NESTA Crucible: a eulogy

In these tough economic times™ lots of things that we care about, and which rely on public funding, are coming under increased scrutiny. The case for science has been well made elsewhere – I’m sure you’re aware of the Science is Vital campaign, and if not you should be. You should also take a look at Shrigley’s equally impassioned, and equally watertight case for the arts (it’s very funny too). Given the threats to both of these sectors, it is perhaps not surprising that the continued existence of NESTA, which exists to foster innovation across sciences and the arts, is also being questioned. (I should point out that NESTA is funded by an endowment from the National Lottery rather than through tax revenue, and that their stated aim to harness innovation to solve major economic and social problems sounds like the kind of thing that politicians have been asking for, but I digress…) The initiative that brought me into contact with NESTA is, however, already extinct. The Crucible programme ran for just a few years, and is described as

…a series of residential workshops run by NESTA to help researchers, who face demanding challenges in their own fields, to network and look to solve more complex challenges across several disciplines. By bringing bright thinkers together, Crucible was designed to help people see the bigger picture…

I came across Crucible early in 2007, when I was applying for jobs and fellowships left right and centre. I kept getting shortlisted, even had a few interviews, always followedby the professional equivalent of ‘I really like you but…’

I can’t remember where I saw the Crucible advert, but the application process was suitably short, and the questions suitably intriguing (‘Please tell us about yourself’, ‘Please give details of your activities outside research’, and so on) that I thought I’d give it a go. In fact, I ended up spewing out all the stuff I normally had to cut from ‘proper’ applications, in a continuous stream of consciousness, and just sending it off. (The wonders of Spotlight – I’ve just found my application, and cringe slightly at the first line: “I am an ecologist by training; by inclination I am a 17th Century Natural Philosopher”; and so on…)

So anyway, somehow I got on it, and it changed my life.

The 2007 cohort was a group of around 30 early career researchers – from across the natural and social sciences, from academia and industry. A major part of Crucible’s success, then, came from providing a space for people from different disciplines to interact, to recognise common ground, to explore possible collaborations. Many of the more memorable sessions involved the interface of science and the arts, visual and sonic, and I think this brought home to me more than anything how creative good science can be.

But it was the social aspect more than anything that defined Crucible. In our departmentalised world, we seldom get the chance to sit down and talk to people from across disciplines, about the kinds of issues that affect us all (I guess NN and other networks provide a similar forum, but virtually, and with less beer). It was kind of how I imagine an idealised high table to be at an Oxbridge College – stimulating conversation with intelligent and articulate people.

Of course, in our impact obsessed world, NESTA needed evidence of outputs, but that kind of missed the point of Crucible. The output was the event itself, the conversations and network and friendships, the seeds of ideas sown. For interdisciplinary work, this is in fact half the battle. So although many of us were prepared to write glowing statements about the effect that Crucible had on us personally, tangible results were thin on the ground. And I suspect this is the major reason why Crucible was culled – despite near universtal positive feedback.

Now, Crucible lives on in Scotland and Wales, but the NESTA’s involvement has ceased. It would be great to think someone else might take up the challenge to organise something similar in the future – something residential, interdisciplinary, creative. Crucible widened my horizons and picked me up from the confidence slump I was in at the time, and it’s sad to see it pass.

Cool stuff whales do

It’s a sunny day, I’m on one of my favourite train routes (up the Northumberland coast, between Newcastle and Edinburgh), en route for St Andrews – home, indeed, of the Sea Mammal Research Unit – so it seems appropriate to forget a recent funding disappointment, and the brewing scientific feud I described last week, and to concentrate instead on cool stuff that whales do. Please don’t expect anything about communication, intelligence, or other cuddly things; this is a tale of death and defecation. Two recent papers highlight the vital roles that the great whales have played in marine ecosystems, and in the global climate system more generally. Given the couple of centuries of concerted effort humanity expended in transforming whales into lamp oil, scrimshaw and corsets, they provide another sobering case study of how we’ve managed to fritter away those very natural resources that keep the world a habitable place.

The first paper, by Pershing et al., concerns the role of the great whales in locking up carbon. As they say,

In terms of their size and potential to store carbon for years or decades, marine vertebrates [especially the large whales] are the only organisms in the ocean comparable to large trees.

They use simple metabolic scaling to show that large animals are more efficient at storing carbon than are smaller animals:

…the same amount of primary productivity can support a higher biomass of large individuals due to the increase in metabolic efficiency with increasing size.

So krill, the small crustaceans on which the Southern Ocean ecosystem is based, are pretty rubbish as carbon stores – too small, and with too rapid a turnover. Blue whales, on the other hand, are great. What’s more, if they aren’t eaten or otherwise removed from the sea, even when they die whales perform an important carbon storage function: sinking carcasses can export carbon from the shallow, sunny surface waters to the deep ocean, where it is likely to remain for 100s or 1000s of years.

Perhaps the neatest part of the paper is in using estimates of pre-industrial whaling biomass of the really big species, to calculate the ‘carbon footprint’ of whaling. First, they estimate that whaling removed 1.7 × 10^7^ tons of C from marine ecosystems. They estimate the upper-bound of the pre-whaling flux to be “1.9 × 10^6^ tons C yr^-1^, or 0.1% of the ocean’s net carbon sink”, and they estimate that whaling contributed a total of 2.35 × 10^7^ t of C to the atmosphere.

The logical consequence of this is that restoring whale stocks will benefit the climate. For instance,

rebuilding the southern hemisphere blue whale population would sequester 3.6×10^6^ tons C in living biomass…[these] new blue whales would be equivalent to preserving 43,000 hectares of temperate forest, an area comparable in size to the City of Los Angeles.

The authors note that such figures compare favourably to other climate remediation schemes, notable geoengineering plans to use iron to fertilise the oceans. Intriguingly, whales may perform this role too. The second cool paper is by Nicol et al., and the start of the abstract sets it up nicely:

Iron is the limiting micronutrient in the Southern Ocean and experiments have demonstrated that addition of soluble iron to surface waters results in phytoplankton blooms, particularly by large diatoms. Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) eat diatoms and recycle iron in surface waters when feeding. Baleen whales eat krill, and, historically, defecation by baleen whales could have been a major mechanism for recycling iron, if whale faeces contain significant quantities of iron.

They go on to show that whale poo is, indeed, rich in iron. More specifically, krill are rich in iron, and whales absorb this. But their most crucial role is in converting the iron locked up in krill into a form that is more ‘bioavailable’:

Baleen whale faeces are released as a slurry, which disperses rapidly in the surface layer. [Pre-exploitation]… whales consumed some 190 million tonnes of krill per year … thus they converted some 7600 tonnes of iron in krill into iron-rich faeces every year… Thus, whales would have been part of a positive feedback loop that maintained primary productivity by efficiently recycling iron in the surface waters. Larger populations of whales would have led to enhanced primary productivity and this larger food source would have potentially supported bigger krill populations.

Which is exactly what the geoengineers want to achieve with artificial iron fertilisation. Who’d’ve thunk the climate change generation would be recycling the rather retro rallying cry of the 70s environmental movement?

Save the Whale!

Rising to the bait?

No – not another fisheries blog. This time, I’m in a qandry, unsure whether (once again) to engage, through the scientific literature, in another public squabble. More specifically, I’m pondering the following vexed question: exactly how bad does a paper have to be in order for me to drop what I’m supposed to be doing, fire up the old critical faculties, and spit out a vituperative rebuttal? At what stage does ‘petty complaint’ upgrade to ‘vital corrective response’? Here’s the background. A paper has recently appeared, on a subject about which I know more than I do about probably any other academic topic. And it is bad. Truly, terribly awful. It is directly critical of some of my previous work, misguided in almost every way, and sheds no light whatsoever on the subject. And did I mention how bad it is?

On the other hand, it’s on a rather esoteric topic, published by an unknown author, in a decent but middling journal, and is very likely to sink without trace in the citation universe.

So, should I rise to the bait, and patiently destroy each of the the spurious arguments, dodgy simulations, and naïve statistics? And can’t I in any case put a positive spin on all this bile, i.e., that part of my public duty as a practising scientist is to correct errors in the hallowed scientific record, act as a sentinel for truth and reason, and so on and so forth. (Notwithstanding the thrill of the chase inherent in the assassination of shoddy science…)

Hmmm. Well. I really should just let it lie. But over coffee this morning I’ve already discussed this with a couple of senior colleagues, who have similar views to myself. I’ve re-run some of the simulations and plotted a few of them up, and they are as dodgy as I suspected. So, I’m afraid it’s not looking good for all the stuff I’m meant to have done by the end of this week.