Land of birds

What would I have thought, when I stepped off the boat? A barren and inhospitable land, too much bush, too many loud birds? Or just, oh dear, someone lives here already?

I suppose like everybody else I’d have been homesick before very long, and if I had the means would have set about sending back to the motherland for familiar things to make me feel at home. Granny’s sideboard, my second-best bustle, some bunnies and sparrows. Maybe a weasel or two.

And maybe it was me who accidentally brought in seeds wedged into the soles of my boots: thistles, dandelions, burdock.

With the benefit of hindsight though, it’s hard to imagine that I would have thought

New Zealand's wildlife: stuffed.
Photo credit: Te Papa

it was a good idea to bring in stoats to eat the rabbits, after I realised the rabbits were out of control. After all, there were so many flightless birds out there, just minding their own business. Enormous, placid parrots, tiny defenceless wrens and ground-nesting native ducks. Surely I would have considered the consequences?

Easy to judge though, at this late stage.

I can imagine thinking gorse was a good idea, having come from a country where farmland hedgerows were so traditional. But decades later when gorse was recognised as a pest, would I have thought introducing gorse-hungry weevils, spider mites, moths and thrips worth the risk? As with all biological controls, in an unusual ecology like ours there’s always a chance these introduced control agents will discover they prefer the taste of something native (and knowing Aotearoa’s luck, something on the verge of extinction).

The possums I definitely would have voted against, while making the sandwiches at

Photo credit: unknown

my local branch of the Acclimatisation Society. Assuming I had any kind of voice of course. But if I’d had anything to do with it, the landscape around you might be quite different today. Wombats, for one thing. They would have been a better choice than the possums. Probably some zebras, because, zebras. And some quokka, who would have been a much better bet than those pesty hedgehogs. If you’re going for ‘exotic’, well, might as well go crazy. How about some giraffes?

Sea cucumbers

I was interested this week, on news of the sad death of cricketer Martin Crowe, to hear that he’d chosen to treat his cancer with 'natural therapies' rather than follow doctors’ advice.  Each to their own, of course. But, given the alarming influence that sportspeople have in this country, well. I despair. One minute it’s weetbix sandwiches, heat pumps, and the joys of crippling debt, and the next thing you know it’s all what a nice flag and eat your sea cucumbers.

Google sea cucumbers and you’ll find there’s no shortage of people who believe they do cure cancer, but actual research is only in its infancy, and is not

Here, kitty
Photo credit: theeggadventure.com

conclusive one way or the other. 

Now I’m in no position to scoff at anyone suffering a severe illness who tries anything that offers hope. I once, in desperation, saw a naturopath in the hope that ANYTHING she could suggest might (might) help me with the crippling pain of endometriosis. Hope was enough. Strangely the waving of a pendulum gave me no relief, though I’m sure Dr Crystal-Muncher would say my skepticism ruined the effect. And this would be so, if she was talking about the placebo effect. But actual medicine works whether you ‘believe’ in it or not, surely?

I’m all for people experimenting with different methods of pain control and quality of life enhancement, don’t get me wrong. Whether it’s prescription painkillers, liquid marijuana, yoga stretches or a nice cab sav, we’re all different in what works for taking that edge off – and if you’re suffering from a terminal illness or any health condition that compromises your ability to enjoy yourself, you should be able to try whatever you like to improve your physical comfort and your state of mind.

But please don’t experiment on yourself with sea cucumber extract, vitamin C , turmeric and baking soda expecting an actual cure for your condition. If you want to know

Quack

whether some wacko treatment works, why not get yourself involved in a clinical trial, and then we can all have some proper evidence about your alternative medicine.

But then as Ben Goldacre has explained there’s no such thing as alternative medicine. Because if it doesn’t work, it’s not medicine. And if it works, it’s not ‘alternative’ is it? It’s just 'medicine'.

Protein

Confession: I’m no longer a vegetarian.

Over the course of this summer I have eaten at least five fruit flies.

I don’t know what they were thinking when they fell into my wine, but I can’t say it tasted any the worse.

It’ll be a rare day when a sheep climbs into your roasting dish, or a pig into your frying pan, so

Photo credit: Daniel M.N.Turner via iStockphoto.com

as animal protein goes it was a fairly cooperative business. I have to assume those fruit flies knew what they were doing.

But how much did they contribute to my protein intake?

Only about one gram, apparently, or around 2% of my daily needs.

Intriguing that the most accessible source of info on the protein value of insects is a weight-loss website, and their calculation is based on the measurement of a ‘partial swarm’.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

I did think though that the notion of insects as a protein source had been much in the news over the last couple of years and had become, if not mainstream, at least well known (in a futuristic, wouldn’t-that-be-a-laugh kind of way).  But as this Guardian article explains, it seems likely that in the Western world our blind dependence on farmed stock animals as a meat source makes it more

Razing forest for palm oil plantations, Indonesia. 

Fonterra: “They were going to cut those trees down anyway.” 

Photo credit:  Ulet Ifansasti, Greenpeace

likely that insects will form a major part of their food, rather than ours.  Got to be an improvement on all that palm oil industry waste, anyway.

It’s been a good summer for insects in Wellington. My house is full of moths and my Facebook feed is infested with desperate posts from women of a certain age, begging for swan plants to feed their herds of ravenous monarch butterflies.  

It’s been quite a cicada season too. Surely we can make use of all these? Tapas?  Or if the thought of the crunch makes you queasy, how about just grinding them up into powder – pop it into your smoothie. Could be anything in there anyway, who would know. Truth be told, I’m pretty squeamish about eating insects myself, so I shouldn’t tease. But then, I’m squeamish about eating sheep, cows, pigs, fish, hens, other people – and I’m not keen on smoothies either. I figure the time will come soon enough when I’m not able to chew my food, and meanwhile my digestive system is the world's most powerful nutrient extractor. Actually.

But for those of you who are okay about eating your fellow mammals, really why should you be put off by the thought of eating insects?

They’ve been around a lot longer than us, and as the world warms we’ll be seeing a lot more of them; anything you can do to keep their numbers down will be helpful in the struggle to maintain the lifestyles to which we’ve become accustomed. Get them before they get you.

Desperate advertising

Now that the paper I started this blog for is finished, I'm free to rant about all manner of things. So for starters, this:

WHAT. Do they mean?
A heavily sedated child propped up in front of an industrial fan. The milk is, where? Why? What?

I know the dairy industry is in trouble in this country, but really. Who thought this was a good idea?

I used to watch Bewitched as a kid and quite liked the idea of doing Darren's job, pitching crazy ad ideas to strait-laced people who didn't quite get the joke.

But with the benefit of age and impatience I see now that this is what that looks like. Can't wait for the next instalment in this series.  

Wrap up

The key things I’ve learned about science communication from this course are techniques for writing position papers, strategies around editing of others’ work, and how careless I am with referencing.

The initial section on position papers was gold: go through the opposing viewpoint fairly, clearly, point by point, and then address each point with contradictory evidence. Simple! But writing an argument this way was not something I’d consciously explored before. I’m respectful enough of others to argue similarly in real life (unless you really push my buttons) but I’ve realised I’m a lot more self-righteous and ‘show-offy’ on the page; I need to take care that I don’t get carried away. The ability to stand back and dispassionately weigh up the opposing positions without getting snarky will be a definite gain.

Concentrate! Photo credit: thevintagenews.com

I also learned about my limits around working with other people’s writing, which I found more difficult and stressful than I expected.  If I were to do this again I would insist that only finished material was given to me to work on, and refuse to accept any re-writes while in the process of revision. Having others change their material while I was in the midst of revision, trying to stitch the sections together, was frustrating. And I’ll admit – I was already proofreading, while revising, when I should have left that til last. Can’t. Help. Myself. This made version control a nightmare, and ultimately the version I submitted as the final report had errors I was sure I had already corrected, including a MISSING APOSTROPHE. The Shame.

Finally, I’ve learned that I need to get my referencing right the first time and check

Photo credit: freelancers union.org

the prescribed format there and then. Journal articles drive me particularly mad. Why does it have to be so complicated?  

Twice (twice!) I made the mistake of deleting non-crucial material from the text, but leaving the reference on the list. I checked the team’s sections against their references carefully for this but overlooked my own. On the plus side, very glad to have learned the ‘command T’ trick for reference list formatting. Genius.

What I still need to learn about writing/communicating in science is the editing of my own work: what to focus on and what to leave out. I think I’m so good at it, but I still include a lot of extraneous words and details that just don’t need to be there. Oh! Just did it again. In blog 8 I sang Carl Sagan’s praises for leaving the right gaps, but I still have a lot to learn about this. ‘Stop giving reasons’ is my focus now. So much can be inferred, and I need to trust my readers to join the dots for themselves - without forgetting the difference between general knowledge and specialist knowledge that I might need to explain.  Knowing what to spell out and what to leave people’s imaginations is what I still need to learn. More haiku practice might help.