My last few posts have described my experiences with the time required and financial cost of applying for faculty positions as a postdoctoral fellow. The amount of time it takes to submit X number of applications and how much it costs to interview for X number of positions is something that can be quantified – it can be tracked and tallied, although your personal mileage will vary. Today’s post, however, is not going to be that straight forward. Today I’m going to describe the emotional destruction that makes applying for faculty jobs so incredibly hard. Few people talk about how it feels to apply for jobs beyond “it’s stressful,” and even I, with my commitment to transparency, am more than a little afraid to post this piece.
Valley oak, Quercus lobata, an iconic California endemic that has been one focus of Victoria Sork’s research (Flickr: Philip Bouchard)
The Molecular Ecology Prize Committee has announced the 2020 recipient of the award, which recognizes an outstanding scientist who has made significant contributions to the still-young field of molecular ecology:
We are pleased to announce that the 2020 Molecular Ecology prize has been awarded to Dr. Victoria Sork, Distinguished Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Dean of Life Sciences, and Director of the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden at University of California Los Angeles. Throughout her career, Dr. Sork has made substantial and diverse scientific contributions to the field of molecular ecology – from working to build the foundation of landscape genetics, to pioneering the use of molecular markers in tracking plant dispersal, to unraveling the genomic and epi-genomic basis of climate adaptation in non-model organisms. With well over 100 publications, she has proven herself to be a preeminent scholar in her field for decades, while serving as a role model and mentor for many early career scientists, and as a continual advocate for increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM.
Dr. Sork joins previous winners Godfrey Hewitt, John Avise, Pierre Taberlet, Harry Smith, Terry Burke, Josephine Pemberton, Deborah Charlesworth, Craig Moritz, Laurent Excoffier, Johanna Schmitt, Fred Allendorf , Louis Bernatchez, Nancy Moran, Robin Waples, and Scott Edwards.
A new episode of The Molecular Ecologist Podcast is now out on Anchor.fm. On this episode, we’re taking our NewPI Chat conversations among early-career faculty to the podcast format. In this chat, Rob Denton, Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, and Jeremy Yoder discuss teaching: the transition from postdoc life to managing classrooms and curricula, juggling instruction time and research — and how all of this has changed while our campuses are locked down to help contain the COVID-19 pandemic.
You can listen right here on the blog, with the widget below:
You can also find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Spotify — or you can add the RSS feed URL directly to your podcast-management app of choice. Whatever service you use, consider taking a moment to rate or even review the podcast, which will help us build an audience.
The music in this episode is Leroy Anderson’s “The Waltzing Cat,” performed on piano by Markus Staab and available under a Creative Commons license via Musopen.
For whatever reason, viral disease and pandemics have been on my mind, so it’s no surprise that a recent paper in Molecular Ecology caught my attention. It blends the existential dread of global pandemics with the increasing panic concerning the effects of climate change on ocean ecosystems. Doesn’t that sound enticing?! (Incidentally, I’m not the only one fretting about this nexus. For a brief summary on instances of recent emergences of marine diseases, see this New York Times opinion piece.) But first, a little background.
The outbreak of sea star wasting disease (SSWD) on the western coast of the US was first noticed in 2013. The disease affected 20 different species of sea stars, sub-tidal to intertidal, from the coast of Alaska to Baja, California with high mortality rates (67-99%, depending on the species). To date, there is some anecdotal accounts of recovery in small pockets, but not much.
FIGURE 1 from Hewson et al. (2014) showing A) an asymptomatic Sunflower sea star, Pycnopodia helianthoides B) an asymptomatic Ochre sea star, Pisaster ochraceusC)P. ochraceus succumbing to SSWD D) the geographic occurrences of SSWD and E) an electron transmission micrograph of icosahedral SSaDV virus particles recovered from an affected Evasterias troschelii sample.Continue reading →
In a recent article, researchers evaluated reproductive systems within Cataglyphis, a genus of desert ants (Kuhn et al., 2020). Two unusual systems had been observed within the genus. To understand Cataglyphis reproduction, though, one must first understand conventional ant reproduction.
The vast majority of ants in a colony are workers. They are female, but infertile. Workers grow from the eggs of the colony’s queen (Wheeler, 2016). A few eggs develop into winged alates – either queens, which are fertile females, or males, which are haploid and hatch from unfertilized eggs (White, 1984). Every year, alates fly from the colony en massein search of mates (Wilson, 1957). Males die soon after mating, and queens maintain the sperm in a specialized organ (Wheeler & Krutzch, 1994), allowing them to fertilize eggs for the rest of their lives, potentially decades in some species (Keller, 1998). Each queen then finds a safe place to hide while her workers reach maturity. In many species, the queen raises her first offspring to adulthood without eating (Keller & Passera, 1989).
Diagram of the standard ant reproductive mode in Camponotus pennsylvanicus by Sam Gregory
Call me a procrastinator but I strongly believe that spending time to select a good color scheme can work miracles with a plot, paper, or presentation. In science, it’s generally not expected that you invest time into a thought process on something like aesthetics. I would dare to go as far as to say that it’s sometimes outright frowned upon if you do. Like if you were less of a scientist for caring if the plot design is good, just as its numbers are.
Needless to say, aesthetics is very subjective and if you do like bright yellow letters on blue background, I can do nothing but secretly roll my eyes. No offense. However, it’s also good to keep in mind that there are some basic principles of color theory, which are valid regardless of personal preference.
This video explains some of the reasons why understanding color is important and how to mix colors in the right way. But you might be asking how is this relevant for non-artists.
When presenting results, both in a Powerpoint presentation and in a figure, we are mostly interested in two things: 1) drawing attention to the most important piece of information that needs to be delivered, and 2) streamlining the flow of information if there are multiple pieces of information. Using the right colors can tremendously help with this.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a change in how Victorian England viewed the Christmas holiday. It’s clearly not Christmas … and certainly isn’t a jolly time. But, taking some artistic liberty from how Dickens outlined the five chapters of A Christmas Carol, there’s been a small flurry of papers published on the future of invasions in Antarctica.
Biological invasions, as one consequence of global change, have very real implications for biodiversity on a global scale. Invasions of fungi, terrestrial plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates have occurred over the last 200 years on the Antarctic continent and its surrounding islands (Frenot et al. 2005), but these are largely terrestrial invasions.
Marine invaders have wreaked havoc throughout the world’s oceans and near shore marine communities … is Antarctica the final frontier for invasive marine species?
Last week I talked about the ‘workload’ of applying for a tenure-track faculty job (let’s call them TT jobs). This week, I want to talk about a different load – the financial one. This burden was a surprise to me, although in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps the surprise was how much I spent, even if most of it was eventually reimbursed, and how long it took return to a baseline bank balance. For example, my first expense came in early November and my last reimbursement arrived in the middle of April. Again, this post is based on anecdata from my own experience and discussions with friends. Your mileage will vary.
What’s the first thing that pops in your head when you think Bobcats?
Their stumpy tails?
Their screams when fighting?
Did you know that that they are important predators whose population statuses are used as indicators for functional landscape connectivity in their areas?
