Using Blogs to Enrich Your Scientific Career

On Monday, February 13, 2012, I will once again have the pleasure of visiting the University of California-Davis graduate student seminar, “Translating Research Beyond Academia: Communication Strategies”. Here are my notes for the session.

Updated 2/13/2012.

Why Communicate Science?

1. Because it’s fun.
2. Because it’s fun when your parents actually understand what the heck you do/want to do for a living.
3. My take: Publishing your findings is one thing, but it’s just as important to clearly and effectively convey the significance of your research to your dean, a reporter, a senator or a stranger at a party. Simply put, the more people who know the implications of your research, the more opportunities may come for collaboration, funding, influencing public policy and improving societal awareness of science. (http://younglandis.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/communicating-science-through-context)

Why Learn How to Use Blogs

Communicate your research to the public

• Foster interest in your research
• Become a source for information
• Defend your science (http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies)
• Required Reading: http://io9.com/5873948/you-are-bitching-about-the-wrong-things-when-you-read-an-article-about-science

Interact with others in your academic field

• Find students/advisors
• Engage in critique/punditry (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/12/02/happy-birthday-arseniclife/; http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/01/23/independent-researchers-find-no-evidence-for-arsenic-life-in-mono-lake/)
• Get help in your research? (http://smithsonianscience.org/2011/03/facebook-friends-help-scientists-quickly-identify-nearly-500-fish-specimens-collected-in-guyana/)

Organize and showcase your research

• Online notebook
• Field blogging (http://seaplexscience.com/; http://www.werc.usgs.gov/ProjectOutreachNews.aspx?projectID=221)
• Interactive thesis (http://landis2009commutesheds.wordpress.com/)

Fundraise for your research

• Like this: http://rockethub.com/projects/3810-turtles-in-the-deep

Venture into Science Communications

• Brand yourself (http://www.kirstensanford.com/)
• Hang out with your friends (http://deepseanews.com/)
• Work for that magazine you’ve always dreamed of (http://blogs.nature.com/; http://news.sciencemag.org/; http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/; http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/)
• Become a professional journalist (http://www.aaas.org/programs/education/MassMedia/; http://scicom.ucsc.edu/; http://journalism.nyu.edu/graduate/courses-of-study/science-health-and-environmental-reporting)
• Write about your passion; (http://www.persquaremile.com/; http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/)

THE Conference About Science Blogging

• http://scienceonline2012.com/

Free Family Science Talk: The Secret Life of Nesting Birds on Alcatraz – Oct. 29!

A black-crowned night heron perches near the lighthouse on Alcatraz Island. Image courtesy of Roger Hothem/USGS.

Some of my great USGS ecology researchers will be giving a free public lecture this Saturday, October 29, 1:30 p.m. PDT in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Science Festival.

Titled “Life and Death on Alcatraz Island: The Secret Life of Nesting Birds on ‘The Rock’” and hosted at 201 Fort Mason by the National Park Service, our biologists will share their knowledge from 20-plus years of research on Alcatraz.

We’ll focus in particular on the black-crowned night-heron, a secretive, twilight hunter that’s particularly useful in environmental contaminant studies, due to its position in the food chain. Additionally, herons have to coexist with nesting gulls and ravens on Alcatraz… and can often end up as raven food.

• Blogpost: http://www.werc.usgs.gov/outreach.aspx?RecordID=110
• News Release: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3011
• Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=203249386407172

Interestingly, a lot of these nest monitoring surveys requires the use of remote cameras hooked up to — you guessed it, DVRs. 

So we’ve pretty much got these birds on TiVo and have to sit through a bajillion hours of footage to quantify behavior…

Fun activities for educators and kids include:

• Owl pellet dissections (from which kids get to keep the bones and goodies), which are similar to what we do to study raven diets.
• Ask a biologist Q&A session on what field work is like.
• Field work tools and props that kids can touch and hold, including the remote nest cameras and DVRs that we use to monitor nest behavior.
• Coloring sheets of some of the seabird species we work with.

For the more advanced geeks, we’ll have some technical posters and reprints of research articles on hand. Some of this data also will be presented at The Wildlife Society 2011 Annual Meeting the following week.

The first-ever Bay Area Science Festival has already made a big splash this week, and USGS will also host other hikes and even science pub crawls later next week. Details at the USGS news release.

Hope to see some of you there on Saturday! Follow at #basf11 and @bayareascience and of course @younglandis.

Science Gets a Black Eye (Pea) for Good

I’m late to the news, but looks like will.i.am is leading entertainers and artists like Snoop Dogg and Justin Timberlake in a new program/effort to boost science, technology, engineering and math education:

 

Folks on the Left Coast will still be able to catch the program tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific on ABC.

Curious to see how this unfolds! #iamfirstTV

Biologists Draw Blood in Forks, Wash.

A toothy smile and hair you can't resist. Does not sparkle. Image courtesy of C.J. Casson/Seattle Aquarium.

Marine biologists are setting up camp in Forks, Washington, this week to capture some fanged predators. They are definitely cute and they have great hair, but their seafood-breath should cut short any romantic fantasies.

We’re talking about sea otters, of course.

Researchers from the USGS Pacific Nearshore Project will spend the next three weeks studying the health of local sea otters to assess the condition of Washington’s nearshore ecosystem. The expedition team will set up base camp at the Olympic Natural Resource Center, while the daily sampling missions will depart out of La Push. They’ll board the research vessel Tatoosh of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, and work the waters near Olympic National Park, Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and the Washington Island National Wildlife Refuge.

This is the third trip this summer for the Nearshore Project crew, which has already spent weeks in Southeast Alaska and recently returned from Vancouver Island. They will once again post photos and field journals as the carry out the Washington expedition.

• Read the USGS press release
• Read the field blogs from 2011 Alaska and Vancouver Island expeditions
• Download sea otter photos from past expeditions
• Visit the Pacific Nearshore Project homepage
• Read a Washington Post story about the Nearshore Project

“We’ll be temporarily capturing and releasing sea otters for physical exams, biopsies and blood tests, observing sea otter feeding behavior, and collecting samples from fish and other species that hold clues to ecological health,” says Shawn Larson, a Seattle Aquarium sea otter biologist on the August expedition. Larson will assist verterinarian Dr. Mike Murray of the Monterey Bay Aquarium with sea otter biopsies and sample processing, and also conduct otter feeding behavior observations.

And how does blood figure into all this?

Blood and tissue samples drawn from each sea otter will be analyzed with the gene transcription technique developed by WERC, which can show whether a sea otter has been exposed to oil, parasites, disease or other types of stress. The gene transcription analysis will be conducted by scientists Keith Miles and Liz Bowen of WERC Davis Field Station.

Researchers also will extract a tooth sample to determine the age of each sea otter. Rounding out the sea otter health exam are measurements like body girth, dental and gum checks and whisker samples.

The beautiful Olympic Peninsula. Image courtesy of Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary/NOAA.

“Sea otters are the perfect health indicators of our nearshore waters,” says James Bodkin, the project’s chief scientist and a sea otter biologist at the USGS Alaska Science Center. “They’re entirely dependent on nearshore marine habitats and they are keystone species in kelp forest food webs. Some populations are abundant and stable, while others are either declining or struggling to reach healthy numbers. Can these differences be explained by ocean influences, or by human impacts to the adjacent watersheds? That’s what we’re hoping to learn.”

WERC sea otter biologist Tim Tinker will be sitting out of the Washington capture. Tinker will be attending the 2011 Ecological Society of America conference in Austin, Texas, to present findings on diet specializations by individual sea otters.