Interactions

I just started writing a book. There, I said it. So now I guess I better get on with it. Actually, it has been on the move for 10 years since its first, drunken inception, but I digress. Who am I trying to kid, right? It’s going to be an awareness-raising book on lost & disappearing mutualistic plant-animal interactions – specifically pollination and seed dispersal – and why we should give a flying hoot about this loss. The book will consist of popular scientific case stories from all over the world. I am fully aware that my writing skills leave much to be desired. Thus, I have teamed up with a rather brilliant Australian wildlife artist – Robin Wingrave – whose amazing illustrations will take up more or less half the space, and hopefully detract from the inadequacy of my ramblings. After close to a year’s worth of chatting, phoning, and skyping with Rob (and apparently quite often sounding like giggling teenagers in love, according to Rob’s wife Sharyn), we recently finally managed to meet face-to-face, in the Atherton Tablelands, Queensland, Australia. It was an absolute blast! – Fellow nerds, friends & such – I give you the Team: Robin Wingrave and Yours Truly. More to follow.

Today is a happy day for Mauro & me – our short Perspective on the relativity of the megafauna concept is out in Science! Plus, even better, we convinced the well-known and fantastic paleo-artist, Carl Buell, to do the illustrations! I think they are fantastic; especially (no bias whatsoever) his rendition of the extinct saddle-backed Mauritian giant tortoise, Cylindraspis triserrata.

And here are the two happy nerds – two weeks ago; now Mauro has left us and is back in his native Brazil, to be the King of the Castle in his brand-new lab.

Today our paper on the seed dispersal and seedling establishment of a critically endangered endemic Mauritian tree went online, you can find a pdf of it here. The tree is, in fact, Syzygium mamillatum the gorgeous species that Christine is looking at in the previous post.

Its main content is focused on empirically testing the predictions of the Janzen-Connell model on an oceanic island, and in relation to practical conservation issues. The second focus of the paper, for which we present less empirical data, is the use of ecological analogues to replace extinct species – in our case resurrecting lost seed dispersal interactions using giant tortoises as stand-ins for extinct Mauritian giant tortoises. This is en exciting recent development in conservation and restoration ecology – and one which has to be used with extreme caution, to avoid unwanted ecosystem effects or new invasions. Tortoises are ideal analogues: they move slowly, they grow slowly, and they are thus easily controlled – and I for one have so far not heard of invasive tortoises anywhere on this planet.

And they are goddamn cute.

I just got an email from a friend, asking me for a pdf of our paper on indirect interactions between plants & geckos. He ended the email with the following:

And how the hell do you get this in your abstract??

‘Among plants, the nuptials cannot be celebrated without the intervention of a third party to act as a marriage priest, and that the office of this third person is to unite the representatives of different households.. Now the marriage priests who officiate in the vegetable kingdom are insects in search of honey; the winds, or anything which by accident, or design, may carry the pollen from one flower to another.’

Clearly the whole I-bet-you-can’t-get-this-word-in challenge is far too simple for you.

Hmm. That quote is actually from the first pollination paper to appear in The American Naturalist – I put it in as a quote before the introduction, to honour the fact that our paper was one of the first in the recently resurrected section ‘Natural History Miscellany’ that used to figure prominently in that journal in its early years. I wondered how my friend mistook that as part of the abstract though? On a hunch, I checked Web of Science – and lo and behold, this is what it currently shows for that paper:

Oh dear. Now, I believe, is the time to use that link to “Suggest Corrections” in Web of Science. Oh, and by the way, why is that they also seem to think that “CRAB CRUSTACEA” would make a good ‘KeyWord Plus’ that will assist readers to find our paper???