The Cephalopodiatrist

The recent outbreak of Invertebrate Wars reminded me of something splendid that happened a while back. A couple of blocks from our house, as we were coming home from a walk, my husband spotted an ant moving at frenetic ant-speed across the sidewalk. "Look at that ant," he said, "fleeing from the Great Arthropod Wars!"

This assertion was apropos of nothing at all (other than the ant) and did not in any way reference earlier conversations. In fact, as far as I can recall, this was the first instance that the phrase "the Great Arthropod Wars" has ever entered my brain.

But now it will not leave.

I've already sketched out the plots. Plots, plural, because it is a trilogy, of course. I will pick Star Wars over Star Trek (and the Beatles over the Rolling Stones, which now that I mention it seems somehow like the very same thing for reasons that I do not now have time to dissect) every time. Not that I ever dressed up as Princess Leia* or anything that dorky. Well, I may have done the double-braid-bun to my hair once. Or maybe twice. But I haven't seen pictures of that in a long time. It will remain a happy mystery. (Apparently I am into italics today! Maybe it's all the suppressed energy that can't find an outlet in my dissertation. Writing in academese is getting really, really tiresome. My illustrious university is now doing electronic dissertation submission--do you think that means I could just blog my whole thesis? And they would confer a degree on my head? Because that would be awesome!)

Does anyone remember what I was talking about before the long parenthetical diversion? Oh yes: Arthropod Wars.

But first, a quick disclaimer, because this whole plot hinges on a post-apocalyptic Earth, in which we foolish vertebrates (not just humans, mind you, but all vertebrates) have long since wiped ourselves out, and all those jokes about bugs taking over the world come absolutely true. The story opens with Insecta reigning supreme. And of course, the quesion is, how could I? How could the Cephalopodiatrist's deep and abiding love for molluscs be set aside so callously, to sketch out an entire trilogy about a crunchy reddish mess?

Never fear! I'm not setting aside that love. No, I'm still going to write all sorts of novels and poetry about squid in space and other fabulous cephalogia. But I love all invertebrates. I can't help it. So although I am greatly honored that the Cephalopodiatrist and Squid-A-Day were both invoked in the defense of Molluscs during the Invertebrate Wars, and although I did issue of checklist of cephalawesome, I can't really argue against the wonder and delight of tunicates, echinoderms, and, of course, arthropods.

With that, I give you:

Episode IV: Crustacea Rising
Insecta reigns supreme. Termite mounds have spread across plains and deserts. Dipterans (flies and mosquitoes) have quickly engineered leftover human technology to their own ends. Cockroaches serve as beaurocrats, organizing insect affairs. But in their hubris, the insects have forgotten that Earth should be more appropriately called Water. And in the oceans, the downtrodden Crustacea are plotting insurgency. Their plan: to engineer the slippage of the Greenland ice sheet (yes, we're assuming it hasn't happened already) to drastically raise sea level, bringing in their armies on the rising tide to inundate the terrestrial Insecta.

Episode V: In Which The Myriapods Mediate
Okay, it's a stupid title. But here's the idea: the Myriapods (millipedes and centipedes) are not nearly as abundant as either Insecta or Crustacea. But what they lack in numbers, they make up in legs. Also, they have deadly poison (centipedes) and negotiating ability (millipedes). Seriously, I've had pet millipedes, and they are very soothing. Look at this: wouldn't you listen if that talked to you in a calm, reasonable voice? Especially if its centipede pal is backing it up? So the myriapods try to negotiate a cease-fire between Insecta and Crustacea. But the aggressive, poisonous Centipedes are won over by Insecta, accusing the Millipedes of being more sympathetic to Crustacea--even though Millipedes themselves can't breathe underwater. Battle lines are drawn again, and the nascent treaty is in shambles.

Episode VI: Return of the Chelicerates
For those who have been following along at home with your favorite invertebrate textbook, you know who the final player is . . . the Chelicerates! For those who haven't been following along (what? you don't have a favorite invertebrate textbook?), we're talking about spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and pycnogonids. They have long memories. They remember when their cousins the Eurypterids ruled the world. (The Largest Arthropod That Ever Lived was a Eurypterid.) They even remember the Trilobites. They've got perspective. And they get things sorted out.

Um . . . the end?

Do you see how I am heavy on biology, but short on things like plot and character? Do you have helpful ideas for me? Then share them! As long as you don't mind me using them when I make these into books someday. You will be in the acknowledgments, I promise!



* Yes, I did just link to a perfectly good blog that has nothing to do with biology whatsoever. Well, that is not strictly true, because it is (ostensibly) about dachshunds, and dachshunds are certainly included in the Great Circle of Life. Although some people think they shouldn't be. Some people are judgmental about weiner dogs. I am not one of them. Perhaps it is my German ancestry, but I think this is the very definition of adorable.

Well, right after this. So, um, hmmm, maybe it's hard to define words with pictures.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: I like Miss Doxie, even though she cusses and drinks a lot, plus she is blond and a lawyer, and all of these characteristics make her like the ANTITHESIS OF ME, and perhaps if we were ever in a room together, there would be an explosion like in a collision chamber, and new subatomic particles (blogons!) would be discovered. And now I will stop being weird and creepy, because I am talking about a fellow human being whom I do not actually know and may possibly, concievably, through the magic of the interwebs, find and read this.

(with apologies to the Beatles)

Woke up at half past five,
Got in the car and started to drive.
Crossed over the hills and headed down
And looking around,
We noticed we were there.
Got on the boat and dropped our lures,
Caught two squid, they weren't mature.
Made our way back home, another eight-hour drive,
And by the time we arrived,
It all felt like a dream . . .

Not too surprisingly, I was seasick, but not as ill as that one time. I managed to keep my squid jig in the water, dropping down to the bottom and cranking up to the surface over and over as I gazed beseechingly at the horizon.

Man, we fished the heck out of that ocean. We just didn't catch much.

I'd talked two other marine biologists into joining me as customers on a commerical sport fishing expedition. The captain and crew were great fun, and just about as doggedly determined as we were, although the enthusiasm of the non-scientist customers waned as hours passed with little success.

One of the biologists came from a lab in La Jolla; the other was a colleague from my home institution and did the whole trip with me, starting and ending in Monterey. We took her wonderful new car Valentine, whose front seats make very serviceable beds to curl up in at a rest stop off I-5 from four to six o'clock in the morning, when the fog is as thick as the radio static obscuring Fresno's classic rock station.

To sum up:

936 miles, 27 hours (total trip time), 5 hours (fishing time), 11 anglers, 4 hook-ups, 2 landed squid, 0 mature females.

BUMMER. I was really hoping to do more of this.

Personal virtues that might be commonly attributed to scientists include intelligence, persistence, concentration, diligence--virtues of the head, one might say.

Less frequently associatated with scientists are virtues of the heart: kindness, generosity, compassion.

Yet it was an abundance of these latter virtues that constantly impressed me during the four-day Strathfest extravaganza, a retirement party for Richard and Megumi Strathmann. Students, colleagues and friends gathered at Friday Harbor from around the world to celebrate the "global influence of Strathmann". As they spoke of lessons they'd learned from this brilliant scientist couple, I heard the same threads being woven together again and again:

Meticulously credit others with ideas. Provide students with the best materials and support. Always be respectful. Treat students as colleagues. Take your science seriously, but don't take yourself seriously. "I love being wrong because that's when I really learn something new." He makes you feel smart. Someone comes into their offices, and it doesn't matter what they were doing before, now they're yours.

This sweetness, this humility, wasn't present just in Richard and Megumi, it was the flavor of the whole crew. Everyone, absolutely without exception, was smart and interesting and funny and, most especially, kind. It didn't matter whether I was talking to a retired whitebeard or a fellow grad student or anyone in between. Every conversation was shaped by mutual interest and respect. I met for the first time famous people whose names I have heard and read for years, and I made friends I'd like to keep forever.

Mentioning my desire to move into science communication after I finish grad school, I met with nothing but enthusiasm and encouragement. With several people I brainstormed a coffee table book about field stations, across America or across the world. It would be such fun to research and write! Field stations are remarkable places, marked by a certain cosmopolitan insularity, populated by characters so distinctive you'd swear they're fictitious.

As background, I have to read Here's How We'll Do It, a book on the creation of Shoals Marine Laboratory in the 1970s. Other books recommended in various conversations throughout the weekend include Oranges, Volcano Cowboys, Science at the Edge (is this the right book? I have to ask Moose!), The Crest of the Wave, Mindless Eating, The Plug-in Drug, and the Dictionary of Word Roots. Also, one TV show: Slings and Arrows, about a troubled Shakespeare festival.

But all conversational diversity aside, the party was at its core a four-day ode to invertebrate larvae and embryos, since Richard basically invented the field of larval ecology. I met him (and Friday Harbor itself) in the summer of 2008, when I took Invertebrate Embryology. I had an absolute dream of a time drawing embryos night and day, composing poetry, and falling a little bit in love.

Strathfest, just as I'd been hoping, was a concentrated dose of more of the same. Just about the most awesome way I could imagine to ring in the new year.

January 1st, 2010: The Larval Art Auction

The goal was to raise money for a scholarship fund. To this end, I contributed the very hand pluteus whose creation is illustrated in Make Your Own Hand Pluteus. I was a little embarrassed to see it rubbing shoulders with such unique wonders as hand-knit echinoderms and photographs of dancing larvae, but was pleasantly surprised that it did get a few bids. And since only one person could take it home, I now have commissions to make several more for the non-winning bidders!

The darlings of the auction were the incredible twin cuttlefish sculpted, glazed, and fired by Richard's last student Fernanda. They carried the evening, a perfect blend of biological accuracy and aesthetic interpretation. I have to prod Fernanda to see if she would be willing to post pictures somewhere . . .

January 2nd, 2010: The Larval Poetry Slam

Writing poetry about larvae has been a glorious tradition since the days of Walter Garstang. The pairing seems extraordinarily appropriate to me, because both larvae and poetry come in a wild diversity of form. Limerick. Actinotroch. Sonnet. Pilidium. Haiku. Planula.

Triolet.

The triolet is an old French form of eight lines. The first line is repeated twice, the second once. It has enjoyed much popularity with modern poets as well; one of the best examples is from Wendy Cope. I readily confess that I completely ripped off her rhyme scheme for my contribution to the poetry slam, which was born out of my frustration with growing baby squid at home in the lab.

You see, during the Invertebrate Embryology class, we fertilized dozens of species' eggs and watched them develop with ease to hatching and beyond. But at home, when I try to fertilize Humboldt squid eggs in the lab, my success rates are dismal. Other researchers don't have much better luck. One of the big problems has to do with an envelope, called a chorion, which surrounds the embryo. It's supposed to expand as the embryo develops, giving it room to grow, but this expansion can only be stimulated by jelly from the mother squid's special jelly glands. Sadly, we can't get her to extrude jelly on demand, so we take the glands, freeze-dry them, grind them into power, and sprinkle the powder in the water with the eggs.

Heh. When I say it like that, it sounds impossible that it would work at all. Miraculously, it does, but not very well. So, in closing, here is an

Embryonic Triolet

In vitro looked so easy. But embryonic
squid are awfully difficult to grow.
The nature of the challenge, chorionic.
In vitro looked so easy. But embryonic
squid require a freeze-dried jelly tonic.
And even then the embryos won't grow.
In vitro looked so easy. But embryonic
squid are awfully difficult to grow!

The finalists of the Scientific Blogging Competition were announced last Sunday. I was delighted to find my essay among them:

Autumn has arrived, bringing firework foliage, delicious squash, and, at least in the Pacific Northwest, an invasion of squid.

Humboldt or jumbo squid, sometimes mistakenly called giant squid, are grabbing fishing lures and washing up on beaches from Oregon to British Columbia. As a marine biologist fielding questions from reporters and citizens, my heart always sinks when I hear the inevitable query--delivered with a mixture of horror and fascination--"They eat people, right?" . . .

Yay! Honor and delight! Now, how are they going to select grand, second, and third prize winners from these thirty finalists? Public online voting:

Now it's the readers turn to tell us who their favorites are. The red CONTEST tab now lists all of our finalists. If you wish to vote for an article, click on the article of your choice, and then click the "VOTE" widget that comes up with that article. You can vote for an article only once per day, but you may vote for more than one article each day if you have several favorites. And be sure to come back the next day to vote again if you want to help your favorite finalists win.

Individuals do NOT need to be registered members of Scientific Blogging in order to vote. However, voting will close at Midnight Pacific Time on Sunday, November 22nd. So get your votes in while you can, and then stay tuned for the announcement of our winners on December 1st.

So, go vote for my essay! Okay?

Now, here are five things that make me feel weird about this contest:

1. The contestant pool. When I described the competition to a labmate and mentioned that it was only open to grad students from the ton ten (eleven) universities in the country, he immediately responded, "Well that's kind of elitist." Scientific Blogging has responded to similar accusations in their comment threads:

We have to keep the pool of writers small. If it goes off without too much of a hassle, we will open up the next one to all schools but we have a limited amount of people who can read the papers and help pare them down to a manageable number. . . . Obviously we're the only science site that is open to everyone so we aren't elitist, we are just making this first one manageable.

A site that's open to everyone isn't necessarily immune to accusations of elitism, but I certainly sympathize with the need to keep the applicant pool small, having read and graded my fair share of essays.

More than anything, this got me thinking about the original US News & World Report study. Who do they think they are, ranking the best science schools in the country? "Questionnaires were sent to the department heads and directors of graduate studies at each program in each discipline." I would sure love to know what kind of rankings they'd get if they sent questionnaires to the grad students instead . . .

2. I don't like asking people to "go vote for me" instead of "go read all the essays and vote for the one you think is best, and if that's really mine, then thank you for your praise." But Rule 3 of the contest is: "Encourage friends, family, and faculty to vote for you." So I'm following instructions. Selfishly.

3. Online voting makes me nervous. It's just too easy to game the system. How do you identify voters? As originally stated, the plan was that only registered users could vote. However, when they announced the winners, they announced new rules: voting is now open to anyone, registered or not. But they've got to track voters somehow--I'm guessing by IP address, a standard but imperfect practice. It allows people to vote as many times as they have network connections (at least one contestant has stated explictly in their article comments: "one vote per computer per day") and I rather wish they'd stayed with registered users only. True, there's nothing to prevent you from registering multiple accounts if you have multiple e-mail addresses, but it takes a lot more work.

4. And why does the voting go on for 22 days? I can certainly see the value of a long voting period in terms of giving voters time to hear about the contest, read all the essays, and decide on their favorite. But why give each voter (or rather, each network connection) 22 votes instead of one? And if you really want to give out multiple votes, still, is there any reason not to let people allocate them all in one day?

As I've talked about this system with other people, it's become obvious that this is the online voting paradigm. Upon reflection, it makes sense. These competitions are a great way for websites to drum up readership (which translates directly into ad revenue)*. From this perspective, you want to make people vote every day for as long as possible, so all the contestants' friends and relations keep coming back to your site, day after day. Not only does this create a big temporary boost in readership, but with sufficient exposure, some newbies might decide they like the site enough to stick around after the competition. Or maybe they keep coming back out of habit. In any case, win!

5. So, is this a networking competition or a writing competition? Not surprisingly, several comments on the website have addressed the idea that open voting to determine the winners is "unfair". After all, who's to say the "plebes" have the discriminative ability to pick the best essay? Scientific Blogging's Kim responded:

The voting is to determine the writers that not just "scientists" or science professionals find interesting, but that the general public find interesting as well.  We are looking for writers that can cast a broad net, and make even those that "are not even interested in science" want to stop, and read, and potentially learn something new from one of our posts.

Hear hear! I fully agree with this definition of good science writing. But the big question is: are the people casting votes actually "stopping, reading, and learning something" or are they just taking two seconds to click a button? In other words, is the electorate actually made up of the "general public"? Or is it made up of the contestants' "friend mobs", who haven't actually read all the essays and may not have even read their friend's, but are nonetheless voting loyally and daily?

In answer to this question, SciBlogging's Hank argued:

There's nothing unconventional about letting the smartest audience on the planet pick the winner of a writing competition. The notion that some vague nepotism is somehow going to overrule a million people a month who read this site is not realistic.

Is it all that unrealistc? I'm not sure. Nepotism isn't the right word (commentor's word choice btw, not Hank's) but personal popularity (as opposed to writing popularity) or networking ability just might be.

Sure, the site gets a million readers a month. Do they visit the site every day, though, or just once a month? And however often they visit the site, do they know about the contest? The article announcing the finalists was one of the five featured articles on the front page for a few days, but it's no longer there. It wasn't mentioned in the e-newsletter at all. And even if you happened to visit the article, you had to read half-way down before you learned how to find the finalist essays (by clicking on the red CONTEST button). Maybe that should be obvious, but that red button had been there for the last two months, before finalists were chosen and voting opened, so unless you'd been keeping pretty close tabs on things, there's no reason you'd assume you could click on it and vote now. And even if every one of those million readers know about the contest, do they care enough to vote? Do they care enough to vote every day?

All these concerns are trivial, perhaps, but in my mind, they add up to the hypothesis that the vast majority of votes are coming not from the permanent sciblogging readership, but from friend mobs, voters visiting the site to read one article--their friend's--and vote for it. So, the more friends you have, and the more frequently you remind, cajole, and nag them, the more votes you'll get.

I realize this could all sound pretty negative and critical. The thing is, I like Scientific Blogging. I like Hank and Kim, and all the other bloggers there that I've been reading. Over the last month or two that I've been blogging with them, I got more and more excited about the idea of winning the internship and working with them.

But over the last week of voting, I've realized that this phase of the competition makes me uncomfortable. It's not that I think networking is an evil skill. If I were trying to drum up votes or donations for a larger cause (like Sasha does for her non-profit SOIL) then I would probably be more comfortable sending out lots of e-mails. In this case, though, the cause at stake is science communication. I'm passionate about it, but honestly, any one of the finalists is going to do a fine job. My desire to win is therefore purely selfish, and I don't want to harass people for a selfish cause. Besides, I've never had a very competitive spirit.

This experience might just be teaching me that I don't belong in internet competitions. And that's a useful thing to know about myself.



* Just to be clear: I'm not saying that drumming up readership is the only, or even the primary, motivation for holding a contest like this. Also, I'm not saying that it is a bad motivation. I am 100% in favor of good websites (like sciblogging) building up both their readership and their revenue so they can stick around and keep serving up good content.

Oh well, here goes. I submitted my essay to the Scientific Blogging contest, and while the judges hem and haw, I contemplate additional writing-related opportunities. I'm also keeping my artistic muscles limber by illustrating a card game about science. These pursuits, however, are mere sidelines to this year's primary task of Finishing The Thesis. Data analysis and paper-writing continue apace. A continued brake on forward progress is the near-incapacitating cuteness of my cats.

Introduction

I'm sorry, dear little blog. It's been a while since I gave you any quality time. You haven't even seen a mention of the International Cephalopod Awareness Days (October 8-10). In my defense, I did honor every single ICAD over at Squid A Day. Furthermore, I'm working on a longer, more serious Cephalopodiatrist post about the whole meaning of ICAD and Squidmas. So, be warned! Something not-hilarious might show up here! Because, you know, everything else I write is a laugh a minute. (That phrase was once used rather drily by an eminent larval fish biologist to describe a scientific meeting he was about to attend, when I rather thoughtlessly suggested that he "have fun".)

Anyway, hi! I have been wildly busy with a variety of boring things, like remodeling a kitchen and having the flu, but also with some interesting things, namely, the three obsessions of my life, SCIENCE, WRITING, and ART.

Methods

Science

I am trying to finish my thesis. By May. There, I said it. I want to finish my thesis by May. Hah! That does not mean it will absolutely happen, but I do have this feeling that the more often I say it (and the more people I say it to, most particularly members of my committee, which--yeah, I should get around to that) the more likely it is to happen. Also, of course, the more work I do, the more likely it is to happen. So, I am writing a chapter up for publication, analyzing data on all the rest, and learning about deadlines.

Writing

I have my eye on two internships: the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship, which I had really better apply for, but I haven't even started, because I was focusing on the other one, the Scientific Blogging contest that I mentioned way back--when? Exactly three entries ago.

As of yesterday, the competition is closed! My essay, my superb-nay-flawless chunk of prose, has been submitted and is now available for all to read. It is rubbing shoulders with a whole lot of pretty outstanding pieces--I haven't had a chance to read them all, but these are my favorites so far. Now, the secret judging panel at sci blogging is doing secret-judge things to pick the finalists. Picking winners from amongst the finalists, however, will be done not-secretly-at-all by the plebes--anyone and everyone who wants to vote. So if I make it into the finalist rounds, this is what you will hear: HEY PEOPLE GO VOTE FOR MY ESSAY NOW PLEASE. (Just practising! In case!)

Art

I have been illustrating a truly awesome card game that my friend Kevin came up with. It is about Science, of course. And it is really fun, even compared to real games that real game companies come up with. But right now, many of the cards are lacking pretty pictures. And they need pretty pictures. That will make it more fun. So, that is my job!

We're hoping to auction off the first fully-illustrated version of the game at WSN this year. After that, there may be some revisions, but pretty soon the game will probably be available to buy through The Game Crafter. Never fear (or, maybe fear), I will keep posting about it! It's very educational--you get to use your botanist to distract your opponent's chemical oceanographer with pretty flowers, or have your theoretical mathematician prove that cloaking is possible. This is true!

Results

I have been very busy.

Discussion

There are also the two cats, who are mercifully (and adorably) sacked out on top of two different stacks of boxes in my office right now. And then there are the boxes themselves, which, although they are very serviceable cat pillars, might someday want to be, I don't know, unpacked.

Then there's the kitchen. But let's not even go there, okay? Instead, I'm going to go back and write a little abstract for this absurdly long rambling entry, to make life easier for people who might be too busy to read all fifty pages (just a guess, of course--isn't it nice how webpages can be as long as forever?) about how busy I am.

After writing the abstract, apparently, I will decide it would be clever to organize the whole entry like some kind of warped, mutant scientific paper. Then I will start using future tense to describe things that have already happened, and at that point it is CLEARLY time to go work on something else.

I began this poem during my month-long sojourn as visiting scientist on the MacArthur II in 2006. Three years later, as I'm working up plankton data from that and many other cruises, seemed a good time to finish and post it.

~

The bow of the ship is sacred on moonless nights.

You stumble up there, drunk with artificial lights,

and sway in the darkness--clinging, staring, blind.

Moment by moment, you are sobered by the black,

until your appetite diminishes. You find

that single photons from long-gone supernovas

are enough to satisfy you. If you look back,

an open porthole seems obscenely bright:

a gluttony.

Best if your voyage takes you far beyond

where city glow demarcates the horizon.

Here nothing separates sky from sea, save

the abrupt absence of stars.

                                          Or not. You see

a luminescent soup, a swarm, in every wave!

They are tiny, these planktonic supernovas,

their lifespans shorter than any star or galaxy.

But to your light-thirsty eyes, they are the same:

a single sip.

Or, An Illustrated Guide to Sorting Plankton.

First the motivation: why would you want to spend all summer sorting plankton? Especially why would you go to La Jolla, beautiful warm sunny La Jolla, just so you could sit in a basement laboratory behind a microscope all day--sorting plankton?

Because in 2006 I went on this cruise, and I sorted plankton every night, and my findings were preliminary, but intriguing.
Because as part of this scholarship, I had to do some kind of research collaboration at a NOAA facility.
Because it turns out that NOAA has been doing these cruises, and collecting plankton samples, every few years for decades, and that is an amazing dataset ripe for the picking.
Because it made sense for the fourth and final chapter of my thesis to focus on squid spawning in the tropics, and that means looking for squid babies in plankton.

So, for all of these reasons, I found myself spending the summer in a rather surreal environment.

The fume hood:



The doorstop:



The bench full of open containers:



The best thing about my working conditions was definitely the company. A hilarious and energetic undergrad helped me out on her own erratic schedule, and next door to us was the reliable, friendly and knowledgeable collections manager, Annie. I admire Annie a great deal, in large part because she can look at crustaceans and see something biologically meaningful, instead of a crunchy reddish mess, as I do. But she also loves molluscs. Sort of the same way I love worms. We actually had this conversation:

Me: I would be a worm person if I weren't a mollusc person.
Annie: I would be a mollusc person if I weren't a crustacean person.

Unfortunately for me, plankton samples tend to be mostly crustaceans--copepods, ostracods, krill, shrimp, crab larvae, you name it--if it's red and crunchy, it's probably in the plankton somewhere. It will not surprise you to hear that I was looking for squid, not crustaceans. It's not as bad as a needle in a haystack, but . . . well, sometimes it is. After a few days, this is what I began seeing on the backs of my eyelids:


So, sorting squid out of plankton samples makes you insane! Hooray!

My job was made slightly more rewarding because I had decided to sort out fish also. There were more fish than squid, but (usually) not so many more that it really slowed me down. And at the end of the day, it feels like more of an accomplishment to have pulled 87 fish and 2 squid out of a jar than to have pulled out just 2 squid. Or zero squid. There are lots of people at NOAA who are very interested in fish, so I was able to give a little back to the people who were helping me out.

Plankton sorting is essentially a grown-up, scientific version of Where's Waldo? There are two fish and one squid in this image:


See?



It's not fair, of course, because I get stereo vision through the microscope, but you're just being given a single flat picture. Sorry about that. Here, I'll make up for it with some lolplankton:

So the folks over at ScientificBlogging decided to have themselves a little contest. A contest that is absolutely irresistible to yours truly. You see, US News & World Report did a 3-year survey-based study on the nation's best science graduate programs. Scientific Blogging reported the results, then said,

Now we know what universities to attend in order to receive a phenomenal education in science. But it's one thing to know a lot about science, and another thing entirely to be able to apply it and communicate it effectively. And communicating science is what we at ScientificBlogging are all about.

So to highlight these outstanding universities, ScientificBlogging has decided to sponsor a little friendly competition between them. Today we announce our first ever "University Writing Competiton." We invite graduate students that are currently enrolled at any of these Top 10 Universities (actually, eleven) to participate. The official rules are below, but the big idea is that we are inviting graduate students to write about science - on any scientific topic of their choosing. It is our hope to discover those exceptional students that not only know their science, but can also effectively communicate it to the scientific community - as well as to the general public.

The grand prize? A three-month paid writing internship. Hello! I'm in! Now, if only I could decide what to write about . . .

Just kidding. Of course I'm going to write about squid. But which squid? And what tentacular squidly aspect of squid? These are the questions that must be answered, in superb, nay, flawless prose, by me, before October 15th. And that answer must be posted on my Scientific Blogging account. Which I have just created for this purpose.

But I can't create a new blog and then post only one entry in it, ever, just to enter the contest. That feels a little cheap. I also can't create another blog like the Cephalopodiatrist, full of deep, rich, and way-too-long-for-sensible-blogging entries. So I thought: let's do something different. Something short and snappy that won't take too much time away from the Cephalopodiatrist, and OH RIGHT ALSO MY THESIS. Something that will serve a greater goal, namely, gathering fodder for the brilliant essay that I will eventually craft as my contest submission.

And thus, Squid A Day was born. I haven't decided if it should have dashes in the name or not. Opinions, anyone?

The idea was simple: Find something about squid in the news every day, and blog it, either correcting the science, or--in the unexpected instance where everything in the news article is actually correct--congratulating it. The execution was fairly simple, too--once I figured out ScientificBlogging's awful user interface.

Hi, ScientificBlogging. Do you notice how I am whining about this here on my personal blog instead of on my/your blog? You're welcome!

I'm pretty sure I am not dumb, nor technically incompetent (my advisor's snide comments notwithstanding) and yet I could not for the life of me figure out how to start posting on my new SB blog.

By the time I scrolled down to the part of their FAQ which announces, "Article creation is quite easy. Go to My Account and click Write Blog," I was already seriously annoyed. It is not "quite easy" it is "quite circuitous and counter-intuitive." I understand that UI is difficult--it should be intuitive, but everyone's intuitions are slightly, or drastically, different. So intuitive isn't always possible. But how about just "simple"?

You see, this is what happens when you sign up for an account on SB. First you find and click on the "register now" option, that's fairly straightforward--although admittedly I didn't find it on my own, I had it pointed out to me by the rules of the contest. Now you're at a page where you can provide some information about yourself, then you click "create new account." Then you get an e-mail. You follow the link in the e-mail, and it takes you to a login page. At this page you can edit more stuff: change your password, add books to recommend, and so forth. You make some edits, and click "save". Now you're still at the same page, it's just added a little note indicating that your changes have been saved. But nowhere does it have any place to actually write a post.

I stared at this page bleakly for a while, then went and did some actual work, then went back to staring at it bleakly. Finally  I noticed a little link in the corner leading to "my account". Hunh, I thought, am I not already at "my account"? But I clicked it. This took me to my "account dashboard"! This page boasts a "my friends" section and also a "corkboard" (The heck is a corkboard?) as well as a menu called "my tools."

(Was it Microsoft that started prefixing first person possessives to make everything look more friendly? Maybe that worked once, but now it is just aggravating. And ambiguous. Are you suggesting that the tools actually belong to me, the user, or are you emphasizing that you, the website, are generously allowing me to use your tools? Either way it's patronizing and a waste of space.)

Anyway, "write blog" is one of these tools, so now I'm in business! Hooray! And, SB, don't take it personally. No one can do UI properly. Not even my own school, which apparently offers the number one science graduate program in the entire NATION, can make reasonable UIs.

Check out the screenshot below. This is how I enroll in classes. Isn't it great that the exact same set of links is at the top AND bottom of the page, just to give you more stuff to look at? Also, note the instructions suggest that you "select the term and click Change." Anyone see an option to select a term? Or a button labeled "Change"? Nope, I don't either! Another fun fact: it's impossible to "proceed to step 2 of 3" as such. All you can do is keep clicking through those pale green buttons, and eventually, if you look to the upper right at the retro sci-fi "1-2-3", you will notice that the 2, instead of the 1, has become highlighted. It's like a bread crumb, indicating you're on the right track!

 

My husband and I went to Miyazaki's new film knowing only its title. We hadn't even seen any promotional posters, let alone the trailer. As Anton said, "I kinda like the idea of going to see a movie that I'll love without knowing anything about it."

Well, as it turned out, we didn't love it. Spoilers commence.

It began as a marine biologist's dream--gorgeous underwater scenes that weren't all about dolphins and turtles, with plenty of gooey invertebrates, and actual plankton! Plus a message of environmental conservation--a magician who's angry with humans for harming the oceans, and a rather bleak and frightening scene of a trawl net tearing up the already polluted ocean bottom. Classic Miyazaki, right? But (in my opinion) the movie just didn't sustain the awesome.

So I rewrote it.

Before posting my version of Ponyo, though, I figured I owed the reader some explanation of why I was so discontent with Miyazaki's version. But I was too lazy to write a movie review myself, so I poked around online until I found a nicely articulate one that addressed my concerns*.

According to this review, the problem is just that I'm an adult. Little kids, apparently, don't care if a story is "chock-a-block with inconsistent internal logic, head-scratching plot turns and nonsensical story progression." Grown-ups do. And I cared, oh, how I cared! The movie was crammed with logic hiccups--the worst for me was the total lack of distinction between seawater and tap water. Apparently Ponyo is the most euryhaline fish ever.

Two salient points from the review I will quote in full:

It's light as a feather, with little to no real meaning or subtext - the wizard's generic dislike of humanity doesn't fuel the main conflict (which is hardly much of a conflict at all, really) and is more of a side note than a real theme within the film . . .

. . . there's one character - Sosuke's mother, Lisa - who provides something of a ground for adults, and is a delight every time she's on screen. She is portrayed as a strong, caring, rational and totally modern mother figure, with plenty of human flaws peeking through the cracks. Her tender and realistic relationship with Sosuke - and ultimately, Ponyo - is a big highlight of the film, and her scenes provide a subtle but potent refuge for adult viewers who may need a break from the tempest of fairytale madness that inhabits the rest of the story.

I was reading this after rewriting the story, and I recognized these as the very story elements that I'd changed! I desperately wanted the wizard's dislike of humanity to fuel the main conflict (and for there to actually be conflict at all), and I wanted more of Lisa. So here's my version, somewhat validated by the opinions of a random Anime News Network reviewer. I tried to keep some of the Miyazaki feeling by not overthinking the plot too much . . .

Ponyo On The Cliff By The Sea

rewritten from the movie by Hayao Miyazaki, which was, in turn, inspired by Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid" (yes really)

A magician named Fujimoto lives far out to sea in a beautiful submarine laboratory. Once he was human, but he grew to despise humanity for its careless disregard of the earth, especially the ocean. Angered by rampant pollution, habatat destruction, and overfishing, he used his magic arts to change himself so he could live and breathe in the sea. He spoke with sharks, chatted with cuttlefish, and danced with many other creatures, deep and strange and nameless. From among his aquatic acquaintances, he took many wives, and for the children they bore, he built a garden on his submarine.

The children have food, and room to play, and the company of their siblings, but they miss their mothers, who stayed behind in their reefs and rocks and nests. The magician is a neglectful father. He tecahes them magic when it suits him, for he will need their help in his master scheme to cleanse the ocean of human abuse once and for all. But most of his time is absorbed in other parts of his plan, and the children are left to amuse themselves.

One of his daughters is a magic little fish named Ponyo. She is not the eldest or the youngest, nor even the cleverest or most beautiful. Nevertheless this story is about her, for one day she manages to squirm out of the magician's garden, and finds herself free in the wide open sea. She catches a ride on the bell of a passing jellyfish, who takes her all the way to the waters of a small coastal town.

Leaving the jellyfish to explore on her own, Ponyo suddenly finds herself scooped into a fishing boat's trawl net. As it drags along the bottom, the net churns silt into the water. Ponyo can hardly see, and she has to dodge rocks, bottles, and all the other fish and shrimp trapped in the net. She gets stuck in a bottle, but luckily, she and the bottle are both so small that they slip right through one of the holes in the net.

With her tail sticking out of the bottle's mouth, Ponyo tries to swim towards the surface. A wave picks up her bottle and washes it onto the sand of a small beach.

On a cliff above this little beach is a little house, far enough from the town that it has its own water well and a generator for electricity. In this little house live a mother and a father and their little son, Sosuke. Sosuke's mother, Lisa, works in a nursing home, and dreams about saving the polluted, overfished ocean. Sosuke's father, Koichi, is the captain of a fishing boat, and he has to spend many days away from his family. When he's gone, Lisa is lonely and resentful, and when he's home, they argue about fishing and conservation. Sosuke misses his father, and wants his mother to be happy, and doesn't have any friends to play with because he lives so far away from the town. He spends a lot of time by himself at the seashore.

He finds Ponyo on the beach, in the morning before school starts, and frees her from the bottle. She doesn't want to go back in the ocean, so he fills a bucket with seawater and puts her in it. His mother is calling that it's time to go, so he rushes back up to the house and into the car, lovingly carrying his bucket along.

In the car, Sosuke shares his breakfast with Ponyo, who decides she loves human food. He introduces her to the old ladies at the nursing home, and to the other kids in school. As Ponyo learns more about the human world, she uses her magic to become more and more human. By the end of the day, when Sosuke and Ponyo ride home with Lisa, Ponyo isn't a fish any longer--she's a little girl. Lisa is surprised, but takes it in stride, and decides to keep Ponyo for the night.

After Sosuke and Ponyo are asleep, Lisa goes outside to sit by the ocean. She is glad that her son has found a friend to play with, but also sad, because Sosuke is her only companion when Koichi's gone. She starts talking to the ocean about how much she wants to take care of it, but doesn't know what to do.

Meanwhile, the magician Fujimoto has finished his spell to cleanse the earth of human pollution, and is looking for a human vector to release it into the world. He sees his opportunity in Lisa, and invites her into the ocean, encasing her in a bubble of air and showing her all the wonders under the water. Sosuke sees his mother leave and screams for her to come back. She doesn't hear him, but Ponyo wakes up and asks him what's wrong. He tells her what he saw. Ponyo realizes that it was her magician father, who is trying to destroy all humans. They go after Lisa to warn her.

Fujimoto convinces Lisa that she can save the ocean by taking his spell and setting it free on land, but he doesn't tell her what it will do. Before she can take it home, though, Ponyo and Sosuke find her. Ponyo tells Lisa what Fujimoto is really up to, and Sosuke reminds her that she loves Koichi, even though he's a fisherman, and wants to protect humanity, even when it's foolish. They destroy the spell, which causes a terrible storm, and turns Ponyo back into a fish.

The other part of Fujimoto's plan, after he killed all humans, was to have his many magical children travel around the oceans, using their magic to clean up all the pollution and plastic, and restoring the balance of nature. Ponyo suggests that all the other children go out and start doing that now. Fujimoto claims that it's no good to clean up while humans are still around, because they'll just mess it all up again.

Ponyo insists she's going to turn back into a human, so Fujimoto's spell, if he creates it again, will kill her too--and Lisa and Sosuke, whom she loves. Finally Fujimoto promises to stop trying to kill humans, as long as they work to stop polluting the oceans and fish sustainably.

The rest of Fujimoto's children all swim out of the garden to visit their mothers and begin the great cleanup. Everyone is happy, except that Ponyo finds that she can't turn herself human again, because she lost her magic when they destroyed the spell. Fujimoto agrees to use his magic to make her human, if Sosuke will prove he returns her love by kissing her when they reach the surface. In the magician's eyes, this is the first step towards redeeming humanity.

Lisa, Sosuke, and Ponyo swim back to the surface, where Ponyo turns back into a girl, and Koichi fishes the three of them out of the water onto his boat. Lisa and Koichi kiss too, and start making plans for the human side of ocean conservation.

Well! I'm finally home from my two-month research collaboration in La Jolla. Any day now (any day! really!) I'll be posting a distillation of my experiences: Plankton Sorting and Identifying for the Layperson. It'll be riveting.

First, though, I'm going to wrap up the unexpected adventures that resulted from a few dozen of my study organisms washing up on the beaches while I was there.

I already wrote about the fun and inky times of finding and dissecting squid on the beach, with the help of some wonderfully enthusiastic chance companions who provided a knife and plastic bags for my samples. Well, they were so grateful--for what was probably the most unappetizing experience of a lifetime--that they insisted on treating me to dinner at White Sands, their (very posh) retirement community. Baffling! But very sweet! Here we are, the squid dinner crew:


The company was outstanding, the food was delicious, and the view is unbeatable--they're right on the beach, watching every sunset over the Pacific. Apparently I'm not old enough to apply for residency, but man, I know where I'm going on Februrary 19th, 2048!

Meanwhile, other people were losing their heads over the whole business--first the squid sensed an earthquake, then they started attacking divers, and wait a minute, they were GIANT squid, weren't they? Actually they were not. Big thanks to Deep Sea News for setting the record straight.

No thanks to the New York Times, who ran the disappointingly sensationalist and poorly-fact-checked AP article, with the addition of this hilariously captioned picture:

John Hyde, a marine biologist, and a jumbo flying squid, now swarming off San Diego.

That is the actual caption--no substitutions, exchanges, or refunds. Was the copy editor so harried that she missed the verb taking two subjects, or was she so entertained that she let it slide? I hope it was the latter.

Finally, the night before I left town, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak about squid to the San Diego Dive Club at their monthly meeting. I started off by introducing all the squid in the area--

 
--but I know more about Dosidicus than the others, so I spent a lot of time skillfully steering the conversation towards that species. It was an awesome discussion; I found the audience was more engaged and curious than those at many scientific meetings. Of course, it was 8pm at the La Jolla Brewhouse--a rather different venue from most conference presentations.

After meeting so many interesting and interested people, I was sorry to be leaving the next day! I hadn't even made time for a dive, just a few short swims and snorkels. Next time I'll get on scuba and look for some squid . . .

For now, it's good to be home, reacquainting myself with the mammals in my life.