New jellies

In the interests of record keeping and keeping all my writing in one place, this little passage sprung from my fingertips this afternoon while sat in the office. What was one verse originally just multiplied.

As a background, we had had our first sighting for months of the jellyfish I study, Pelagia, in the sea today. So I had to go for a snorkel during the afternoon to search for some more if I could. The water was cold, 14oC, but in a full wetsuit it was bearable. I found some more jellies although not in good condition on the whole, and some other gelatinous species. Anyway with music on in the lab and some measurements to take I suddenly got rather animated, bouncy and smiley. I think I had missed working down there. I've been in virtually every day for months, but not had much to do, bar changing some water. Variety as they say is the Spice of Life. For me, having some new jellies spiced up mine.
Oh and I was planning to take a day off and go skiing tomorrow, working Saturday instead, but the presence of jellies means that I ought to work and do the skiing another time. At least I hadn't paid for much of it as yet..


Jellies in the lab, Jellies in the sea,
Martin's even happier, Who wanted to go and ski?!

Yes, Skiing tomorrow, thats the original plan,
Work comes first you see, 'tis only money, Man!

Auron the destination, weather wasn't great,
empty slopes appealed, The jellies better wait!

If i miss both ski and jelly, life will just depress,
writing that paper, no progress? Oops, I digress!

Time to get back to it, Poetry's not my thing,
I'd much prefer a rockface, with nut, friend and sling.

So FB is being distracting, "Quelle surprise" you say,
Another couple of paras, then I'll end the day.


Well I  used to think I only wrote when I was stressed, but this wasn't that, so those lines must have been a result of something else!
Bon nuit a tous.

Habituation

Sat in the laboratory, petri dish under the microscope and another sample is now ready to count. The dish has a 1mm square grid on it. Music playing, counter in hand ready to record the essential details in the next five minutes. The only decisions to make are whether to go to the top or bottom first and to scan from  left to right and back again, or up and down likewise.

So why have I never scanned up and down? I always, as far as I am aware have gone horizontally. Is this a thought-out decision or just a habit?

The same situation faces us in many situations in our daily lives, but for the most part we probably aren't conscious of the decisions because they have become habits or we don't make a definite decision, but go with the flow. But at what point does something become a habituation? And was there ever a logical reason for the decision in the first place?

To give a few examples: Why do you shop in that supermarket, buy that brand of soap or tin of beans? In some situations such as going to the cinema on a particular day of the week this may be a matter of cost and owning a particular brand of telephone and the rest of the routine develops around this.

All I am driving at is the suggestion that maybe you should question some of your actions sometimes. Things change, one brand becomes cheaper or more ethical. For others you may not know why you do something but it is simply the way it has always been done. Make your life easier and figure out the most efficient way of doing things. Change your driving habits to save fuel rather than driving to the speed limit. The time difference is probably minimal, or maybe it is worth the extra cost and environmental pollution that the exponential fuel use causes.

The classic story is the family that always cut the end off of the ham bone before roasting it in the oven. Many years later someone thought to question why they always did this difficult task..... and discovered that it was simply to fit it in the oven that was available in grandmother's house and there was no advantage otherwise!

Question, question, keep your mind moving and enjoy your life.
To misquote: Take care of the seconds and the minutes of free time will add up by themselves. After a while there will be a nice half hour to enjoy a book chapter or a glass of wine (or both).

And so the scientific logical mind takes another turn to the obscure, back to my counting!

Gelatinous sampling

As many of you will know I have the luck, or possibly the bad luck(!). to study jellyfish. Among my studies today I came across a quote which I couldn't leave hidden away in the article. I thought it might describe some of the fun and challenges that I go through to find out more about my chosen organisms.

"As Richard Harbison is fond of stating, sampling with plankton nets is akin to flying over London with a grappling hook. You might pick up hats and umbrellas and a few tree branches, but you can only speculate as to where hats belong, and what umbrellas are good for."
Haddock, 2004, A golden age of gelata: past and future research on planktonic ctenophores and cnidarians. Hydrobiologia 530/531: 549-556.

As you might expect, much of my practical research into jellies has been with the ubiquitous plankton net. It is used for its convenience, and often because we are meant to be sampling something more suited to the net, but you are always left scratching your head and wondering what else was in the water and avoided the net.

I hope your work is just as enjoyable as mine and has a smaller element of chance associated with it!
Bonne Chance!

Essentials of Marseille

Well as you might have guessed the blogging has lapsed as other things have taken control of my new life. On the accommodation front I spent a week in a hostel in town with a night in a hotel because the hostel was booked. By the end I was glad to move out of a room that I shared with people and got woken at night into a single room in an international hall of residence which is where I am now. The postgrads who live here are a generally quiet and friendly bunch. There isn’t the sociableness that the hostel provided but I can spend more time cooking in the evenings and relaxing. There are downsides though, not having wifi and the internet really cuts down your options when you are in a new place and generally alone. Life is difficult certainly. However there has been a particular person who translated for me initially and has been a good companion in the evenings. Unfortunately she leaves at the end of this week. Hopefully other people will continue to fulfil the role...

Marseille as a place can be summed up in a few lines for me. This may be true for many urban areas too, but new for me.

1)      Cosmopolitan, multiple races and origins of the people. This makes for little communes and centres of population.

2)      The Calanques - the national park on the outskirts of the city divides the city from the natural coastline, in contrast to the urbanised section around the city itself. The Calanques become infested by people at the weekend and bank holiday and lose much of their dry, limestone, charm at this point. You can get away from people but it is a lot harder and less appealing than Snowdonia for instance..

3)      The Urban Commute. I am still staggered how it can take anything from 35 mins to an hour to go about 6km to the campus each day. Relying on two metro lines and a bus route there are numerous combinations which can save a few minutes here or there, but despite going against the main commuter flow it takes an age! Maybe this should be a good time for reading and relaxing, but it certainly makes it harder to stay late in the office…

4)      Commercial centres. I was told that Marseille has over 300 commercial centres. This seems to be true, every so often there is a cluster of shops, a bakery, a tabac, and various others on a couple of street corners. It is just as if a small village had been enclosed in the city, but they are much closer together than British villages or even estates. It does mean that will very little planning you can pick up a baguette or croissant almost anywhere you are..

5)      Finally I have to say the traffic. Stationary or moving, car or motorbike, there is an awful lot of vehicles on the roads. There is a good system for regular bike rental, but not enough people use them as far as I see. The Metro, trams and buses run well too and at times appears close to capacity, but the cars outnumber them.

On this last point. Is it possible to do without a car in Marseille? In the city, yes definitely. But as an outdoor person, I am less sure. I am wondering how long the abilities of the city to satisfy me are going to last. I guess day trips into the surrounding towns may also do an exploratory job too, but to get to the places in between or in the wilds, difficult. Again this is something I need to explore. How easy is it to rent a vehicle to come and go as I please?

One thing at a time, I need to find permanent accommodation first and make a choice about how long a commute I am willing to make. Maybe for a better place to stay, that is furnished the commute will have to remain. Difficult choices to be made. The job is enjoyable, now I just need to settle myself for the evenings and weekends. 

Where next?

Holidays are coming...
For you and for me
For one, the Mountains
For the other, the sea

Why have a British holiday
When Greece you could go?
It really depends if you need
The sun or the snow!

(c) Martin Lilley 15/3/10

With the submission of my PhD I have been lacking the rhyming touch, this one above was written a while ago. Still I would much prefer to be relaxed and not rhyming than working too hard and needing an outlet to my thoughts.

So with submission comes the prospect of what to do next. Thankfully for the moment I can sit back and relax, enjoy my working holiday and gradually come to terms with the future. None-the-less in a couple of months I will know if i have achieved my doctorate and be contemplating jobs. So what does an out of work Marine Biologist do? Do i look for science jobs, for marine jobs, for voluntary jobs?, for anything?

Personally the choice has to come between an academic post and a commercial one.. While voluntary and taking a break from science are attractive they certainly can't be long-term aims. So..., to continue at university and pursue post-doctoral positions or look for something more applied.

Currently I am looking towards the commercial aspect mainly because I don't feel that the university environment has enough funding to support a practical person and hence the need to move on somewhere else. Alternatively I could change the way I work to adapt to the university environment.. but for the present I don't feel that is a worthwhile option. All in all I am currently planning which companies to apply to with my CV and see if they show any interest. Some have suitable roles going on a 'until they are filled' basis, while others suggest that speculative CVs will be put on file until such time as they are looking for a suitable candidate.

All in all I don't know what the future holds, but I'm sure it will be interesting.

Metabolism

Metabolism is doing my head in,
I look at it every day
but I think I've broken the back of it
doing it My Way.

Jellies need to respire
to grow and to feed
My work seems to show
they can get what they need.

Maybe I've looked at it wrongly
processing all those numbers,
but I hope that I understand
all that it encumbers.

Its all to do with Carbon,
efficiency of uptake;
And at each level some is lost
Dissolving in the lake.

Now to try again
with a different species
If it all goes to pot this time,
I'll end up in the faeces!

(c) Martin Lilley 19/3/10

Owl or Lark?

As I have been growing up people have always talked about So'n'So being a morning person or an evening person - commonly known as Larks or Owls. I have also met the odd Nightingale as they shall now be called who spend more of the day sleeping than awake!
Walking into the office this morning at some ungodly hour (it was still dark..) I was struck by the fact that personally I am quite capable of adapting to suit the situation. Maybe the shift work on ships has helped but I can enjoy the day just as much when I get up early late, or even at Midnight..  This led me onto thinking that the labelling of a person is probably more down to their habits than actually when they can physically work better. It is possible that a certain time of day does suit some people, but how did they get to that situation in the first place? Is it simply being used to getting up at a certain time and then switching on mentally so-many-hours after that?

All in all I would suggest that your habits dictate the way you are. Anyone can be anything if they put their mind to it. Otherwise an owl would become a lark when working on the Western Seaboard of the US rather than London...  Maybe it is simply conformity which results in our daily lives fitting around others and the working day.

When would you like to work/get up/have your free time?  Give yourself a couple of weeks to adapt (just like jet-lag) and you can. Go on, go for it! ;) That is what flexi-time is for.

(This posting is brought to you by PhD-writeup-distractions.sea.sci.swampea)

SI Units - Systeme Internationale or Systematic Insanity?

SI units or metrification as many of you will know it resulted in the overall adoption of seconds, grams, metres, litres and Pascals in place of the commonly used minutes, pounds/ounces, feet/inches, pints and pounds per square inch. Okay so some parts of the world have developed a certain reluctance in the uptake of these units despite their development way back in 1960 - the UK for one clinging to miles and pounds of fruit and veg. Aren't we backwards ;)

The reason for blogging has been the recent absolute frustration at the overlaps in the system. In this case it concerns the use of the letter k. k as everyone should know represents 1000. However this substitution takes place for one thousand metres (km), grams (kg) and bytes (kb) to mention just a few, but it also gets placed into the number (£3k) as well.  Once the idea that something might be wrong gets into my head then I have great trouble proving to myself what the correct way actually is, despite probably using it without thinking for years. In the current situation I have been happily converting km2 to m2 (square kilometres to square metres -  1:1,000,000) for absolutely weeks.. until the idea got into my head (thanks guys...) that km2 could actually mean 1000m2 - i.e 1000 square metres rather than 1 million.

Believe me it messes with your head and the more you think the more you doubt!

The consequences, bar the inevitable overestimating in this case jellyfish abundances and biomass - x grams per m3 suddenly reduces to 1000x less grams per m3..., is that I have been doubting the validity of all the other sources of data I have been using. "Maybe they meant 1 thousand instead of 1 million, maybe they meant something else, how can I tell?". The answer to the later bit is simply that I can't. I have to trust that the published figures are as they were meant to be. Arrrghhh.

All I can say is that at some point in my thesis I am going to define and write in words Exactly what I mean by g 100m3 and km2 so that there can be no confusion with my interpretation of the presumably-correct published history.

What a week!

By the way.. 1 Tonne of jellyfish in a square kilometre is exactly the same density as 1 gram in a square metre.  Now convert from T km-2 to g 100m-3 using the web to work out the depth of the water where the samples were taken from... or even better from grams of Carbon m-3 to grams of wet weight per m-3 when the authors haven't provided an equation between one and the other. Good luck!

Dependency and uncertainty

In this current economic climate many people are fearing for their jobs, looking at their future and wondering what is going to happen. For a scientist, unless you are very lucky, this is a regular thing. To have a three year contract is rare, and a permanent post almost unheard of unless you are a university lecturer.  In the later case this means a dependency on regular student contact and a movement away from the research which is probably the reason for originally getting into science.

As a researcher, as I have hinted, you are constantly looking to see where your next project will take you. A one year post-doctoral position will require the writing of grant proposals and making plans for the following year almost before you have started and certainly before you know what sort of results you are likely to get.  Add to that the difficulty now of securing funding that includes the overheads demanded by a university and you wonder why anyone goes into research at all. For the love of it...?

Currently I am trying to decide whether to continue in research, while also building all my skills and my CV up. Gaining sea experience is useful in the career I seem to have been developing, but that is heavily dependent on spaces being available on the ships. Science comes first in that respect and industry require the best people for the job. Bigger projects, such as posts gaining an input from fishermen into the current fish quotas and the science governing them, are at the whim of government agencies. If the government changes then the plug may be pulled on any recent policies of the opposition whether they were a good idea or not, because they were 'their' idea. As a scientist - how frustrating!!!  Ditto government funded national parks - funding secure until the next election, at which point who knows what will happen.

Joined up thinking requires joined up funding and commitments... maybe the public is content to live for tomorrow and cope with the consequences, rather than planning for change and pre-empting it? They shouldn't be!

All at Sea

I thought this was an appropriate title for a Marine Biological researcher. It sums up so aptly the way the world actually is.

Science is all about asking questions and trying to find out the answers, but you are never quite sure what to expect and have to have an open mind to the unexpected.  At that point you again need to re-evaluate whether the result you obtained is actually reasonable and realistic. In essence – Is it possible?  It is this sense of unknown that attracted me to research and I suspect pulls other  researchers into the field.

To take the above argument further in biological research you often are not faced with a stark yes or no.  If you were to create a circuit, or a computer program it will either work or it won’t. Yes there are several ways to achieve a working end product, but when you flick that switch the lightbulb will the light come on?  The fact that you have a middle ground where your creature will do what you expect In Some Situations (!) makes analysis of results much harder to comprehend.  The usual problem is that it is not simply one factor which is to blame for the movement/feeding/speed of swimming, but a combined effect of several things and teasing apart the factors is a challenge, as is working out which factors are actually to blame.

There are days in my research where I feel like I am banging my head against a brick wall and the only result is going to be depression. Finally, if I am lucky, something may click and I’ll suddenly have an enlightened moment and find one of the results. It may even result in several days work to calculate the extent of the effect.  Then I’ll be cast back onto the sea of irritation as I seek to find a new solution to the problem.  The unlucky scenario is that the idea is fruitless for one reason or another and I am back searching for ideas immediately.  Such is life.

While the science in the laboratory and on the computer provides the outputs in the form of scientific publications and reports, it is the time in the field which some of us live for overall.

I suppose the main reason for blogging this idea was to reflect the time I have spent out on the sea. A variety of ships from a small dory right up to the 73m long Cefas Endeavour have kept me afloat as I seek to discover the secrets that lay beneath our vessel.  Being at sea, never knowing what might come up, the long hours, endless horizons, or maybe some land and trying to figure out where you are, is fascinating! I particularly enjoy the magnitude of what we are doing in the middle of the night, when there may be the light of a fishing boat, a handful of stars, or jellyfish drifting past in the stern lights.  You are afloat in a world of your own, dependent only on the people around you, responsible for those who are asleep beneath you. It is frankly awe-inspiring. 

Best of all is the moment as the first light comes across the sky and the sun is within an hour of rising. That magical moment when you look around and remember you really are All at Sea.