Teaching mark-recapture with dor beetles

The key step in the planning of any good field course is to spend some time at the field site observing and asking questions. What is the habitat like, what lives there, what are the facilities, what are potential challenges or dangers to working there, etc? When I first went to do this at Svanninge Bjerge, the location of my zoology field course, I immediately started seeing big blue dung beetles all over the place. Bikuben Foundation, who operate the place, run cattle there. There is no lack of dung. These big plodding dor beetles (Geotrupidae) were all over the place, and it didn't take me long to decide I wanted to work them into the course. I wanted to introduce mark-recapture methods, and these seemed like perfect subjects. Mark-recapture methods involve catching animals, marking them in some way that would allow them to be recognized if re-sighted, letting them go, and then trying to recapture them. Such methods have a huge range of applications from tracking individual movements and estimating population sizes to monitoring growth and survival and studying behavior and sociality. To teach this in a field course, I wanted an invertebrate animal that wasn't too likely to leave the study area, that is easy to capture, mark and handle without damage, and that has enough charisma to capture students' attention. Dor beetles have all this. They are big and slow, and so easy to find and catch by hand. They don't bite or sting. They will collect in large numbers in pitfall traps baited with cow dung. They have big hard upper wings (elytra) that can be marked in any number or ways without harming them (we used this system with nail polish, but I've now got a battery-powered cautery). They are extremely numerous. They are shiny and blue. They can fly, but don't often do so.

Students mark a live beetle for release. Photo by Kim Lundgreen.

They make such an ideal intro to mark-recapture that I almost worry that I've given the student a false sense that this is easy, where in fact such studies are often very hard work. Still, if you want an efficient system for teaching mark-recapture methods and have beetles like this at your location, I strongly recommend them to you.

Jeg kan aila dig!

My three year old has already learned that she can insult us in Danish with relative impunity.  Recently, when angry, she shouts "Jeg kan aila dig!" which means "I can aila you!" only we don't know what illa is, or what Danish word she is actually using there. She was calling us "superfalig" which means, "extremely dangerous" for months before we figured out what she was saying, at which point it lost its appeal.

Having our toddler speak the local language better than we do is a comic indignity, but my failure to learn Danish has more serious consequences. While three quarters of everyone we meet here speaks decent English, the culture, administration, government, commerce, etc. are mostly conducted in Danish, and my engagement in any of these is therefore quite limited. Iris's Danish is vastly better than mine, while still far from fluent. In a fairly open and engaging society we are bound by these linguistic barriers.

Why, you may justly ask, don't I just buckle down and learn Danish? A few reasons immediately come to mind. A more-than-full-time job and two young daughters don't give me a great deal of time for down-buckling. Danish is, even the Danes often say, an unusually difficult spoken language. The correspondence between what a work looks like and sounds like is even looser than in English. Many of the consonants are silent or nearly so, and I just can't detect any differences between some of the very many vowel sounds and stops that make up most of the spoken language.

Danish teacher: The first is Å and the second is Å.
Me: You just said the same sound twice, you said O and O.
Danish teacher: No, Ååååååå vs. Ååååååå. No, you are pronouncing too hard. Oooooo is a third sound, and has long and short forms.
Me: What do the long and short forms sound like?
Danish teacher: Oooooo vs. Ooooo.
Me: Maybe we should skip to grammar.

My students say that my attempts to pronounce Danish make me sound like a drunken Norwegian. I do understand a lot more spoken Norwegian than Danish, as Norwegian is a relatively phonetic sister of Danish and I can read simple Danish. If the Danes would agree to compromise on drunken Norwegian, I would learn it.

But when my department sends me scientific reports to grade (what they call censoring), I know my Danish is not nearly good enough to know if they make sense. My course descriptions all state prominently that the entire course will be taught in English. I Google Translate every email sent out to the department to find out if it is something I need to do something about. Google Translate is less good at Danish than it is at German, for example.

Another reason for my linguistic failing is the linguistic proficiency of the Danes. One look and they can tell that I am not Danish. They start speaking English before I even open my mouth. My daughter's three-year-old friends may not speak English, but their seven-year-old siblings do.

Finally, there is the broader motivation problem. Denmark is a wonderful country in which we do not want to spend the rest of our lives. We want to be closer to family, in a more familiar and diverse culture, in a place where we speak the language (and oh what I wouldn't give for a decent bagel, or a burrito with spicy black beans and nopales). Knowing that we don't want to stay makes it easy to not learn, which makes it easy to not want to stay.

This experience has reinforced my long-standing intolerance for the intolerance toward immigrants and linguistic minorities that is very much on display in many parts of the US and Europe. I could spend the rest of my life in Denmark, and actually apply myself to learning, and would never speak the language well. Those countries that have the harshest attitudes towards immigrants tend to be the ones that need immigrants the most urgently. And being an immigrant is hard enough, even in a relatively accepting culture like Denmark's.

Picture show (in Danish)

This spring I taught a field course in terrestrial zoology at Svanninge Bjerge, a nature area owned and operated by the Bikuben Foundation. The foundation had Casper Tybjerg, a well known Danish photographer, join us and take photos. Bikubenfonden has featured the course on the Svanninge Bjerge website, including posting many of his photos (including the above). If you start here, and click to the right, most of the next several dozen photos are from our course, and all are beautiful. The accompany text is in Danish.

It makes me all happy and proud and sad-that-it-is-over to look through these and remember what amazing fun that course was.

Toddler naturalist

It was only 45 minutes until dinner and my girl was antsy. We decided to head out into the woods and see what we could see. We got on a bike brought along an almond and raisin snack, a water bottle, a doll, and stuffed orangutan. Five minutes later we were standing in the woods outside of town looking at this piece of wood. "This is a perfect cover object," I told Tigerlily. It was flat or even slightly concave underneath, it was on the soil but not in the soil, it was broad, and it was in the sunlight. "I want to look under it," she said. We lifted it up and found this shiny black toad.

We talked about toad poison and washing hands before eating. She hadn't finished her raisin and almond snack so only I held the toad.

Next we went for a little walk in the woods. She said she wanted to find insects. Instead, we found blackberries.

Or rather, she stumbled into them and I recognized what they were. I tried one just to make sure they were good, and they were. I didn't use my hands. Toad poison.

She left only the underripe ones. On our way back to our bike, she said, "what's this? An insect?" It was a beautiful dragonfly that I had walked right past. I couldn't get a good picture of it but you can get a sense of how colorful it was. 

Now it was dinner time and we walked straight back to our bike. My girl was tired and hungry but learning about the woods and was ready to come home.

Gloom and Doom from the happiest country on Earth

I will say first that I find it difficult to imagine any rich modern country taking climate change more seriously, or being more eager to take concrete actions to oppose it, than does Denmark. Danish individuals, society and government, including every political party, acknowledge the reality of anthropogentic climate change and the very real dangers it poses to (very flat) Denmark and the world. Danes know that Denmark is too small for a drop in its emissions to make much of a difference, but they seem more than willing to do their part by reducing energy use, subsidizing alternative power sources (etc.) and applying what limited diplomatic influence they have. Denmark is economically comfortable enough to really invest in these things and has both a highly functional government and a populace willing to implement the policies that their leaders decide upon. I am sure there are people in Denmark who disagree, but I haven't met (or even heard of) them. Unlike most countries, they have made their emission reduction targets law (although how such a law is enforced is unclear to me).

Because of the above, not despite it, Denmark convinces me that humanity will rush headlong into global ecological disaster. I say this because if any country has the willingness and ability to implement the policies needed to avoid disaster, it is Denmark, and they are not there. For while Denmark invests in weaning itself off fossil fuels, it also invests very heavily in the fossil fuel industry, notably North Sea oil and gas exploration. The Danish government surely believes, probably correctly, that the will does not exist in the populace to give up on the profits of involvement in the scramble for hydrocarbons. So while Denmark is trying hard not to burn those fuels here in Denmark, it is trying hard to sell them to someone else who will burn them, doing every bit as much to submerge the Danish lowlands (aka Denmark). Danes know this, but like the rest of the world (I'm looking at you Canadian Tar Sands) they seem to feel  (again probably correctly) that if they don't do it someone else (Norway, UK, etc.) will.

So I can imagine a possible future in which all countries have become as convinced as Denmark is that humans are hurtling into climate disaster and need to hit the breaks, and that would be great, but I have trouble imagining that even in such a world this peculiar form of the tragedy of the commons would be escapable. As long as there is demand for fossil fuels, there will always be others who will extract and sell them because if they don't do it someone else will. And there will always be countries who, even if they fully understand the global situation, need inexpensive fuel and will burn those hydrocarbons. And as long as that is the case, no amount of individual turning down of heat and biking to work is going to make a big enough difference to matter. The problem is structural and that structure is disastrously profitable.

Unless, of course, and this is me looking for that ray of hope, other sources of energy rapidly become so much cheaper than fossil fuels that there is just not much profit to be made in extracting oil, coal or gas. In which case, we will be able to say that all those solar panels installed in the gloom of Denmark were not in vain, but were a vote of confidence and a wise subsidy for the development of alternative energy

Serious people

A colleague, here in Denmark, launched (unprovoked) into bashing US higher education, as light conversation at a party. We discussed the serious problems of student debt, lack of public funding, and the very variable standards of education. She had read something that said that US college students were just there to party, take the easiest possible courses, and "not be serious people." The young women, it was reported to me, only stay in school long enough to find a husband. The strongest evidence for the overall lack of seriousness, I was told, is that students spend a great deal of their time taking courses that have no direct connection to their major. The implication was clear: if one actually intends to do something with one's studies, one focuses exclusively on preparing oneself for that something, and no dabbling. Good biology students, Danish biology students for example, take biology and just enough math, chemistry and physics. At this point I mentioned that as a biology major, I also took classes in essay writing, ceramics, psychology, stage management, dance, etc. and that I thought it was time well spent. This was clearly not comprehensible, and the subject quickly changed.

I will not badmouth the Danish educational system, which in many ways is excellent, and certainly in some ways (particularly public funding, affordability and access) is far better than the US system. I will say that Danish students strike me as no more serious, or sober, than their US peers. As foreign as it is to most people here, I remain a believer in the liberal arts education, and I think they could benefit by allowing some breadth to accompany the focus.

To this day, those writing courses improve my manuscripts, and the stage management experience has made it possible for me to organize myself and a new scientific society. The Social Psychology course, taken concurrently with an Animal Social Behavior course, brought me to understand how barriers between social and natural science impede scientific progress, and that the fallow spaces between these fields are often where the most interesting unturned rocks remain. The dance class was, well, a useful diversion at a stressful time, was useful in wooing a very serious wife, and helps me to entertaining our two-year old. Some of my most original biological thoughts have come to me while making not-quite-round pots and not-as-expressive-as-I-had-hoped monsters out of clay. My creativity, a characteristic more than one boss has told me is my most unusual strength as a researcher, was learned by taking more than just biology classes.

So thank you, Bennington College. Bennington's educational philosophy is as fervently opposite to the Danish way of doing things as almost any school in the world. I do admit that quite a few of my peers there did not strike me as "serious people," although I'm fairly certain no one I knew was there just to find a husband¹, and that most of these not serious people wouldn't have been all that serious at any school. Most of them have turned out just fine. As crazy, dysfunctional and you-can't-be-serious as Bennington sometime is (getting saner actually²) I'm still glad I went there^.3

 Notes:

¹If I remember correctly, Bennington's student body was about 70% females, 10% gay males, and 15% taking-full-advantage-of-the-ratio straight males, so the husband hunting would have been challenging.

  

² Bennington has a new president. The old dysfunction had many roots, but the animosity between the president and almost everyone else didn't help.

³ This is all just a long-winded way of saying that I've started applying for jobs back in the US, and will be looking for a place with a good liberal arts educational program.

More D

Old dried fruit bits mixed with crumbs of my daughter's favorite crackers, all spilling from a torn, unmarked plastic bag: an excellent find. Pumpkin seeds scattered on the shelf along with some paprika and vegi-broth powder: perfect. The back of the pantry is just the place when the bird-seed runs low. I have these bursts of energy, enough to refill the bird-feeder, before the coughing and the need to clutch the nearest wall return. The antibiotics have basically cleared the mycoplasma out of my lungs and ears, but the underlying virus is still there.

When the vitamin D deficiency was diagnosed, the nurse told me to take 10µg of supplement a day and come back in three months for another blood test. I didn't entirely expect to continue being sick for that whole three months, but that seems to be the result. A friend at work told me he takes 70mg of vitamin D a day, which is 7,000 times as much as I am taking, so I decided to do some research about dosage. He must mean 70µg, as he is still alive. 

Different countries recommend somewhere between 10µg and 30µg per day for a healthy adult, and levels up to 100µg per day are considered entirely safe, and EU guidelines recommend this level for patients with very low serum vitamin D levels (which I have). So my piddling 10µg plus whatever tiny bits I get from my diet (they don't add vitamins to dairy here, and I'm a vegetarian) and the no sunlight I encounter probably isn't alleviating my deficiency all that fast. So I've decided to take dosage into my own hands. I'm going to start taking 50µg per day, and scale back if and when my blood test shows that I have a healthy level. I would need to take thrice that much for several months to risk vitamin D toxicity. 

In the mean time, I will slump against this wall and watch the birds on the feeder. The magpie really likes those paprika-flavored raisins.