Category: Guest Blog Posts

Why we shouldn’t blame women for gender disparity in science: Perspectives of women in zoology

A Brazilian network of female zoologists aims to oppose gender disparity in science

Guest blog post by Veronica Slobodian

Scientists are part of a rather sexist society and, therefore, ruled by a rather sexist social conduct. Nevertheless, women scientists attempt to thrive despite all setbacks provided by structural sexism (both explicit and implicit). 

Sadly, female scientists are more likely to suffer from harassment, be deprived from recognition for their work, and be more overburdened with household chores compared to their male counterparts. All these situations are being reinforced by social gender stereotypes. 

As a result, many women leave academia because of these hindrances and prejudice in a phenomenon known as “leaking pipeline”. To properly address those setbacks, we must first recognize the structural inequalities in academia, and then provide strategies to recruit, retain and promote students and faculty from underrepresented groups. 

In a rebuttal to an article published in Nature Communications (AlShebli et al. 2020, now retracted), which suggested that female protégés reap more benefits when mentored by men and, therefore, policies to promote female mentors need to be revisited, our group of female zoologists wrote the opinion paper “Why we shouldn’t blame women for gender disparity in academia: Perspectives of Women in Zoology“, now published in the open-access scientific journal Zoologia. Quickly supported by over 500 signatories from all around the world, the piece soon grew into the Women in Zoology network, which brings together zoologists from underrepresented people in the scientific field groups, especially women.

In this reply, we pointed to the methodological flaws and addressed the inherently problematic conclusions of AlShebli et al. (2020). We also demonstrated the gendered academic settings that systematically prejudices women and presented how some of the current diversity policies are positively changing the zoological field in Brazil. While writing our response, we realized these challenges and aches were in fact much more common in the field, so we decided to broaden the network to encompass all female zoologists who want a more fair and diverse Zoology. So, with the “Women in Zoology” network, our aim is to promote female zoologists, investigate their underrepresentation in Brazilian zoology, and propose policies to balance the situation. 

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Original article: 

Slobodian V, Soares KDA, Falaschi RL, Prado LR, Camelier P, Guedes TB, Leal LC, Hsiou AS, Del-Rio G, Costa ER, Pereira KRC, D’Angiolella AB, de A Sousa S, Diele-Viegas LM (2021) Why we shouldn’t blame women for gender disparity in academia: perspectives of women in zoology. Zoologia 38: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.3897/zoologia.38.e61968 

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Find more information about the “Women in Zoology” network on Instagram: @mulheresnazoologia.

Failure to respond to a coral disease epizootic in Florida: causes and consequences

By 2020, losses of corals have been observed throughout Florida and into the greater Caribbean basin in what turned out to be likely the most lethal recorded case of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. A Perspectives paper, published in the open-access peer-reviewed journal Rethinking Ecology, provides an overview of how Florida ended up in a situation, where the best that could be done is rescuing genetic material from coral species at risk of regional extinction.

Guest blog post by William F. Precht

A colony of the large grooved brain coral, Colpophyllia natans, infected by Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease. The photo shows the progressive, rapid advance of disease, left-to-right, across the colony.
Image by William Precht.

Dredging projects conducted in association with coral reefs typically generate concern by environmental groups, resulting in careful monitoring by government agencies. Even though the aim of those dredge projects is to widen or deepen existing ship channels, while minimizing damage to coral reef resources, there are often the intuitive negative assumptions that dredging kills corals.

The recent Port Miami Dredge Project started as an uncomplicated case story. However, significant problems arose, caused by a concurrent and unprecedented coral disease epidemic that killed large numbers of corals, which was initiated following a regional thermal anomaly and coral bleaching event.

The coral disease, known as Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD), was first observed in September 2014 near Virginia Key, Florida. In roughly six years, the disease has spread throughout Florida and into the greater Caribbean basin. The high prevalence of SCTLD and the resulting high mortality in coral populations, coupled with the large number of susceptible species affected, suggest that this disease outbreak is one of the most lethal ever recorded on contemporary coral reefs. The disease is still presently active and continues to ravage coral reefs throughout the region.

The initial response to this catastrophic disease by resource managers with purview over the ecosystem in Southeast Florida was slow. There is generally a noticeably short window of opportunity to intervene in disease amelioration or eradication in the marine environment. This slow response enabled the disease to spread unchecked. Why was the response to the loss of our coral reefs to a coral disease epidemic such a massive failure? This includes our failure as scientists, regulators, resource managers, local media, and policy makers alike. With this Perspectives paper, published in Rethinking Ecology, my intention was to encapsulate the numerous reasons for our failures during the first few years of the outbreak, reminiscent of the early failures in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

First, the Port Miami dredging project was ongoing when the coral disease epidemic began. Some managers and local environmental groups blamed dredging, rather than SCTLD for the coral losses, reported in the project’s compliance monitoring program. Second, this blame was amplified in the media, because dredging projects are intuitively assumed to be bad for coral reefs. Third, during this same time, the State of Florida prohibited government employees from acknowledging global warming in their work. This was problematic because ocean warming is a proximal cause of many coral diseases.

As a result, some managers ignored the well-known links between warming and coral disease. A consequence of this policy was that the dredging project provided an easy target to blame for the coral mortality noted in the monitoring program, despite convincing data that suggested otherwise. 

Specifically, the intensive compliance monitoring program, conducted by trained scientific divers, was statistically significant. SCTLD that was killing massive numbers of corals throughout the region was also killing corals at the dredge site. Further, this was happening in the same proportions and among the same suite of species. 

Finally, when the agencies responded to the outbreak, their efforts were too little and much too late to make a meaningful difference. While eradication of the disease was never a possibility, early control measures may have slowed its spread, or allowed for the rescue of significant numbers of large colonies of iconic species. Because of the languid management response to this outbreak, we are now sadly faced with a situation where much of our management efforts are focused on the rescue of genetic material from coral species already at risk of regional extinction.

The delayed response to this SCTLD outbreak in Southeast Florida has many similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic response in the United States and there are lessons learned from both that will improve disease response outcomes in the future, to the benefit of coral reefs and human populations.

Publication:

Precht W (2021) Failure to respond to a coral disease epizootic in Florida: causes and consequences. Rethinking Ecology 6: 1-47. https://doi.org/10.3897/rethinkingecology.6.56285

Data checking for biodiversity collections and other biodiversity data compilers from Pensoft

Guest blog post by Dr Robert Mesibov

Proofreading the text of scientific papers isn’t hard, although it can be tedious. Are all the words spelled correctly? Is all the punctuation correct and in the right place? Is the writing clear and concise, with correct grammar? Are all the cited references listed in the References section, and vice-versa? Are the figure and table citations correct?

Proofreading of text is usually done first by the reviewers, and then finished by the editors and copy editors employed by scientific publishers. A similar kind of proofreading is also done with the small tables of data found in scientific papers, mainly by reviewers familiar with the management and analysis of the data concerned.

But what about proofreading the big volumes of data that are common in biodiversity informatics? Tables with tens or hundreds of thousands of rows and dozens of columns? Who does the proofreading?

Sadly, the answer is usually “No one”. Proofreading large amounts of data isn’t easy and requires special skills and digital tools. The people who compile biodiversity data often lack the skills, the software or the time to properly check what they’ve compiled.

The result is that a great deal of the data made available through biodiversity projects like GBIF is — to be charitable — “messy”. Biodiversity data often needs a lot of patient cleaning by end-users before it’s ready for analysis. To assist end-users, GBIF and other aggregators attach “flags” to each record in the database where an automated check has found a problem. These checks find the most obvious problems amongst the many possible data compilation errors. End-users often have much more work to do after the flags have been dealt with.

In 2017, Pensoft employed a data specialist to proofread the online datasets that are referenced in manuscripts submitted to Pensoft’s journals as data papers. The results of the data-checking are sent to the data paper’s authors, who then edit the datasets. This process has substantially improved many datasets (including those already made available through GBIF) and made them more suitable for digital re-use. At blog publication time, more than 200 datasets have been checked in this way.

Note that a Pensoft data audit does not check the accuracy of the data, for example, whether the authority for a species name is correct, or whether the latitude/longitude for a collecting locality agrees with the verbal description of that locality. For a more or less complete list of what does get checked, see the Data checklist at the bottom of this blog post. These checks are aimed at ensuring that datasets are correctly organised, consistently formatted and easy to move from one digital application to another. The next reader of a digital dataset is likely to be a computer program, not a human. It is essential that the data are structured and formatted, so that they are easily processed by that program and by other programs in the pipeline between the data compiler and the next human user of the data.

Pensoft’s data-checking workflow was previously offered only to authors of data paper manuscripts. It is now available to data compilers generally, with three levels of service:

  • Basic: the compiler gets a detailed report on what needs fixing
  • Standard: minor problems are fixed in the dataset and reported
  • Premium: all detected problems are fixed in collaboration with the data compiler and a report is provided

Because datasets vary so much in size and content, it is not possible to set a price in advance for basic, standard and premium data-checking. To get a quote for a dataset, send an email with a small sample of the data topublishing@pensoft.net.

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Data checklist

Minor problems:

  • dataset not UTF-8 encoded
  • blank or broken records
  • characters other than letters, numbers, punctuation and plain whitespace
  • more than one version (the simplest or most correct one) for each character
  • unnecessary whitespace
  • Windows carriage returns (retained if required)
  • encoding errors (e.g. “Dum?ril” instead of “Duméril”)
  • missing data with a variety of representations (blank, “-“, “NA”, “?” etc)

Major problems:

  • unintended shifts of data items between fields
  • incorrect or inconsistent formatting of data items (e.g. dates)
  • different representations of the same data item (pseudo-duplication)
  • for Darwin Core datasets, incorrect use of Darwin Core fields
  • data items that are invalid or inappropriate for a field
  • data items that should be split between fields
  • data items referring to unexplained entities (e.g. “habitat is type A”)
  • truncated data items
  • disagreements between fields within a record
  • missing, but expected, data items
  • incorrectly associated data items (e.g. two country codes for the same country)
  • duplicate records, or partial duplicate records where not needed

For details of the methods used, see the author’s online resources:

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Find more for Pensoft’s data audit workflow provided for data papers submitted to Pensoft journals on Pensoft’s blog.

FAIR biodiversity data in Pensoft journals thanks to a routine data auditing workflow

Guest Blog Post: Researchers split the birdcatcher trees (genus Pisonia) into three

Large Cabbage trees (Pisonia grandis) dominate the landscape of a small island in the Pacific Ocean
Photo by Jean-Yves Meyer (Délégation à la Recherche de Polynésie Française, Tahiti, French Polynesia)

Guest blog post by Marcos Caraballo

The birdcatcher trees – genus Pisonia – are infamous for trapping birds with their super-sticky seed pods that would frequently entangle the body of the ‘victim’. Left flightless, the poor feathered creatures eventually die either from starvation or fatigue, or predators. Similarly notorious are the birdcatcher trees for botanists, who have been baffled by their complicated classification for the last three centuries. 

Here’s why myself and graduate student Elson Felipe Rossetto of the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (Brazil) decided to take up the untangling of this issue with our recent taxonomic studies. You can find our research paper published in the open-access scholarly journal PhytoKeys.

Ripe fruits (anthocarps) of the Birdlime tree (Ceodes umbellifera)
Photo by Ching-I Peng [deceased]

We reestablished two genera: Ceodes and Rockia, where both had been previously merged under the name of Pisonia. Now, as a result, there are three distinct lineages of birdcatcher trees from the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans: Ceodes, Pisonia, and Rockia.

“Previous molecular studies on Pisonia species from around the world showed that species were clustered into three major groups, and here we assign names for each of them. With this new classification, a large number of the species known as Pisonia will be henceforth named Ceodes. This includes the Parapara (Ceodes brunoniana) and the Birdlime (Ceodes umbellifera) trees, both native to many islands, including Hawaii and New Zealand. They are commonly planted in gardens for their lush and sometimes variegated foliage, as well as their fragrant white flowers. However, the Cabbage tree (Pisonia grandis) will still be technically known as Pisonia.”

adds the study’s lead author Felipe Rossetto.
Male (staminate) showy flowers of the Birdlime tree (Ceodes umbellifera)
Photo by Joel Bradshaw (Far Outliers, Honolulu, Hawaii)

Birdcatcher trees have generated much controversy in the popular media because of their seed pods (technically called “anthocarps”) secreting a sticky substance that glues them to the feathers of seabirds or other animals for dispersal. Sometimes, though, too many seed pods can harm or kill birds, especially small ones, by weighing them down and rendering them flightless. This macabre practice has led to many controversies and local campaigns aiming to remove the trees, even illegally.

Brown noddy (Anous stolidus) covered with the sticky fruits (anthocarps) of the Cabbage tree (Pisonia grandis)
Photo by Jean-Yves Meyer (Délégation à la Recherche de Polynésie Française, Tahiti, French Polynesia)

In spite of their forbidding reputation, however, we would like to stress that birdcatcher trees have positive effects on ecosystems and are important components of vegetation, especially for small islands. Sadly, there are many endemic and already endangered species of birdcatcher trees that only exist on a few small islands, where they are effectively placed at the mercy of local people.

Many species of birdcatcher trees are large and, thereby, tolerate harsh environments like seafronts and rocky cliffs, making them prime nesting spots for seabirds. Birdcatcher trees are also ecologically curious and could be regarded as keystone species in small islands, because their soft branches can sustain many types of invertebrates; their flowers are an important food source for bees and ants; their dense leaf litter nourishes the soil; and their roots have intimate interaction with native underground fungi (mycorrhiza).

All in all, clarifying the taxonomy of the birdcatcher trees is the first step to understanding how many species exist and how they relate to each other. 

Although most people relate birdcatcher trees with beaches and coastal habitats, there are species that are only found in mountains or rainforests. For example, the species now allocated to the genus Rockia is endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago. These are small trees able to grow in dry to mesic mountain forests. Using our new classification, future studies can explore in detail the hidden diversity of these enigmatic plants, and find out how trees with high dispersal capabilities evolve into species endemic to small island ecosystems.

Cabbage trees (Pisonia grandis) are important components of the vegetation in small islands due to their massive size
Photo by Jean-Yves Meyer (Délégation à la Recherche de Polynésie Française, Tahiti, French Polynesia)

About the author:

Marcos A. Caraballo-Ortiz is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C., United States). His research interests include plant systematics and ecology, with a focus on flora of the Caribbean Islands. Dr. Caraballo-Ortiz has experience studying the taxonomy of several groups of tropical plants, with a particular interest in neotropical Mistletoes (Loranthaceae, Santalaceae, Viscaceae) and the Four O’Clock family (Nyctaginaceae). 

For more information about his projects, visit marcoscaraballo.com.

Research paper:

Rossetto EFS, Caraballo-Ortiz MA (2020) Splitting the Pisonia birdcatcher trees: re-establishment of Ceodes and Rockia (Nyctaginaceae, Pisonieae). PhytoKeys 152: 121-136. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.152.50611


Guest Blog Post: New Area of Importance for Bat Conservation in Honduras

The recognition of the “Ceguaca, la Mujer de los Juncos” locality comes as a result of research work – published last year in Subterranean Biology – which produced the first checklist of bats for Santa Bárbara

Guest blog post by Eduardo Javier Ordoñez-Trejo and Manfredo Alejandro Turcios-Casco

Bat populations are threatened due to fragmentation and loss of their habitats. Meanwhile, dry forests are some of the least studied and most threatened ecosystems in Honduras, and similarly, so have been the caves.

We had to walk at least two hours to reach either of the caves in El Peñon or Quita Sueño, so we would take our full equipment: for camping, cooking and studying bats.
Photo by Hefer Ávila

Caves are important reservoirs of species, as they offer perks no other habitat can provide at once: a refuge from predators, inconstant weather, and a critical venue for social interactions, reproduction, hibernation, roosting and nutrients. In order to protect bat populations, the Latin American and Caribbean Web for Bat Conservation (RELCOM) supports the establishment of Areas of Importance for the Conservation of Bats, abbreviated as AICOMS (Spanish for Areas with Importance for the Conservation of Bats) .

It was at least a two-hour walk between the caves of Monte Grueso and the caves of El Peñon. The final stint, though, included a swim across Rio Ulúa, one of most extensive rivers in Honduras.
Photo by Hefer Ávila

Together with biologists of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) and local community members, we provided the first ever checklist of bat species in the Dry Forest of Ceguaca, Santa Barbara (Honduras), and described the importance of two caves in the area for bat conservation based on species richness. We published this study last June in Subterranean Biology.

The study is openly accessible in Subterranean Biology

We found that caves in Ceguaca are inhabited by at least 23 bat species of four families, which represents approximately a fifth of all species known from Honduras. Their inhabitants include several threatened species like the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), one of the three existing vampire bats, and rare species with few official records in the area, such as Schmidts’s big-eared bat (Micronycteris schmidtorum). These caves may also represent a critical site for roosting and nursing. During our study, we managed to record pregnant and lactating females of several species, as well as reproductive males.

The certificate issued by RELCOM recognising the caves in Ceguaca as an Area of Importance for the Conservation of Bats, dated 6th March 2020

“It feels wonderful to see that our work has had great results and that with our efforts, we established an area where bats will be protected and studied. This certification also includes the name of Roberto Castellano, an elder member of the community of Ceguaca, who helped us during the fieldwork as our guide. He was a great conservationist of this area and protector of the caves. Unfortunately, he passed away during the study, however, due to his enormous contribution, we dedicated our article to him and included him as part of this AICOM success.”

José Alejandro Soler Orellana, co-author of the study.

Using what we learned in Ceguaca’s caves, we approached the Program for Bat Conservation of Honduras (PCMH) and showed them the evidence the locality was indeed a precious place with a spectacular bat diversity. Consequently, thanks to our collaboration with the PCMH, the site was effectively declared as an Area of Importance for the Conservation of Bats by RELCOM on 6th March 2020. 

This is an enormous step for bat conservation in the country. Bat conservation efforts should focus on studying and protecting these and other important habitats. We also need to make sure that local people appreciate the important role the bats play in the ecosystem.

A close up of a spider Description automatically generated
We captured this adult Pallas’s long-tongued bat (Glossophaga soricina) female in a cave in Monte Grueso. She must have been returning to the cave after spending the day pollinating local plants. During these surveys, we found trees with opened flowers of Mexican calabash (Crescentia alata).
Photo by Hefer Ávila

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Research article:

Turcios-Casco MA, Mazier DIO, Orellana JAS, Ávila-Palma HD, Trejo EJO (2019) Two caves in western Honduras are important for bat conservation: first checklist of bats in Santa Bárbara. Subterranean Biology 30: 41–55. https://doi.org/10.3897/subtbiol.30.35420