Marine biodiversity hits the headlines

This week, the Census of Marine Life has finally published its definitive answer to the question, how many marine species are there? (The definitive answer being, lots more than we thought, and many more than we’ve described.) Clinging to the coat tails of this mini media storm, my paper on the global distribution of recorded marine biodiversity has also finally snuck out. I’m not a habitual press releaser, but we decided to stick one out for this paper for a couple of reasons. First, I just think it’s cool. We plotted the position in the water column of around 7 million records of marine organisms stored within the Ocean Biogeographic Information System. What this shows is that, unsurprisingly, the shallow seas surrounding the continents are better sampled (by orders of magnitude) than the deep oceans. But by considering the relationship between the depth at which each sample was taken, and the depth of the ocean at that point, we were able to gain a more nuanced picture: those records that we do have from the deep seas tend to come either from the surface, or from the sea bed, leaving the ‘big blue bit in the middle’ – the almost inconceivably vast deep pelagic ocean – virtually unexplored.

Webb_fig2.tiff
The distribution of global recorded marine biodiversity. The figure represents the water column, with the x axis proportional to the area of the ocean at different depths (y axis).

I was also keen to produce the press release because, for a variety of (largely political) reasons, we sent this work to PLoS ONE. Now dear old PLoS ONE has its pros and cons (I plan to write more about these soon), but the simple fact that it publishes so much every week means that I was worried that our paper would simply disappear without a little push from us.

Now, because of the clutch of CoML papers, the media are clearly primed and ready to pursue marine biodiversity stories. As a consequence, our press release got a good reception, and I’ve been approached by everyone from the Guardian to Fox News, and I’ve even done an interview on BBC Radio Sheffield. All of which is great, and I do of course enjoy seeing my name in print.

The flip side is that my name has become associated with CoML – fine by me, and my work was indeed linked with the Census, albeit only loosely. But it means that the questions I’m being asked are things like, How do you go about counting all the species in the sea? As well as things about the gulf oil spill and so on, some distance from my area of expertise. My feeling is that I ought to engage with these questions, and I can probably give as well-informed an answer as almost anyone. But my work is data analytical, and I’m not a hands-on marine biologist, and I just cannot shake the fear of saying something foolish.

Still, there’s something depressingly appropriate about stories of the parlous state of marine biodiversity becoming tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers…

Seeing through the sea

Two recent trips to the coast, one for pleasure and one for work, have led me to ruminate on some of the peculiar issues that make marine ecology both especially intriguing and particularly tricky to study. One of the striking features of the marine habitat is the unignorable third dimension. Studying terrestrial organisms, especially at the kinds of biogeographic scales that interest me, we can confidently talk in terms of areas – the range size of any given species will typically be quoted as a geographical extent, in km2. Even the most aerial of birds – swifts, say, or the great albatrosses – are tied to terra firma for breeding purposes. In the sea, it is different. For some marine species, especially those closely associated with the sea bed, we can perhaps take the same approach. But for others, that multitude of pelagic organisms inhabiting the water column – well, many of them undertake extensive vertical migrations every day, without ever in their lives experiencing the hard certainty of rock, sand or silt. Their environment extends in all directions, and their ranges should surely be quantified as volumes.

Conceptually, that can be difficult to grasp, particularly if you have grown accustomed to seeing species ranges, and other patterns of biodiversity, represented on flat maps. But for me, visualising an ecological problem is very often a great help, if not an essential prerequiste, to solving it. So in Wales, gazing out to sea, I practised the following thought experiment: imagine if you could see through the sea, as if it were air.

View of Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire. Imagine if, instead of blue, the sea were see through; imagine seeing the sandy plain and its inhabitants, rather than the mirrored sky.

Extending from the base of the cliffs, then, would be a vast sandy expanse, fringed in places with dense patches of large algae, but otherwise devoid of visible plantlife. But this plain would not be lifeless. Closer inspection would reveal plentiful signs of busy animal existences. It is riddled with the burrows of countless worms and molluscs. More obvious, through your binoculars you will see the larger epibenthic predators and scavengers – the crabs, urchins and sea stars. From time to time, a flatfish may reveal itself, lifting from the sea bed and rippling this way or that.

But drawing most attention will be the swimmers. Darting around the base of the rocks are wrasse and other reef fish; further out, pollock, or perhaps haddock or cod, would be hunting on the plain; and above them, the more flittish flocks of sandeels and mackerel, shimmering like starlings coming in to roost.

And you would see in their entirity the chases of air-breathing predators. The diving gannets, usually curtailed at the sea surface, could be followed right into the shoals of fish several metres below; you could see their misses and, when they succeed, watch them swallowing their grabbed fish on their ascent. Auks would swim deeper among the sandeels like fierce sheepdogs, puffins stuffing their comic bills with fish after fish.

You would be hoping, of course, for something larger: to see the ballet of grey seals at play, or possibly even porpoise or basking sharks, lording it over this shallow plain like the great beasts of the savannah.

People would feature too, of course. In shallow coastal Pembrokeshire, you’d see more evidence of leisure than of industry, although the occasional lobster pot would announce itself with its bright balloon hanging high above. But visit the more productive seas and you would witness carnage of a kind unthinkable on land. Imagine ploughing a field, with a vast net attached to the plough such that everything in your path is collected: the grubs and worms in the soil, the attendant gulls, the fleeing hares and pheasants. That’s beam trawling.

Or imagine casting an immense mist net to enclose those roosting starlings; or suspending kilometers of baited hooks across the Straits of Gibraltar during the autumn raptor migration; or harpooning buffalo; or dynamiting rabbit warrens; or poisoning tropical forest canopies and catching whatever falls out; or… Well, any means you can conceive of to catch and kill animals in commercial quantities has probably been attempted in the sea. If it is effective, it probably still goes on.

Of course, seeing a problem does not automatically mean it would be fixed, but I wonder what marine conservation would be like if every human impact on marine ecosystems were as visible as the Gulf oil spill. Certainly, we would be better placed to understand the state of the marine environment, and the effects of conservation measures, if we had a photographic record of historical habitats and the superabundance of large animals in the recent past. Perhaps it’s my job, as a marine ecologist, to try to assemble such pictures, using the scaps of evidence that we have been able to obtain by fumbling in the dark.

Privatising the Peer Review Process?

I spent last week scouting for sunfish and generally enjoying the beautiful Pembrokeshire coastline, despite the idiosyncratic Welsh summer weather (which eventually led to me abandoning tent for the second time in my life!) So, relaxed and windblown, I thought I’d ease back into things by posting on my colleague Owen Petchey plan to fix the peer review process by privatizing the reviewer commons, just published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Owen and Jeremy Fox start by outlining their concerns with the peer review in its current form:

The peer review system is breaking down and will soon be in crisis: increasing numbers of submitted manuscripts mean that demand for reviews is outstripping supply. This is a classic “tragedy of the commons,” in which individuals have every incentive to exploit the “reviewer commons” by submitting manuscripts, but little or no incentive to contribute reviews. The result is a system increasingly dominated by “cheats” (individuals who submit papers without doing proportionate reviewing), with increasingly random and potentially biased results as more and more manuscripts are rejected without external review.

Their solution is to privatise these commons, through a system of PubCreds: researchers would earn credits for reviewing manuscripts, which are then required to ‘pay’ for submitting their own papers:

We propose that authors “pay” for their submissions with credits, called PubCreds, “earned” by doing reviews. Submission of a manuscript costs three PubCreds, while a completed peer review pays one PubCred. Every individual would have an account held in the central “PubCred Bank.” Their account would be credited when they carry out a peer review, and debited when a manuscript is submitted. Individuals could view their account balance and transaction history on the PubCred Bank web site. We suggest that the PubCred Bank also log requests to review that have been declined, and the reason for declining (the reasons for this are explained below). Critically, submission of a manuscript to a journal would be possible only if an individual’s account balance contained sufficient PubCreds…

Jeremy and Owen develop this idea in more detail, and consider how some of the technical and philosophical obstacles to implementation may be overcome (for instance, the possibility of overdrafts could ensure that publication of important work was not delayed because of a shortage of recent reviews). But they emphasise that:

…potential drawbacks to our proposed system must be weighed against the actual drawbacks of the current system, which are widely recognized and increasingly serious.

I think it’s an interesting idea, and, despite a congenital knee-jerk opposition to all forms of privatisation (I grew up in Thatcher’s Britain…) I suspect I would probably do OK from it – my reviewing balances my writing reasonably well at the moment. It does seem to be all-or-nothing though: it’s difficult to see how it could ever be trialled without the full involvement of at least a large majority of publications within a field.

Also, just as academics play games with impact factors, inevitably strategies would develop here too. For instance, given that PubCreds can be shared between co-authors, might we see clubs of authors develop, some of whom specialise in reviewing, whilst others do the research? But, having relatively recently taken up editorial positions with a couple of journals, I do agree that finding suitable reviewers is a pain, and so some kind of initiative to incentivise the process would be welcome.