How to survive soul-crushingly long experiments

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It has been quite some time since I posted anything on my blog, but rather than providing a long whinge about why this is so (and because ‘I’ve been busy’ doesn’t really cut it at any stage once you’ve decided to plough into the academic lifestyle), I thought I would use the experience of the last couple of months to give some handy hints to other students on a topic I have good experience of: surviving long, complicated, tedious, lonely lab experiments. As in, 8-13 hours per day, every single day of the week, for several months, in a small room by yourself, kind of experiments. The real glamour of PhD life.

1) Let yourself go

Me in my dungeon

Because nothing tells your colleagues that you’re working hard like a terrible beard (not sure what the female equivalent is, I’m afraid), and the red eyes that indicate a person running on caffeine fumes. Over the last couple of months, I’ve lost over 6kg accidentally, purely from being too busy to eat lunch. Not that I’m asking for sympathy, because I’d got a bit fat beforehand – this just means I don’t have to start running again. SCORE.

2) Give your ears a treat

Your hands and eyes may be focused on some monotonous task – like, say, putting tiny food dishes into many boxes which each hold a single insect, just as an example I made up for no reason at all – but your ears are still free to feast upon the glorious smorgasbord that is the collected works of human endeavour (or something). You can raid iTunes U for lecture series, catch up on your favourite podcasts (and a bunch that you don’t really like, but you’re so tired that you can’t bring yourself to search for better ones), or – and this has revolutionised my recent listening – sign up for an Audible audiobook account. If you’re going to be stuck in a lab by yourself for hours on end, you can even get through audiobooks that you would otherwise baulk at, which is how I managed to power through all 57 glorious hours of the unabridged version of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’.

Podcasts I like:
Little Atoms (be sure to get the ‘Little Atoms Road Trip’ podcasts as well)
Quirks & Quarks
The Life Scientific
Breaking Bio (*cough*)

Audiobooks I enjoyed:
‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace
‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ by Richard Dawkins
‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson
‘Life on Air’ by David Attenborough
‘The Human Stain’ by Philip Roth
…also, ‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran, although this is not necessarily the wisest choice when spending many hours in the dark, by yourself, and feeling a bit confused about everything in general.

3) Take your birding when you can get it

Birds are great, and if you don’t think so then YOU ARE DEAD INSIDE. I filmed this from the lab window, having spotted this dust-up on a short break from my sealed-off dungeon to weigh a bunch of crickets (the only lab scales are upstairs). I really need to thank the guys in the BTO office down the hall for having put a bird feeder outside…

4) Walk to work

This enables you to get the bare minimum of sunlight and fresh air that you probably need, and also stops your muscles from completely atrophying. Hopefully.

It also helps if your ‘commute’ looks like mine.

Just some hares and some deer hanging out in front of the Ochils. No big deal.

5) Take your animal behaviour when you can get it

We all like watching animals do stuff, right?

Even if you’re restricted to just watching your study organism over and over again, it still counts.

6) Pretend everything is fine

I don’t want to get all ‘the power of positive thinking’ or any bullcrap like that, but there’s a lot to be said for just deciding not to be in a huff when you get home from 13 hours slogging away in the lab and not having spoken to anyone all day. If you have a partner, they’ll certainly thank you for it. Or at least be less likely to break up with you because you are being massively insufferable.

7) Arrange something at the end to look forward to

I’m getting married, but maybe you don’t want to plan for that every time you start designing a long experiment. We are then going to Borneo for three weeks as well. You probably can’t plan for that either, but at this point, I don’t care about you. I don’t care about any of you. I just care about MY DATA.

Oh, and try not to think about the fact that you’ll probably spend the next 6 months trying to do statistical analysis and work out what any of it means. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAWHYYYYYYYY

My dirty mammal secret

The lying game

My nature photos of 2012

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I have started a new ‘tradition’ at home, in which I create a calendar of some photos that I’ve taken over the previous 12 months; I just finished the one for this year, so thought that I’d put up the photos that I have selected (including a couple of bonus mammal shots to round out the animal groups a little…!).

In 2012, I’ve been lucky enough to travel around Scotland a fair amount, and got a few nature firsts here – crossbills, vivaparous lizards, and finally saw the magnificent capercaillie (and ran away from it as it chased me and a very famous evolutionary biology professor up a path!). I also went to Sweden for a quantitative genetics workshop (where I learnt to love long johns as much as matrix algebra), took a trip to Canada (where I gave my first talk at a major international conference, Evolution 2012), and holidayed in Barbados (where Kirsty and I celebrated our engagement). The final bonus photo in this gallery is actually from 2013, and I hope it is a portent of good things to come!

: A butterfly in Farley Hill National Park, Barbados.

: Thousands of gannets nest on Bass Rock, an island in the Firth of Forth, Scotland.

: A crossbill in the Cairngorms National Park, in the Highlands of Scotland.

: A rogue male capercaillie in Speyside, Scotland; this guy chased myself and Professor Doug Futuyma up the path several times!

: A dragonfly takes a breather by the river in High Park, Toronto.

: A hairy crab on the beach at Bathsheba, Barbados.

: Green-throated carib hummingbird, Barbados.

: Long-horned beetle feasting on red berries in High Park, Toronto.

: Anolis lizard checking out the new guests in our hotel in Barbados.

: Gray kingbird looking nonplussed by the weather in Barbados (hurricane season).

: A crab spider sucks the juices out of its prey, in Canada.

: A juvenile red-winged blackbird in High Park, Toronto.

: Waxwings strip the trees bare, in the glamorous location of Morrison’s supermarket car park, Stirling, Scotland.

: Bonus picture #1: my first ever bear sighting! In Canada, of course…

: Bonus picture #2: taken today, an otter exits the river right outside my flat!

I’m going to post this to Alex Wild’s request for end-of-year photo sets as well; mine certainly won’t compete with most of those on show, so you should go and check them out! There is some RIDICULOUS stuff going on. Hopefully I’ll have a competitive selection next year, as I’m off to Borneo in July for my honeymoon! That’s right: I’m getting married, like a real grown-up person.

Note: I’ve noticed that various people have ended up here after searching for rogue capercaillie in Speyside… I can’t give out the location myself, but I will say that we were taken there by a local wildlife guide, Steve Reddick, who was an excellent host and whose rates are also extremely reasonable!

Horny decisions, sneaky f**kers, and the importance of balls

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That’s correct, friends – the two beetles you see in this image are both adult males of the same species of dung beetle, Onthophagus nigriventis. The chap on the right is clearly larger, and has a rather ostentatious horn extending from his thorax. This horn is a sexually-selected trait: horned males can use their armaments in battles over females, driving rivals away from mating sites, and even prying other males off a female whilst in flagrante. Sexual selection is all about the struggle to reproduce, and so traits are ‘sexually selected’ if their expression confers some benefit to the holder in terms of reproduction. In this case, large males with large horns are more likely to win battles with rivals, enabling them greater access to females, so there is a clear advantage to investing resources into weapons development.

Given that big, horned males fight rivals and guard their female partners (they may engage in the rather ungentlemanly pursuit of trapping lady beetles in mating burrows in order to have their way with them), then what the crap is going on with the guy on the left? Well, these horns are likely expensive in terms of resources, and any energy ploughed into growing horns is not available for investing in other traits – indeed, horns are known to trade off against morphological structures including eyes, antennae, and wings. Species of Onthophagus are well known for the size and diversity of their horns, but often these are only expressed by the largest ‘major’ males. What happens, then, if you’re a down-on-your-luck, resource-starved ‘minor’ male? Is there really any point in cashing in your precious metabolic chips for a gamble on a crappy little horn that’s never going to help you win any contests anyway? Surely there’s another strategy to be taken?

Indeed there is, and it’s called being a ‘sneaky fucker’*. While some males guard their mates, others will try to ‘sneak’ copulations with females. We now enter the realm of sperm competition: females may mate with multiple partners, so there is a battle amongst the sperm within her reproductive tract to fertilise eggs. If ejaculates are costly, males have to trade off resource investment on gaining fertilisation with investment on gaining additional matings. The more sperm ejaculated in a mating, the more eggs are likely to be fertilised – but, again, this requires resource investment. Furthermore, an increased risk of sperm competition should favour the evolution of increased expenditure on the ejaculate (i.e., the more likely that your little swimmers are going to be racing against some other dude’s, the more investment you should be making in ensuring your ejaculate is the biggest and best it can be).

In plain English (or, at least, an approximation thereof): if you’re a big horned dude protecting a little beetle harem, then you shouldn’t be all that worried about the fertilisation aspect – after all, you should be the only one for your ladies. You want to invest in lots of mating, not lots of ejaculate. Meanwhile, as a sneak, you’ve got to make those precious moments count, and ploughing your resources into the ejaculation makes sense – it’s in the female’s interests to have a few flings behind the dung-balls, so the greater the ejaculate, the better your chances of gaining fertilisations. Of course, the best way to produce larger amounts of ejaculate is to invest more resources into testis development.

All of which leads us nicely to what I think is one of the most ingenious (albeit slightly harrowing, once you really think about it) experiments I’ve read about while studying up for my PhD. Leigh Simmons and Doug Emlen (yes, this is another Doug Emlen-related post) cauterised those cells on beetle larvae which produce the thoracic horns in O. nigriventis, manipulating investment by ensuring that they could not grow these weapons. When compared to a control group comprising beetles allowed to develop normally, the cauterised individuals not only grew larger in size, but also developed disproportionately large testes. These results revealed the metabolic trade-off between horn development and both body size and testis size, in line with predictions from evolutionary models of ejaculate expenditure.

But what does this mean for the two beetles at the top of the page? Well, there’s a general tip here: if you’re going to sneak around, you’d better have gigantic balls.

*I’ve been told that Geoff Parker coined this phrase, but have been unable to find a reference for this, and during googling I accidentally clicked on ‘images’ and.. yeah. I need to keep safe-search on in future.

This post is a slightly modified version of an earlier entry on my ‘Nature!Sex!TopTips!‘ website.

Research blogging reference:

Simmons, L., & Emlen, D. (2006). From the Cover: Evolutionary trade-off between weapons and testes Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103 (44), 16346-16351 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0603474103

Other references and further reading:

Simmons LW, Emlen DJ and Tomkins JL (2007) Sperm competition games between sneaks and guards: a comparative analysis using dimorphic male beetles. Evolution 61(11): 2684– 2692.

Emlen DJ (2008) The evolution of animal weapons. Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics 39: 387–413.

Parker GA (1990) Sperm competition games – sneaks and extra-pair copulations. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B – Biological Sciences 242(1304): 127–133.

Blatant plug: I am really interested in the intersection between sexual selection and life-history allocation – the way that individuals invest their resources – and (along with my long-suffering supervisor) have written an article on this topic for Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Life Sciences online journal. You can find it at the following link, or drop me a line if you would like a copy:

Houslay TM, Bussiere LF. 2012. Sexual Selection and Life History Allocation. In: eLS 2012, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester.

The original image is the copyright of Alexander Wild, an entomologist, photographer, and all-round great guy. You can find the original, and more of Alex’s work, at the links below:

http://www.alexanderwild.com/

http://myrmecos.net/

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/compound-eye/

https://twitter.com/#!/myrmecos

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Goodbye to #stabbycockdagger

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Stabbycockdagger is no more.

STABBYCOCKDAGGER

Due to reasons too numerous and boring to go into, I have decided to delete this post. My apologies to anyone disappointed by this!

If you want to read something else I have written, why not try this post on beetle sex: ‘horny decisions, sneaky f**kers, and the importance of balls‘?

If, however, you’re set on some stabbycockdagger action, then head on over to the Breaking Bio website to find some of our podcasts… Episode 10 features Nik Tatarnic talking about traumatic insemination in plant bugs, while Episode 11 is an interview with Prof Mike Siva-Jothy, whose research involves work on some very stabby bedbugs. You can also get the Breaking Bio podcasts on iTunes.

Breaking Bio: the new podcast for AWESOME COOL PEOPLE and also YOU

Tom Houslay

Insects // Sex // Evolution