschool STEM activities with their fees and hidden expenses?

Afterschool programs can have an impact on academic achievement. Improved test scores are reported in evaluations of The After-School Corporation (TASC) programs in New York City (Reisner, White, Birmingham, & Welsh, 2001; White, Reisner, Welsh, & Russell, 2001) and in Foundations, Inc. elementary school programs (Klein & Bolus, 2002). A more recent longitudinal study showed significant gains in math test scores for elementary and middle-school students who participated in high-quality afterschool programs (Vandell, Reisner, & Pierce, 2007) [link]

Those who are admitted to UC are likely to participate in more precollege activities. The study also shows that there is a positive correlation between student precollege participation in these activities and their college experience, academic and civic engagement although the relationship is rather weak. The results also reveal that the participation in extracurricular activities and volunteer and community services is a significant predictor on first-year GPA and persistence. The more activities students participate in, the higher their first-year GPA is and the more likely they persist with their current college programs. [link]

However, we found that a substantial portion of students, particularly those in lower-income groups, are not fully engaged in a well-rounded school experience that includes activities — and too often, it’s because of cost. [link]

4. Did they send you to that cool summer camp?

Steven Infanti, associate vice president for admissions at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, said a STEM camp experience is something that makes him take a closer look at a student’s application. “When I look at an applicant who has a 2.5 [GPA], which would be kind of a borderline admit for us, but I see on his application, I participate in this camp…that shows a lot of initiative and someone who has a passion,” he said. [link]

5. Did you get to travel to the ocean on vacation? Could you afford to travel abroad?

From a prominent university’s website,

High school study abroad programs, and even international vacations, are fantastic opportunities for cross-cultural understanding, learning, and personal growth. For that reason, they can certainly be helpful experiences to draw on when applying for colleges. [link]

6. Did you get to learn to scuba dive?

Being a scuba certified is not at all recquired for being a marine biologist.  Although I do scuba dive and am a divemaster, I rarely if ever use it for my research.  However, many “career advice” websites online definitely recommend it.

There are no certification requirements for marine biology. However, because diving is a large part of marine biology, many schools recommend that students become open water certified and take a course in scientific diving. [link]

7. Did you get to participate in all kinds of wonderful experiences because you had free time? Were you blessed and did not have to work a full- or part-time job?

Data was collected from a very large sample of students when they were in 8th, 10th and 12th grades, and again two years after they graduated. The researchers compared groups by controlling for their economic background, ethnicity, gender, and prior educational experiences. They measured outcomes including standardized test scores, school grades, courses taken, attendance, staying out of trouble, educational and occupational aspirations, post-secondary employment and college enrollment. In general, results showed a pattern of negative effects for students who worked during high school. In particular, working in the final year of high school had a significantly negative effect. These negative effects occurred even from working a small number of hours per week… working during high school undermines students’ commitment to and identification with school and subverts traditional academic goals. [link]

8. Could you even afford to stay in high school?

Using data from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey, researchers at the Urban Institute found that nearly a third of the 563,000 teenage dropouts left school to work. These 16- to 18-year-olds were disproportionately male and Hispanic, and ended their education either at the beginning of high school or nearing the end. Roughly 75 percent of them are native-born Americans, the new study said. [link]

The college years

9. Could you afford not to go to the best school?

Of the 113 Supreme Court Justices, 40% of them attended an Ivy League university. Currently, all of the nine Justices went to an Ivy League. In CNN’s top 100 startups list, 34 of the CEOs went to Harvard…A study conducted by the US Department of Education in 2015 revealed that a decade after enrolling in a four-year college degree, the average income of a typical student is $40,500 USD a year…at the very least you’ll receive on average $19,200 USD more than the standard US college graduate [by attending an Ivy Leage University] [link]

Even when there isn’t a policy of exclusion, students at elite universities join networks of professors and alumni whose members offer each other information, support, and advice that isn’t available to outsiders. [link]

In a corporate environment that still largely favors white men, an Ivy League college degree opens doors that would otherwise remain closed for most. In recent years, I’ve interviewed successful people in a variety of industries. Among them: One of two black presidents in the history of the Harvard Law Review (the other was Barack Obama) who now runs a multi-billion dollar private equity firm, and a Yale graduate Latina female CEO of the Girl Scouts. In both cases, intelligence and perseverance got them far. But they also both agreed that an Ivy League education afforded them pivotal opportunities for their careers today, decades after graduation from those hallowed institutions. For both minorities – the Ivy “stamp of approval” became the first in a long list of achievements. [link]

Tech founders with Ivy League degrees also tended to start companies that produced higher revenue and employed more workers than the average, the report added. [link]

And while Princeton and some other Ivy League schools have generous financial aid programs, this is not the case among all universities.  It is near impossible to get an accurate view of what a typical amount of loans a student is burdened with after four years.  Take Duke University,  several reports suggest the average student loan debt is $25,000.  However, take note of the term average.  Only 37% of the student body is receiving Federal Student Loans.  This begs the question, how is this average actually calculated?  In my time at Duke as a faculty member, the dozen or so students worked in my lab as part of the Federal Work Study Program, meaning they come from lower and middle socioeconomic classes, were taken on $25,000 per year.  So pardon me if I don’t believe the average total student loan debt for Ivy League schools is low.  These universities have large student populations who can afford to attend and not take out student loans as reflected in that 37% amount.

Just keep in mind that low-income students cannot afford 95% of colleges.

10. Did they tell you that they would meet 100% of your financial aid only for you to realize that meant pile you up with school loans and work study?

Yeah me too.

11. Could you afford to leave your home and not financially help your elderly, sick, or young family members while you pursue your dreams? Could you afford not financially support your spouse and children?

Likely to be parents of young children: Roughly half of independent college students, or 4.8 million students, are parents of dependent children. Seven in 10 student parents are women, with women of color in college are especially likely to be student parents.

Twice as likely to be living in poverty: 42 percent of independent students live at or below the federal poverty line, compared with 17 percent of dependent students. In fact, nearly two in three college students living in poverty (72 percent) are independent. [link]

12. Could you afford to move to college? What about all those hidden fees and costs? Parking? Transportation?

Almost 74% said extra activities like study abroad programs and unpaid internships are important to reaching professional goals. But the same percentage (74%) had to turn down such activities due to a lack of money.  Expenses beyond tuition were higher than they thought, too. The top 5 expenses students said were “much more than expected” include: Textbooks: 63% Housing: 56% Food: 46% Exam prep classes: 45% Moving: 41% [link]

13. Could you afford your books?

the average cost of college textbooks has risen four times faster than the rate of inflation over the past 10 years. That has caused 65 percent of students to skip buying required texts at some point in their college career because of a lack of affordability. [link]

14. Could you afford a computer?

Yeah its time to update that one from high school. It should be obvious how not having your own computer could be damaging but take this one students perspective (also see this post),

The problem with not having a laptop comes with online assignments. It may be even more for me as a cs major, but even in gen ed courses we often had to submit assignments online or do readings online which is easier with a laptop. You can survive without one as you can use the library computers at your college or if you have a desktop you can do all your online things there- but it would be easier to just whip out your laptop wherever you are (cafeteria, empty classroom waiting for class to start, etc) to work on assignment [link]

15.  Could you afford the time for extracurricular activities, lectures, clubs, student events? Did you need to work a full- or part-time job while attending college?

More than two-thirds of independent students work on top of going to school, and the majority work at least 20 hours per week…39 percent of dependent students work at least 20 hours per week). [link]

16. Did you not participate in that marine biology volunteer opportunity because you needed to work?

Volunteer research that prevents a student from making money. Remember that most financial aid packages REQUIRE a student to make a certain amount of money over the summer. If they aren’t getting paid to do research, then they are either adding to their debt or working two jobs, neither of which is setting them up for scientific success. [link]

17. Did you not do that great educational experience at sea because you could not afford the hefty fees?

While again I don’t agree, the Semester at Sea Program is often promoted for the aspiring marine biologist.  That at least $25,074.  Keep in mind that both the University of Pittsburg and Virginia pulled out of the program for “safety concerns and complaints that its suggestions for program improvement were being ignored.”

18. Did you not take those field summer courses because you couldn’t afford it? Did you not participate in a summer research opportunity because you could not afford to not work for a summer?

I am obviously biased serving as the Executive Director of a marine laboratory.  As an undergraduate, I took summer marine biology courses for credit…at the marine lab I currently serve as the director.  These courses were invaluable for round out my education and kick-starting my career in marine science by offering experiential learning.  Likewise, a paid Research Experience for Undergraduate one summer launched my career in deep-sea biology.  These experiences are vital.

In conclusion, students with research experiences reported disproportionate gains in their ability to apply critical thinking skills in a novel context, and gain a greater understanding of the scientific research process. Many students who did not participate in research reported gains in general critical thinking skills from their coursework, but out-of-class research experiences were more effective in helping students to develop the intellectual abilities and capacities particularly valued for doing research…students who engaged in an authentic research experience, with adequate amounts of both challenge and support, described gaining an appreciation of the process of scientific research and an understanding of the everyday work and practice of research scientists. Though other out-of-class experiences clearly offered a host of benefits, student reports indicated that participation in research is a more effective way to socialize novices into the scientific research community by helping them to develop the mastery, knowledge, skills, and behaviors necessary to become a scientist. [link]

19. Did you not participate in a great paid opportunity on overseas or even across the nation because you did know how you would afford your travel there?

20. Did you purchase all those extra study guides for the GRE? Did you take the GRE training course? Could you afford to take the GRE multiple times? Could you afford to send it to numerous graduate programs?

You can read all about my views on the GRE here.  I’m not a fan but the fact of the matter is many schools still require this boondoggle of a test.

21. Did you apply to multiple graduate programs and pay all those additional application fees? Did you pay to travel to the visit those prospective graduate schools?

Given that most acceptance rates are less than 20%, applying to several programs is advised.  The application fees typically range from $50 to $100 per graduate program.

If you don’t think all of this matters, consider that,

The percentage of students enrolling in graduate school increases with family income. Among dependent 2007–08 four-year college graduates, 39 percent of those from families in the lowest income quartile, 42 percent from middle-income families, and 45 percent from the highest income quartile had enrolled in graduate school within four years of college graduation. [link]

Graduate School Years

22. Did you have enough money to take a gap year and travel abroad to visit the oceans you want to study?

In my experience, students that have traveled more extensively and have more life experiences fair better in graduate school.  No hard data here merely anecdotal but worth considering nonetheless.

23. Could you afford to move to graduate school?

Moving from Arkansas to Boston was more costly than I anticipated.  Gas, U-Haul trailer, food, and one night in a very cheap hotel all added up.  I couldn’t afford any of this and charged it all to my credit card.

24. Did you buy all those books your advisor recommend you have and read? What about the ones you will need for your research and courses?

Several books a scientist needs on a regular basis, far more often than would be convenient or practical to obtain from a library.  In many cases, these highly specialized books may not even be in the university’s library.  And because these are specialized and low print run volumes, the prices can be astronomical.  These are often out of pocket purchases.  Right now there are three books on my wishlist I simply cannot justify or find the extra fund for: Compendium of Bivalves: Full-color Guide to 3,300 of the World’s Marine Bivalves for $294.51, Reproduction, Larval Biology, and Recruitment of the Deep-Sea Benthos for $169.07, and Pattern and Process in Macroecology for $106.45.

25. Can you afford the computer and software you needed for your research?

That cheap, outdated, and slow laptop leftover from college is going to need a major upgrade.  Time for a new computer because science is becoming more and more computational and data driven.

Referring both to the modelling of the world through simulations and the exploration of observational data, computation is central not only to astronomy but a range of sciences, including bioinformatics, computational linguistics and particle physics…Computation has been an important part of science for more than half a century, and the data explosion is making it even more central.  [link]

26. Could you afford to travel to that conference or collaborators when you grant, or travel awards weren’t available?

If your advisor has grant money to cover your travel or you are lucky enough to obtain a travel grant or award you are set.  However, if not then you will need to find a creative way to pay for it on your own.  These professional conferences are tremendous benefits to your career and you cannot afford to miss the opportunity to network and hear about the latest advances in the field.

Nearly all (91%) gained new contacts that improved their research, in-the-field conservation, science communication, and/or conservation policy making. Two thirds (64%) gained ideas, contacts, and/or lessons could lead to publications. Over a third (39%) gained new ideas, contacts and/or lessons that led to grant proposals, and 36% gained contacts that led to funding. A conference is not just an avenue for a scientist to present their research to the wider community, but it can be an important venue for brainstorming, networking and making vital connections that can lead to new initiatives, papers and funding, in a way that virtual, online meetings cannot. This is why conferences matter. {link]

27. Can you afford to live on an income of $10-25k per year? Could you afford not to support your family while you pursue your career? Does your partner have a stable and high paying job?

The current poverty levels in 2018 are for 

• One person $12,140 $15,180
• Two people $16,460 $20,580
• Three people $20,780 $25,980
• Four people $25,100 $31,380

The average graduate stipend in science is $20,000-$30,000 per year.  This puts any graduate student with a family below or near the poverty level and nowhere near the middle class.  “Middle-income households – those with an income that is two-thirds to double the U.S. median household income – had incomes ranging from about $45,200 to $135,600 in 2016”

28. Can you afford your own health insurance?

Most universities do not offer health insurance to graduate students.  Health insurance for a graduate student is going to be obscenely expensive if you need to get it independently.  Current cheapest plans with high deductibles, i.e. do not ever, ever need any medical assistance, will average $440 per month.

29. Can you afford that scuba or field gear you will need for your research?

Some gear, e.g. wetsuit, hiking boots, backpacks, binoculars, is considered personal and will not be covered by a grant or your advisor.  There may not even be funds currently available to purchase these things.  When I worked in the Antarctica Seas as part of my graduate research, I needed a set of good set of wrap around polarized glasses.  There was $100 I did not have.  You need to get in the field to get that data though.

30. Can you afford to be social over drinks and food with other scientists you need to network with?

Networking is a must and nobody in science seems to give a damn if you cannot pay.  You can try to drink cheaply but at some point, that restaurant or bar bill is going to be out of your control.  When I was a graduate student, this senior professor came to dinner and charged up a tremendous bill with a fancy entree and a bottle of expensive wine. This while ordered water and the cheapest dish I could find on the menu.  When the bill was brought, the professor stated we would just split the bill evenly “because it was easier”.  By the way, as aside, here if you are a faculty member and ever pull stunts like this YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.  Pardon my language but its true.  If you are faculty member you should really be following the pay down rule; the faculty member should always pay for the food and drinks of the all the students.

31. Can you afford to wait a long time to be reimbursed for expenses from your university?

The major invisible difficulty that I’ve observed has been the reimbursement process. It’s common practice for people to spend their own money on scientific supplies and then apply for reimbursement from their grant, actually receiving the money 3-8 weeks later. For people without substantial cash flow, this can lead to credit card debt and future problems. [link]

Postdoctoral Fellow and Faculty Years

32. Can you afford that new set of clothes to interview in?

if you’re interviewing for a job, you might want to pay some attention to the way you dress. Because interviewers — yes, even a committee of curmudgeonly old tenured faculty members, most of whom don’t wear Armani themselves — are going to make judgments about you, fair or not, based on how you present yourself. And what you wear is part of your overall presentation. [link]

33. Can you afford to be social over drinks and food with other scientists you need to network with?  Do you have the funds to take care of the people in your lab group?

See above. Don’t be an asshole.

34. Did you just realize you are 35-40 haven’t paid off your school loans and just started to contribute to retirement?

A scientist doesn’t start thinking or paying into retirement plans until that first faculty position is landed.  With the current track record of 5-6 years of postdoctoral or soft money research positions until landing a permanent position could mean being 40 before landing that first job.

To afford a comfortable retirement, a 40-year-old couple with household income of$100,000 should have amassed savings of 2.6 times salary, or $260,000, according to research by J.P. Morgan [link]

35. Can you afford for your partner not work or do they have a mobile job?

Yeah with all that moving around for graduate school, postdocs, and faculty positions good luck to your partner trying to find a meaningful career.

36. Can you afford to wait a long time to be reimbursed for expenses from your university?

See above

38. Can you personally afford to float your research and travel needs between grants?

It happens and it sucks.  Are you just going to stop doing research?  Not go to conferences?

39. Do you have the funds to pay for society memberships?

A lot of grants will not pay for society memberships.  So there is that.

So this all leaves us needing a lot of money to get from Point A to Marine Biologist.  Conservatively, I estimate that cost, to ensure the greatest amount of success, to be $591,395 to make it to Associate Professor. Granted you could choose not to do some of these things, I didn’t do many of the things listed above as undergraduate or high school student and here I am.  But it was a tremendous amount of struggle and sacrifice for me being from a lower socioeconomic group.  If you poor and then non-white and non-male on top of that, the disadvantage is even greater, the proverbial one-two punch.

But let this sink in for a moment.

Nothing above is out of the recommended, ordinary, or expected.

We have created a system that to succeed it costs

half a million dollars.

This is not the kind of science I want.  The beauty of being a marine biologist and scientist should not be only those privileged enough to pay the price.

More reading

• Poverty in the Ivory Tower
• A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons why we lack diversity

Below the tab, my calculations for putting real numbers on the costs of this pathway.

The post Can you afford to be a marine biologist? Or a scientist? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Background

Most of you are probably aware of the GRE or Graduate Record Examination. Those applying for graduate programs are required to report scores from this standardized test. The GRE, along with the resume/curriculum vitae illustrating depth and breadth of experience, GPA, letters of recommendation, and an essay are evaluated for acceptance into many graduate programs. Although the weight given to the applicant’s GRE varies among institutions, many schools and departments require the GRE and set minimum scores for application/acceptance. Typically top institutions and programs institute a high minimum GRE score to reduce the number of applicants and to ensure highly accomplished applicant pools. However, to what extent does the GRE predict success in graduate school? Does the GRE accurately measure an applicant’s ability to synthesize and apply knowledge, acquire and assimilate new information, or familiarity with mathematics, vocabulary, biology, history, chemistry, etc.?

Criticisms of the GRE

Critics of the GRE, myself included, feel that the GRE does not evaluate any of these but simply provides a metric for how well a person can master GRE test-taking procedures.  ETS, the nonprofit that administers the test, states “the tests are intended to measure a portion of the individual characteristics that are important for graduate study: reasoning skills, critical thinking, and the ability to communicate effectively in writing in the General Test, and discipline-specific content knowledge through the Subject Test” However, the Princeton Review guide states, “ETS has long claimed that one can not be coached to do better on its tests. If the GRE were indeed a test of intelligence, then that would be true. But the GRE is NOT [emphasis original] a measure of intelligence; it’s a test of how well you handle standardized tests.” Indeed, training for the test, either in a GRE course or with a book, involves more learning test-taking strategies rather than a focus on acquirement or application of specific knowledge, i.e. “cracking the system”. Before the days of computerized exams, more math questions were included on the test than the average mathematically literate undergraduate could solve in the designated time period. To prep for the math section of the GRE, I and others learned not geometry or algebra, or even logic, but rather methods, i.e. cheats or tricks, to quickly move through the question. Of course, these tricks provide little help when math is encountered in either academia or the real world.

Who evaluates and writes the questions on the GRE? The Princeton Review states “You might be surprised to learn that the GRE isn’t written by distinguished professors, renowned scholars, or graduate school admissions officers. For the most part, it’s written by ordinary ETS employees, sometimes with freelance help from local graduate students.” Unfortunately, I am not able to retrieve information about question writers online either from ETS or other sources, so there is little I can comment on. However, the lack of transparency and accessible information should give all of us pause.

I am from the old guard and took my GRE with a No. 2 pencil with which I spent hours incessantly filling little circles. Modern tests are computerized and use a computer-adaptive methodology. Simply, the difficulty of questions is automatically adjusted as the test taker correctly or incorrectly answers questions. A complicated formula is used based on the level of questions and how many you answered correctly to determine your “real GRE score”. There is a substantial criticism of the computer-adaptive methodology. One, if a test taker suddenly encounters an easy question mid-exam, they may deduce they have not been performing well thereby affecting their performance through the rest of the exam. Test takers may also be discouraged if relatively difficult questions are presented earlier on. Second, unequal weighting is given to questions, with earlier questions receiving more and setting precedent for later questions, biasing against test takers who become more comfortable as the test continues. ETS is aware of these issues. In 2006, they announced plans to radically redesign the test structure but later announced, “Plans for launching an entirely new test all at once were dropped, and ETS decided to introduce new question types and improvements gradually over time.”

The GRE, a financial burden for students.

The GRE is expensive to take, $160 per test for U.S citizens.  Most students will take it at least twice to try to get their score higher.  This encouraged by both academia and ETS.  If you buy GRE prep books, which is also encouraged, you could easily be out another $100.    At the minimum,  a student is putting out $420.

It is often encouraged that the prospective graduate student also takes a GRE prep course.  I will use Kaplan as an example, but there are others.

• In person course $1,299 or in person plus $1,699 (link)
• Life online $999 or live online plus $1,399 (link)
• Tutor $2,499 (link)

By the time you count in missed work hours for test taking and preparation, transportation to the test (mine was 1-hour from my college), and various other expenses, a student could easily be out a significant amount of money.   It is also an additional $27 to have your own GRE test scores sent to more than the 4 “free” schools that come with the test.

So is the GRE finding us the best students or simply the richest?

Educational Testing Services: a multinational operation, complete with for-profit subsidiaries

So who is ETS? They are a nonprofit 501(c)(3) created in 1947, located in Princeton, New Jersey. In an article from Business Week…

”Mention the Educational Testing Service, and most people think of the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test that millions of high schoolers sweat over each year in hopes of lofty scores to help ease their way into colleges. But if ETS President Kurt M. Landgraf has his way, Americans will encounter the testing giant’s exams throughout grade school and right through their professional careers. Landgraf, a former DuPont executive brought to the organization in 2000 to give ETS a dose of business-world smarts, has a grand vision for the cerebral Princeton (N.J.) nonprofit. Worried that the backlash against college testing means a lackluster future for the SAT and other higher-ed ETS exams, Landgraf has been trying to diversify into two growth markets: tests and curriculum development for grade schools, where the federal No Child Left Behind Act has spurred national demand for testing, and the corporate market, where Landgraf sees potential growth in testing for managerial skills. By 2008, he hopes expansion in these two areas will more than double ETS’s $900 million anticipated 2004 revenue. “My job is to diversify ETS so we are no longer reliant on one or two major tests,” he says.

Does this sound like language applied to a nonprofit? From the New York Times…

It has quietly grown into a multinational operation, complete with for-profit subsidiaries, a reserve fund of $91 million, and revenue last year of $411 million… Its lush 360-acre property is dotted with low, tasteful brick buildings, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a private hotel and an impressive home where its president lives rent free… E.T.S. has come under fire not only for its failure to address increased incidents of cheating and fraud, but also for what its critics say is its transformation into a highly competitive business operation that is as much multinational monopoly as nonprofit institution, one capable of charging hefty fees, laying off workers and using sharp elbows in competing against rivals… ”E.T.S. is standing on the cusp of deciding whether it is an education institution or a commercial institution,” said Winton H. Manning, a former E.T.S. senior vice president who retired two years ago. ”I’m disappointed in the direction they have taken away from education and public service.”

In response to growing criticism of its monopoly, New York state passed the Educational Testing Act, a disclosure law which required ETS to make available certain test questions and graded answer sheets to students.

For all practical purposes, ETS has grown into a for-profit institution trading on its nonprofit status to create a monopoly (read the New York Times and Business Week articles for more alarming revelations). For example,

• As of the Spring of 2018, 24,141 graduate students were enrolled as graduate students in Louisana.
• Let’s assume that the applicant pool into Louisiana graduate programs was 2:1 (they are probably considerably more competitive), so 48,282 applicants took the GRE.
• At $160 per test (its actually $190 for non-US students), that generates $7,725,120 for just the current body of graduate students.
• If we assume the near 50,000 applicants represent the cumulative applicants over a typical 5 years Ph.D. program, i.e. represent multiple cohorts, then ETS generates conservatively $1,545,024 per year from Louisiana alone.

In 2016, ETS brought in $1,609,201,000 dollars in revenue.  You read that right. One. Point. Six. BILLION. Dollars.   Most of that revenue, over 97% comes directly from testing.    You can find the complete financials from 2016 backward at ProPublica.  ETS also markets through one of their subsidiaries, and for-profit, a test book at $33.89 (at Amazon). “We prepare the tests-let us help prepare you!”  It is unclear the total revenues these subsidiaries bring in.

The GRE does not predict success in graduate school

But what of the original question? To what extent does the GRE predict success in graduate school? A meta-analysis in 2001 by Kuncel et al. demonstrated that correlations between GRE scores and multiple metrics of graduate performance were low. Correlation with graduate GPA ranged from 0.34-0.36. With performance as evaluated by departmental faculty the correlation ranged from 0.35-0.42, time of degree completion ranged from -0.08-0.28, citation count ranged from 0.17-0.24, and degree attainment from 0.11 to 0.20. While encouraging these correlations are positive (in most cases) and even accounting that GRE is supposed to be evaluated in the context of other materials (but often are not), these correlations are not that impressive. Do we need the GRE scores to evaluate applicants? Interesting, the same study also demonstrated that undergraduate GPA performed equally well as the GRE.

Even [ETS], warns that there’s only a tenuous connection between test scores and success in graduate school. According to the ETS report, “Toward a Description of Successful Graduate Students,” “The limitations of graduate school admissions tests in the face of the complexity of the graduate education process have long been recognized.” The report acknowledges that critical skills associated with scholarly and professional competence aren’t measured by the GRE… Perhaps more alarmingly, as with the SAT, high GRE test scores time and again tend to correlate with a student’s socioeconomic status, race, and gender. Research dating back decades from the University of Florida, Stanford, New York University, the University of Missouri, and  ETS has shown that the GRE underpredicts the success of minority students…ETS studies have also concluded the GRE particularly underpredicts for women over 25, who represent more than half of female test-takers.  [link]

Death to the GRE

In recap, the GRE is a financial burden to students, poorly predicts graduate student success, and has biases associated with socioeconomic status, race, and gender with profits going to a $1 billion revenue “nonprofit” company.  It is abundantly clear, we need to rid academia of the GRE.  Thankfully, I am not the only one to believe this.  Two physics professors in op-ed in Nature (open-access) called for the same.

This is a call to acknowledge that the typical weight given to GRE scores in admissions is disproportionate. If we diminish reliance on GRE and instead augment current admissions practices with proven markers of achievement, such as grit and diligence, we will make our PhD programmes more inclusive and will more efficiently identify applicants with potential for long-term success as researchers.

As well as the President of the American Astronomical Society,

 It’s a matter of great concern to all of us: failing to draw from the full pool of talent weakens our profession. It’s vitally important to train leaders who will help our profession achieve true equity and inclusion, and thus the strongest possible astronomical community.

In a bold move shortly after, the American Astronomical Society adopted a policy to encourage departments to make the GRE optional or to stop using it.  What has followed is a wave of schools and departments dropping GREs (link, link).  Joshua Hall, Director of Admissions at UNC (on Twitter @jdhallphd) maintains a list of all biology and biomedical programs who have dropped GREs from the applicant process.  

Your next step? If your department, school, and university still use the GRE, it is time to call the faculty together and kill the GRE.

UPDATE 1: Follow the #grexit hashtag on Twitter

The post Let’s Kill the GRE first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Dear Dr. Craig McClain.  

I am contacting you on behalf of [A Major Textbook Publisher]. [The Publisher] seeks permission to use your material in the upcoming text book [Name of commonly used freshman text book but a long line of authors].  Please see the attached permissions request letter which formally lists the rights we are requesting. I am also attaching the copies of the materials we intend to use in the book along with the letter for your easy reference.  I would really appreciate it if you could kindly review the request and return the signed letter to me via e-mail at your earliest convenience. Or, you can indicate via email that you are granting us permission to use the material by agreeing to the following terms:

“Following rights to the licensed material specified herein are granted to [The Publisher], its worldwide subsidiaries and affiliates, authorized users, and customers/end-users: Use of the licensed material, in whole or in part, in the [Textbook], and in subsequent editions of the same, and in products that support or supplement the [Textbook], and in products that use, or are comprised of, individual chapters or portions of [Textbook], and in-context promotions, advertising, and marketing materials for the same; Territory (World); English; Formats (print and electronic, and accessible versions); Term (Life of the Edition + Future Editions); Print Quantity (No Limit); Electronic Quantity (No Limit).”

I look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to contact me if you.

Thank you! Regards,

[Person from Major Publisher]

 Yeah…that was the tipping point.  So I responded back.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

My image is not free for use.  I can send you an invoice for usage if the [The Publisher] is interested.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

Apparently, they were fine with me invoicing them so I responded.

Dear [Person from Major Publisher]

Given the current cost of your textbook of is well over $200 for an undergraduate, I don’t believe I can support the use of my image in your textbook.  The only way I will allow usage of the image is if the company agrees to donate 30 free textbooks to the Louisiana College or University of my choice.

Dr. Craig R. McClain

 

From this, I received this response.

Dear Dr. McClain,

I passed your request to the Development and Managing Editors and after some consideration [The Publisher] is electing to decline the request.    We appreciate your response and will search for a replacement image to be included in the book.

Kind regards,

[Person 2 from Major Publisher]

Here’s the thing. How can I support a textbook that students will need $214 dollars to buy?  I cannot.  Not as a scientist committed to the tenet that information should be available to all, an educator who believes education is a right not a privilege, a mentor who needs to remove barriers for my students, and lastly someone who came from a lower socioeconomic family, struggled to purchase textbooks, and is now committed to reaching back and pulling others up.  I. CAN. NOT.

Even more, the landscape of Louisiana represents one of considerable struggle. The poverty rate in Louisiana’s poverty rate is 19.6%, well above the national average of 12.4%.  Child poverty nationally is 21.9% while in Louisiana’s is a shocking 27.8%. Twenty-four of Louisiana’s parishes are considered persistent poverty parishes with more than 20% of the population falling below the poverty line consistently since 1970.  Thirty-two parishes are classified as black high poverty areas.  These poverty rates place Louisiana number one among the 50 states in both poverty and child poverty levels (WorldAtlas.com 2016).  The ramifications of this poverty are seen in higher education in Louisiana.  The adult population with a bachelor’s degree or more nationally is 32.5% while in Louisiana is 14.7% and among African Americans, the national average is 14.7% compared to the 13.4% in the state.

I am, and need to be, personally committed to providing educational opportunity to all those in this state, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.  The high costs of textbooks are prohibitive for students in Louisiana. Indeed, the Louisiana Board of Regents through the LOUIS system is also committed to addressing the textbook issue including purchasing eBooks that can be substituted for required course textbooks.  This program has saved 40,000 students around $4.8 million dollars.  Also, consider that,

 college textbook publisher Cengage conducted a survey titled, “College Students Consider Buying Course Materials a Top Source of Financial Stress”. The results revealed that, “about 43% of students surveyed said they skipped meals because of the expense for books, about 70% said they took on a part-time job because of the the added costs, and around 30% said they had to take fewer classes” 

All of this has occurred on a backdrop of textbook prices rising almost 1000% in recent years — more than three times the rate of inflation (Bureau of Labor Statistics).  And instead of the publishers admitting there is a problem, they deflect.

Marisa Bluestone, spokeswoman for the the Association of American Publishers, called the BLS data “misleading” because of the “law of small numbers” where a small item that increases from $100 to $200 will appear as a 100 percent increase whereas if tuition increases from $10,000 to $11,000 it’s only a 10 percent increase. Further, the BLS data is “not the reality today” added Laura Massie, spokeswoman for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), as it doesn’t count buying used books or renting.

The prices for academic institutions to access the scientific literature has also gotten out of hand.  Despite scientists volunteering to both serve as editors and reviewers for journals and often paying to publish in these journals, many for-profit publishing companies continue to rake in profits while choking out access to the very scientists and scientific institutions they expect to volunteer and read their publications.

Last week the marine lab (the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, LUMCON, where I serve as Executive Director) received the notification for renewal for a major journal, now published by a for-profit publisher. The cost for the publication next year is $9,545. The average inflation rate since we first subscribed to this title (starting in FY2010) is just over 20% annually. The number of issues has not changed (12 per year), nor has the size of the issues in terms of pagination, so it’s not a matter of getting more for the money.  Another way of looking at it is that one journal subscription would have eaten up 25% of the journals budget that we allow for LUMCON’s small library. It is hard to justify spending $10,000 a year for a single subscription for less than a dozen faculty.

So a couple of weeks ago, LUMCON made a bold move.  We canceled all of our paid journal subscriptions. Every. Single. One. Of. Them.  These funds will remain with our library, reinvested into other initiatives.  We have set aside some of these funds to purchase hard volumes without electronic versions, pay for singly purchased articles from the canceled journals, investing heavily in LUMCON faculty to publish in Not-For-Profit, Open Access Publishers, new library printers, and variety of other smaller library upgrades.  Needless to say, the amount LUMCON spent on journal subscriptions was considerable and freeing up those funds is actually allowing us to be able to provide BETTER support to our scientific teams.

You read that right.  I feel that even though we are losing journal access and the burden on the faculty and librarian to find needed articles may be higher, the funds that LUMCON now has available to invest in other library projects will provide a greater depth and variety of support for scientists and students at LUMCON.  Our journal access simply prevented us from affording these programs and infrastructure before.

I am in a position of leadership and have an amazing, supportive, and forward-thinking faculty to work with.  We are able to accomplish things that may not be possible in a larger university system.  So what can you do?

I am going to take a hard stance but here we go.

1. Do not require textbooks for your courses. Provide other materials and make them freely available to your students.
2. If you absolutely need to use a textbook, teach out of older editions. Provide in your syllabus a variety of links where that textbook can be purchased at a reduced fee. If you ever come across a good deal on that textbook, purchase it yourself.  Give or loan the book to your students in need.
3. Work with your university and state on ebook programs that purchase electronic rights to textbooks that are made freely available to your students.
4. Through your departmental and university committees, and your faculty senate, start working with your university (or putting pressure on them) to replace the antiquated and overpriced book model at your institution.
5. Do not serve as editor, reviewer, or author of a paper in a for-profit journal. Support the innovative models you want to see.  I recognize the commitment will be dependent on your career stage.  But you the senior faculty need to step up to the plate and be an example. Create safe places for junior faculty to be able to pursue this.
6. Change evaluation policies for faculty that reward open science models and decrease value on publishing in and with for-profit journals and publishing houses.
7. Do not grant interviews to journalists that work for these for-profit publishing houses and/or limit access to the materials behind a paywall. If we believe that scientific information should be available to all, then the public discussion and public translation of that work should also be freely available.
8. Educate yourself on open-access publishing standards. Here is a directory of all open-access journals.  Read about the difference between gold, green, and even copper open access standards.
9. Lastly, make sure you retain copyright over all your own work and make sure it is available for free on the web. I have been woefully poor on this front.  But as of today and moving forward, I will be posting all my preprints on https://arxiv.org/.  I will research all of the copyright and sharing restrictions on all of my published articles and try to find solutions in making them all more available.

I realized that this is a tremendous amount of burden on all us all.  Indeed, many times in science what is for the benefit of the scientific community is not for the benefit of the individual scientist.  These are big standards to follow, and depending on your career stage, opportunity, current funding, etc., you may not be able to follow all of these or follow them all of the time.  This does not make you a bad person or scientist.  But with all of us trying to make small decisions in the right direction, working toward this goal, we will move the field in total to the right place.

UPDATE: A colleague and friend asked this…

Great piece but genuine question, does open access = not for profit? Who are the not for profit publishers? Is there a list somewhere? I am all for open access and detest the pay wall system. But the problem with the current open access model is it places the burden of publishing cost on the individual scientist as opposed to the pay wall model where costs are met by library subscription and it is “free” for the individual researcher to publish. There must be another way to do this? I would like to see more societies running and profiting from journals. Then the profit goes back into science.

So open access does not always equal not for profit.  These are not mutually exclusive categories.  A journal can be

1. Completely open access, hybrid open access (papers are open access if the author chooses to pay additionally), or closed access
2. For- or non-profit
3. Society or not  (profit can be completely applied to the society or shared with a large for- or non-profit publishing house).

For example, PeerJ or PloS are open access and not for profit (UPDATE: Ok, ok people…PeerJ is technically for profit).  Nature Communications is an open access and for profit.  Unfortunately, I am not aware of a list of not for profit or non-profit journals.

My colleague does raise another issue which I’ve been burdened by for a while, the movement of paying for publishing of articles from the institution to the scientist.  The switch does not really address the real money issue and ultimately the taxpayer is footing the bill, the conduit of the money is just different.  I am not sure what the right model here is to solve this dilemma.  I am a fan of the PeerJ model that limits the publishing cost to a one-time fee for authors with each author of the paper paying this fee.  But the fee is negligible and spans an entire career.

Pricing for Lifetime Memberships is (from October 1, 2016):

• Basic: $399
• Enhanced: $449
• Premium: $499

Memberships allow for one, two, or five peer-reviewed publications per 12-month period respectively, counting from your last publication to your next first-decision.

The post Tipping Points, For-Profit Scientific Publishing, and Closed Science first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Nearly two miles below the ocean’s surface, we are building new worlds. You might be surprised that these ecospheres are wooden—little log cabins hosting a cornucopia of sea life.  By controlling the size of these wooden homes, we can begin to answer fundamental questions about how the oceans will adapt to climate change. In our most recent, paper we are beginning to grasp the extent that food controls biodiversity, biological novelty, and the competition among species.

On the seafloor, chunks of wood—we call them wood falls—play host to a variety of invertebrate species often not found anywhere else in the ocean.  These species live their entire lives on waterlogged timber; settling out of the water column as larvae to consume wood, or to prey upon other species that do.  Once on a wood fall, these organisms can never leave, their dispersal limited to the beginning of their lives as plankton. And for all of these reasons, the island communities created by wood falls serve as the perfect experiment.

Because of humans, the oceans are radically changing.  They’re becoming warmer, more acidic, and less oxygenated.  But an even more disturbing trend has been uncovered; the oceans may be becoming less productive, providing less food and carbon for its denizens.  Scientists do not really have a handle on how life in the oceans will react to this finding. What will happen to individual species and whole communities of species?  This is an intractable question in many ways because it is hard to test. We cannot easily experimentally adjust how much food a swath of ocean gets. Or can we? In a wood-fall experiment we can change the amount of food the community receives by simply adjusting the size of the log. These species cannot leave to look for better meals once they arrive.  They are wholly dependent on the log we’ve provided in an otherwise barren patch of the deep ocean floor.

In 2006, Jim Barry (MBARI) and I placed 16 logs with a remote operated vehicle (ROV) over 2 miles down on the deep-sea floor off the California coast. We left them there for five years and then remotely and robotically harvested them.  After sorting, identifying, and analyzing, these wood falls are revealing yet another fundamental insight.

How does more food, or more specifically more carbon, allow for more species?  To explain the science, let’s visit a donut shop. At this donut shop, there are three types of donuts: chocolate, plain glazed, and raspberry filled. I ask the donut maker to make three new donuts and provide extra ingredients for them to do so.  

In Scenario A, the donut maker produces chocolate, plain glazed, and raspberry filled along with a dark chocolate, a plain glazed with sprinkles, and a blueberry filled.  The donut shop is still just serving three basic types of donuts: chocolate, plain glazed, and fruit filled. These new donuts are just slight deviations. We will call this Scenario A donut packing.  The donut maker is just packing the menu with variants of the original donuts.

Much like donuts in a shop, we can think of species in a community the same way.  As food increases and the number of species increase, are we getting slight deviations (donut packing) or something truly novel (donut expansion)?  In the ecological sense, are niches, i.e. the full set of characteristics that describe a species and their requirements, being packed into the community or are we expanding the overall niche diversity.

And so for our wood-fall species, we put numbers to each of their niches describing their feeding habits, how well and even if they move, as well as their preference for space on the wood fall. We found that as you increase the wood-fall size, and the amount of wood, you do not get truly novel species, rather you pack these species into the community.  They are just slight deviations. This suggest that increased food reduces competition among animals allowing them to coexist peacefully. Species do not have to be completely novel to join the community.

In the end this means that decreases of productivity in the oceans, will limit diversity by not allowing species to coexist.  Species will be vying for the same spots and in the end many may lose.

McClain, C.R., C.L. Nunnally, A. Chapman, and J. Barry. (2018) Energetic Increases Lead to Niche Packing in Deep-Sea Wood Falls. Biology Letters 

The post Wooden Homes on the Seafloor Yield Insights Into the Impacts of Climate Change first appeared on Deep Sea News.

1. We focus a lot on science communication as the generation of content.  However equally, and if not more, important is the filtering of content.  In the last few years, poorly informed, incorrect and out right maliciously wrong content has become prolific.  We need now, more than ever, for trusted domain experts to amplify, share, and provide reliable and accurate information. I saw this first hand reporting here at DSN with both the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and the Fukishama Reactors that bad information was rampant and people were looking for trusted content.

2. Somewhere we stopped teaching students and the public how to critically evaluate information. Or may be it never existed at all.  We need with renewed vigor to teach students and the public how to think, reason, and evaluate information.  We need mandatory classes and lessons across education levels in logic, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, problem solving, and scientific methodology.

3. We need to make sure good and correct information is more accessible and more viral than bad information.  We need to make it easier for students and the public to get the information they need to be an informed citizenry.

4. Science needs to be more open.  Open access publishing, science communication, and citizen science and other initiatives were good start of a larger “open” movement.  But now we need to swing the doors of science open a little wider.  We are not open or honest to our failures in the enterprise of science.  Metal health issues, inequality, profiteering, and harassment run rapid.  We need change and a river in Egypt isn’t the first step.

We need to be more open about our failures not just successes. @DrCraigMc giving a rallying cry rant I needed to hear and can get behind this morning. #nerdsoftrust

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

5. We need to renew the social contract between educational institutions and the public.  We need to place value on an informed and educated citizenry.   This is the hallmark to economic prosperity and quality, political stability and growth, innovation in the sciences and humanities, and overall public health.  The renewal of this contract comes first and foremost with economic commitment from local to national levels and the foresight that this investment will be returned 10-fold.

6. Scientists need to all become nerds of trust. On Facebook, over beers at the bar, in your local and state government meetings, you need to be there with science.

@DrCraigMc of @deepseanews encourages us librarians to be “nerds of trust for friends & family” & use social media like Facebook to discuss science in our social spheres. @alaannual #alaac18 @ALA_ACRL #STS pic.twitter.com/8it9UtOV4m

— Michael R Leach (@mikeleach42) June 25, 2018

7. Science communication needs to be goal and mission oriented.  The idea of a “Field of Dreams” model of putting something out there and expecting it work is ridiculous.  If you have not thought about what success is and how you are going to measure it, stop now.  Science communication has to be deliberate in action.

“We need to stop half-assing our science outreach” and to think I almost meh’d out of this mornings session because sleep. >⁦@DrCraigMc⁩ https://t.co/5wOgz5bTEJ

— KT (@vivalakt) June 25, 2018

8. We need to break out of the echo chamber.  If you defriended all of your Facebook friends who had different political leanings to you, you are probably part of the problem.  Are your science communication efforts only reaching the NPR and PBS, science-enthusiast audience?  Was the last science and drink night you talked at just hipsters in tweed? Probably…  Are you still wondering why the public is struggling with science or just actively anti-science.  YOU ARE NOT TALKING TO THEM.  We need new and creative ways to reach new audiences especially those in lower socio-economic classes. We need to go to where they are and put science there.

9. We need to create and support places and times of innovation…places that domain experts in humanities, social science, education and pedagogy, science communication, and scientists learn from each other and build together.  These need to be places that applaud risk and go after moon shots while focused on action and products. Events like #oceandotcomm are one example.

10. Even if we don’t get anything else right, we need to get one thing right.  Be passionate.  This idea of science as cold, heartless, and stale enterprise needs to die.

“Be passionate. Science is not a cold place, it is an amazing place. Share that.” – @DrCraigMc in how we connect and excite the community in science efforts #alaac18

— Paige Dhyne (@LibandLife) June 25, 2018

The post 10 Things Science, Science Communication, and Just Maybe All of Academia Needs first appeared on Deep Sea News.

For more updates on my research, follow along at jellybiologist.com, or on twitter @RebeccaRHelm

As a scientist, I love jellyfish, and I suffer for it. Up until a few years ago, I had no way of knowing exactly where or when the jellyfish I study would appear. So I traveled to Washington and France and Florida looking for them, and more often than not, came up empty handed. The most frustrating part of all this travel was that I had all the species I needed right at home, but couldn’t use them. That’s because jellyfish, like butterflies, are the last stage in a complicated life cycle. Jellyfish have a stage that’s analogous to a caterpillar, termed a ‘polyp’, which lives happily in the lab. So imagine studying butterflies, and having all the caterpillar you need, expect none of them will metamorphose. No matter how hard you try to convince them, they just sit there eating leaves, and so you travel all around the world to find and study the actual butterflies. That is the exact position researchers and aquarists have been in with jellyfish.

This is why I’m so excited to share with you a paper I just published in PLOS ONE on a simple method for triggering metamorphosis in a huge variety of jellyfish species. Now, rather than traveling halfway around the globe, scientists can add a couple drops of a special compound to their polyp tank, and have jellyfish to study in under a week! I hope this work will be helpful to many different kinds of jelly-lovers, form biologists to aquarists and beyond.

This research started out of frustration. I’d been traveling for over two years looking for the best species to study, and was consistently coming up short. I wanted to better understand the process of metamorphosis, called ‘strobilation’, but I needed to find a species that would easily strobilate in captivity. No luck. And so one day, rather than going out to look for jellies,  I decided it was time to spend a couple months indoors, to test out a hair-brained idea that was all together different.

Throughout the decades, a handful of scientist have recorded that this-or-that chemical, when added to water with this-or-that polyps species, will trigger strobilation. Most of these papers stretch back to the 70’s and earlier, and most have been largely forgotten. But I decided it was time to revisit those old studies, and test out different chemicals. The experiments were messy and quirky–I had a bunch of chemicals, jars, and polyps all soaking in different substances for different lengths of time–but I remember the exact moment when I got my first breakthrough.

I carried a small dish of polyps, which had been soaking in a type of chemical called an ‘indole’, to the microscope. I was working alone in the lab, and I was feeling pretty discouraged. It’d been two weeks of stirring up different chemical solutions, doling them out in precise proportions, and checking every single day for signs that the little polyps had begun metamorphosis. Nothing. But when I looked down at the polyps soaking in indoles…well, I think my lab notebook can express it better than I can (there was, um…some language):

Each polyp had formed a small ring below the tentacles. This ring was the first sign of metamorphosis. Each ring would eventually grow to be a tiny jellyfish (the pictures at the top of this post are the same animals I saw that day!) This species is the Pacific sea nettle, but the same compound also worked for species from the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Almost every species I tried would dutifully metamorphose into a tiny jellyfish.

Not only did this open up a whole new research avenue for me, it has become the foundation for my career. Now we can have tiny jellyfish of almost any species in under a week. Even box jellies!

But here’s a result that’s got me head scratching: one type of polyp, from a crown jellyfish, didn’t strobilate with the indoles. I tried all sorts of different combinations of conditions, nothing worked. But there are a couple really cool things about crown jellies that may explain why they didn’t respond. First, the polyp lives in a small tube, unlike any other species. So it’s possible the compound didn’t work because the polyp is mostly tucked away behind a barrier. But the second cool thing about this species is that it’s a very distant cousin of most of the species that I studied. So it is possible that over evolutionary time it evolved a slightly different biochemistry, which makes it insensitive to indoles. Similar to the way catnip gets cats high, but doesn’t have the same impact on people. Indoles works well on many related species of jellies, but not so well on a distant relative.

I’m now working on figuring out the reason why indoles works so well for some species. What genes might this compound help turn on and off? By studying metamorphosis in jellyfish, I hope to better understand how metamorphosis evolved over long time scales. For example, are there genetic similarities of metamorphosis between frogs, butterflies, and jellies?

Those results are still pending. For now, I’m enjoying all the new jellies we have growing in the lab. And I hope these results can be helpful to all those seeking to learn more about jellyfish in this coming new year!

Paper:

Rebecca R. Helm & Casey W. Dunn (2017). Indoles induce metamorphosis in a broad diversity of jellyfish, but not in a crown jelly (Coronatae). PLOS ONE 12(12): e0188601. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0188601

The post New Research Reveals How to Easily Grow Jellyfish In Captivity first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Liz Neeley and I discussed this in our 2014 paper.

In terms of social media outreach, or outreach in general, the impact on a scientist’s career remains largely unquantified and quite possibly indirect. “Many faculty members identified their primary job responsibilities as research and post-secondary teaching. They felt that outreach participation hindered their ability to fulfill those responsibilities and might be an ineffective use of their skills and time, and that it was not a valid use of their research funding”. In the survey by Ecklund et al., 31% of scientists felt that research university systems value research productivity, as indexed by grants and published papers, over everything else, including outreach. With this prioritization structure in place outreach may be perceived as unrelated to a scientist’s academic pursuits.

Perhaps because of both the ease of quantification and the impact is hypothesized to be direct, one specific question continues to generate considerable attention.   If a paper receives a significant number of social media mentions does it also receive a significant number of citations? If this correlation exist then this would support an argument that Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. about your scientific papers. This science communication would increase the exposure of your paper, including to scientists, eventually leading to more citations of that paper.  In this were true the impact of science communication would be direct and impact a metric that is used to evaluate scientists.

One of the largest studies on this topic, in analysis of 1.4 million documents published in PubMed and Web of Science published from 2010 to 2012, Haustein et al. found no correlation between a paper or a journals citation count and Twitter mentions.  However, multiple studies since do find a link between Tweets and citations rates including the papers of Peoples et al. and de Winter.

A new paper by Finch et al.  finds a link between social media mentions an citations also exists in the orthinology literature.  The authors set up the question nicely in the introduction

Weak positive correlations between social media mentions and future citations [5,8–10] suggest that online activity may anticipate or drive the traditional measure of scholarly ‘impact’. Online activity also promotes engagement with academic research, scholarly or otherwise, increasing article views and PDF downloads of PLoS ONE articles, for example [11,12]. Thus, altmetrics, and the online activity they represent, have the potential to complement, pre-empt and boost future citation rates, and are increasingly used by institutions and funders to measure the attention garnered by the research they support [13].

The findings? For a subset of 878 articles published in 2014, the group found that an increase in social media mentions, as indexed by the Altmetric Score, from 1 to 20 resulted in 112% increase in citation count from 2.6 to 5.5 citations per article.

So drop what you’re doing and start Tweeting about your most recent paper RIGHT NOW! 

But wait…

All of these studies show a correlation and not causation.  Simply put, scientific papers with a lot of social media mentions also have lots of citations.  One hypothesis would be that communicating your science broadly increases its exposure and increases the probability of citation.  And it appears that often those advocating for science communication repeat this narrative despite there currently being no support for this hypothesis.  Why is there no support?

Because the correlation between social media mentions and citations could be equally explained by other hypotheses.

So an equally likely explanation for this correlation is that papers that are popular garner both numerous social media mentions and eventually numerous citations.

Tom Webb also makes an outstanding point about the authors of such studies.

The authors of this most recent study note this overall causation and correlation dilemma as well.

Instead, our results suggest that altmetrics might provide an initial and immediate indicator of a research article’s future scholarly impact, particularly for articles published in more specialist journals…The correlative nature of this and other studies makes it difficult to establish any causal relationship between online activity and future citations

So what now?  First stop arguing, as many did on Twitter today (examples here), that Tweeting about your paper is good thing because it will ultimately generate more citations.  The jury is still out on this and will be until a study specifically is designed to test for the causation and not the correlation.

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