Adventitious knowledge

Joseph Grinnell, eminent ecologist and zoologist of the early 20th century, and founding Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where I was a graduate student, wrote some hilarious stuff. Google Scholar lists 376 publications in his name, most of which are actually by him, including foundational papers in niche ecology, bio-geography, museum science, and so forth. He took so many thousands of pages of detailed, elegant, highly legible, informative, rigorous, lyrical, systematic field notes that if I told you how many, I'd have to look it up again, and it is getting late here. And he is rightly revered as a founder and role model in the MVZ. But perhaps my favorite thing of all about Joseph Grinnell is his nearly forgotten, mildly disturbing, profoundly droll paper, "A Striking Case of Adventitious Coloration." I have no memory of how I first encountered this paper, other than that it was in my former life as an ornithologist at the MVZ. I have never come across another paper that cited it, and Google Scholar lists none. It is, at core, a mystery.

The whole story is available here. The first two sentences:

On February 8, 1920, I spent the afternoon with my family at a point in Moraga Valley, Contra Costa County, California, some five miles, airline, northeast of Berkeley. My son Willard undertook to exercise the shotgun for the purpose of securing some specimens of local birds such as happened to be needed at the Museum.

So ornately informal, so precisely vague, so informatively not-to-the-point, I am in love with this opening. No reputable journal would publish it these days, and that is a shame. He's storytelling, and quite well. The story strides on: Willard blasts a mated pair of Oak Titmice, both of whom have bright yellow breasts. Why bright yellow? Oak Titmice are grey, never yellow.  Grinnell rushes the five airline miles back to Berkeley, marches into the botany department with his dead birds, and tells them to figure out what kind of yellow pollen these birds have got on them. Not pollen, say the botanists. Grinnell marches into a mycology lab and tells them to figure out what kind of yellow spores his birds have on their breasts. Maybe slime molds, hard to tell, say the mycologists. Grinnell concludes that possibly bird feathers could be an important means of dispersal in slime molds! He finishes by pointedly mentioning that if anyone is interested, these two birds "and their loads of spores, constitute Nos. 40,391 and 40,392 in the bird collection of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology." He publishes the whole thing in The Auk, and that is the end of that, for almost a century. A century, by the way, is how long Grinnell said some of the MVZ's specimens might have to wait before they would be put to some as yet un-imagined use. It has been 97 years.

Which brings me to that wonderful word in Grinnell's title, "adventitious." It means something on the order of "acquired by chance" which is how those titmice presumably got their yellow, and how I came to the knowledge that in a drawer in Berkeley two spore laden titmice waited.  What did I intend to do with this knowledge? Keep it in a drawer, until, perhaps after one hundred years, it proved valuable.

Now, I unexpectedly find myself with colleagues interested in spore dispersal ecology, and somebody mentioned spore dispersal via bird feathers. Which started me rummaging around in my dusty rusty musty gusty fusty drawers of ornithology, hunting for memory of birds with spores on them. All I remembered clearly was Willard undertaking to exercise the shotgun, but eventually (this morning) I found first memory, then paper, and shared both. And by afternoon my new mycology colleagues had requested access to Nos. 40,391 and 40,392 from my old ornithology colleagues at the MVZ, so that we can collect some of the long faded yellow dust. A little bit of molecular genetics wizardry (our lab is set up for sequencing DNA from dried fungal museum specimens) and we may finally be able to discover what made Grinnell's birds so yellow. If it is a new species of anything, we must surely name it after Willard.

Accepted, but...

We have set ourselves a difficult task. Some months ago, my friends and I submitted a review article, clarifying some common (within the scientific literature) misconceptions, to a very good anthropology journal. Today we heard back from them. The editor explained that it took longer than usual because he had sent it out to "several" reviewers, and then "several more" and was waiting to get comments from all of them.

The good news is that all the reviewers seemed to like it, and the editor knows which issue of the journal he wants to put it in, which we take as the paper being accepted. The bad news (or at least time-consuming news) is that all of the several and several reviewers made long lists of things they would like to see changed, added, clarified or reorganized. I have not yet finished reading all these comments, but I don't see a lot of repetition, meaning that we have hundreds of distinct comments and criticisms to deal with. In the months we were waiting, we also showed the draft to a couple of colleagues, who gave us still different but also very useful comments. The good news is that the editor has given us permission to go well beyond the usual page limit for this journal in order to deal with all the reviewer comments. The bad news is that we now can't use space limitations as an excuse for not dealing with relevant points or citing relevant literature. So we have a great deal of rewriting to do.

Part of the problem with writing an article pointing out places where other people's thinking or language has been unclear is that one has to live up to very high standards for clarity in one's thinking and language. We've already extensively rewritten this paper a few times, and each time it has gotten clearer. Nevertheless, a large portion of the reviewers' comments are right on, and further clarification is needed. By the time this thing comes out it will either be brilliant or a total muddle. I'm not clear which.

Culturing culture

I am supervising/mentoring/collaborating with two post-doctoral researchers (a.k.a. postdocs), and greatly enjoying the process. They are both smart, hardworking and enthusiastic, and, unlike me, talented experimentalists. I am good at proposing experimental designs, and at inventing or improving upon experimental apparatus, but I managed to get through all my years of training as a biologist without ever being taught the nitty-gritty of laboratory work. I like to make things up as I go along, and work on twelve projects at a time, paying sporadic attention to each, and you can't really do experiments that way. But these two post-docs actually know what they are doing in the lab. It is impressive to see how thoroughly they train the students, how carefully they document their doings, and how well they know their organisms. As a grad student I started working with rotifers with almost no prior knowledge of rotifers, and without any advisor who knew rotifers. I read the literature, but there is a deep cultural knowledge about how to care for aquatic lab animals, with lore and practice around each group, and I had none of that. These two know, and it is wonderful to watch and learn.

Hyphum

I know a bit about a lot of organisms, but don't really qualify as an expert on any species. It is great fun planning experiments with people who know a lot about a particular organism. I can say, "if a hypha that is only 300 microns breaks in half, do you get two living 150 micron individuals, or two dead hyphae?" and get the immediate response, "The singular of hyphae is hyphum," followed by, "you would get two dead halves, so we don't have to worry about it." This way I can concentrate on designing the experiment and learn good Scrabble words.

EDIT: May 2nd 2017.
 The singular of hyphae is actually hypha. I just stumbled upon my own old blog post and said, "Whoa! That's wrong." I must have misheard that six years ago.

Sprouting collaborations

In the last week I have agreed on two major collaborations (with a Harvard professor and the Director of a Max Planck Institute) ordered some tens of thousands of Euros worth of equipment for my own experiments, hired two lab assistants for those experiments and promised my boss that I would perform a significant reanalysis of a set of data I already have in collaboration with another member of the lab. My wife and I also made some very tasty Brussels sprouts with garlic, soy sauce and lemon juice.

Here's the recipe:

Wash the sprouts, peel off any out leaves that don't look good, and cut each sprout in half.

Cut up a head of garlic.

Juice 2 lemons.

Heat a large cast-iron skillet or other frying surface, large enough to fit all the halved sprouts in a single layer. Put on a fair bit of oil and bring to very hot. Pour in the sprouts and use a spatula or fork to flip them over so that the flat side of each is down. Slide them around some so they all cook evenly. Cook them like that until they are somewhat charred on the bottom. Then flip them over and roll them around so that the other surfaces get cooked. They will still be somewhat too hard inside, so pour in a scant cup of water and cover while the water rapidly boils off, steaming the insides. Once the water cooks off, taste a couple of sprouts and if they are still too hard inside, pour on a little bit more water. Once they are done, remove them to a large bowl and put the garlic on to fry. After a minute, pour some splashes of soy sauce over the garlic, and let it cook down a little bit. Mix this with the lemon juice, salt and pepper, and pour it over the sprouts. Serve hot.

Co-authorship

Writing a paper with others, in the sense that we all have to agree to have our names on every bit of it, and publish it, is a difficult but rewarding process. The paper is surely improving because of it, and the disagreements have all been purely intellectual and cordial, but every step of the process has involved spirited discussion over a thousand details of fact, style and strategy. I have 'won' about as many of these discussions as I have 'lost' and I am satisfied with the outcome in pretty much every case. It will all be well worth it if we actually get the paper into print.