A short defence of short term contracts

Many of you have probably seen already the Science is Vital report on Science Careers, which was published this week. Perhaps you contributed to the consultation. I’m afraid that I didn’t. In part, this was because September is among the busier of my months (conferences, start of term, and this year too a whole load of rugby to watch at inconvenient times in the morning). But I was also put off by the negative way in which the issue was framed. For instance the online survey which asked respondants to “rank the following problems with science careers…”, and the email I got inviting me to contribute stated that they were “…currently preparing a report… detailing the worsening situation in scientific careers” (emphasis mine). If you start your consultation with the outcome decided, then you preselect a biased sample of respondants. Scientists often get questionnaires wrong in this kind of way, not having read the literature on how to construct them properly (and I’ve worked with enough social scientitsts to know that it drives them mad!)

Notwithstanding the lack of space for people to say ‘I love my job – few other careers would give me more freedom to manage my own time, or more opportunity to be creative, and I think the career structure is about right’ – I will admit that it’s hard to disagree with the main conclusions of the report. Although many of the complaints (lack of job security, work-life balance, pay, pressure to perform against suspect measures, etc.) could of course be made by people in any of a number of other careers, and I’m not convinced that as scientists we have it especially bad.

The ultimate issue, of course, is that there will always be fewer senior positions than there are qualified scientists. I know some have made the argument that we could solve this by producing fewer PhDs, but that’s really hard to justify. Hunter S. Thompson once wrote something like, ‘Of course not everyone should be allowed a gun. But I should’ – we have to be very careful not to advocate restricting access to something that we already have. So, the situation will continue: lots of PhDs chasing fewer post doc positions chasing still fewer senior positions. Short term post-doctoral contracts have been one, much maligned, way of wearing down the demand until it matches the supply.

Which brings me to my surprising (to me, at least) defence of short term contracts. Now 5 years ago your would have struggled to convince me that my future self would be writing this. I was in the middle of a 4th consecutive 1 year post-doctoral contract, at a 4th successive institute, and, chasing that elusive work-life balance, had been conducting some crazy commutes over that time (York-Oxford a particular favourite). I used to reckon that in a 12 month contract, 5 months were spent writing up the previous project, 5 months applying for the next one, leaving a couple of months for productive work in the middle. (And I still think one year contracts are a little extreme, and more bridging funds would have been very useful at times…)

But for all that… In four years I got to work in four different institutes, for different bosses and with different colleagues, exposing myself to different methods, ideas, networks. I was fortunate to work for people who supported my efforts to progress, pushing me apply for fellowships and lectureships on the tacit understanding that I would still be contributing (unpaid, of course!) to their project after moving on. That kind of mobility can be really useful (if tiring) for a post-doc; and just as important, the intellectual atmosphere of an institute greatly benefits from a turnover of bright, enthusiastic people. The inconvenient truth is that the best places I’ve worked have always had a high proportion of fixed-term contract researchers.

Of course, there comes a stage where more stability is needed. Would I have bitten your hand off if you’d offered me a permanent contract 5 years ago? You betcha. None was forthcoming, but I kept tweaking my applications and was lucky enough to land a couple of fellowships before I went mad / left science. That’s not the end though, is it? My current fellowship is lovely, but still fixed term, and if I don’t perform I’ll be out at the end of it. Most lecturers are also appointed now with probationary periods, and the idea of a ‘permanent position’ in science is receding everywhere. Should post-docs really expect the security of a permanent position without the responsibility of leading a lab, or of taking on heavy teaching and admin loads, or propping up a department’s REF submission? Should systems be in place to allow a lucky few to continue their post-doc forever?

The thing is, such positions do exist – in research institutes, the scientific civil service, and so on (although they frequently bring their own administrative hell). Whether the job security at such places leads to more / better / different science is an open (but I guess answerable) question. Expecting universities to fund similar positions – effectively permanent post-docs – is unrealistic: why would they pay a lecturer(+) salary when for the same money they can get a researcher who also teaches and is a grant-writing PI? If you see your position as essentially providing skilled support to the research programme of a lab head, you should probably expect your payscale to reflect this fact.

In the meantime, I expect those on short term post-doctoral contracts to continue to make massively important contributions to the intellectual life of our scientific institutions.

How ecology crosses marine-terrestrial boundaries

I’ve been off the grid for a while, first at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting last week, then in grant writing mode this week, and tomorrow I head off to Aberdeen for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity, hoping to have the two talks I will be giving in some kind of reasonable shape. But for a break from all the everyday business of science, here’s a little bit of cool natural history. Let’s start with a question: How do forests in Alaska end up getting fertilised with nitrogen which comes from the sea?

The answer involves an icon of wildlife photography, and a famous rhetorical question. The image first: think of Alaskan streams and one picture more than any other is likely to spring to mind: a brown bear, stood in a waterfall, plucking a leaping salmon from mid-air. Of course, those samlon are returning upstream to spawn, having spent years feeding at sea (and thus assimilating nitrogen, as well as various marine-derived minerals). As for how the nitrogen then gets into the forests, well, is the Pope a Catholic? Or, hang on, do I mean the other one….?

This kind of transfer of nutrients from one ecosystem to another is known as an ecological subsidy, and is actually pretty common. Think about the billions of insects which emerge every year from their aquatic larval homes, and how many of them will end up, somehow or another, fertilising the banks or shores of their nursery river or lake with matter originally derived from the aquatic system. An individual mayfly might not provide much of an N input, but multiply by any realistic number of individuals and you start to see what an impact such subsidies might have.

I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a while, partly I guess because I spend quite a bit of time comparing and contrasting marine and terrestrial ecological communities. But it came to mind this week because of a new paper I happened across in the Journal of Avian Biology.

In this paper, Therrien et al. have tracked snowy owls overwintering in the Canadian Arctic. Because these magnificent birds specialise in the summer months on hunting small mammals, and this is likely to be rather tricky in the winter, it had previously been thought that most owls winter further south where little furry things were still active.

But this new study shows owls spending several weeks over the sea ice, around 40km (and up to 210km) from shore. It seems that this small mammal specialist turns generalist in the winter, targeting small areas of open water and the seabirds that gather there.

The authors focus their discussion on the likely consequences for owls of reduced sea ice in the future, and I agree that the effects of a changing sea ice regime on the structure and functioning terrestrial ecosystems has been overlooked. But I also think this is another neat example of the slow, ecologically-catalysed cycling of elements between the land and the seas.

Reducing unknowns in marine biodiversity research

I have been interested for a while in trying to catalogue the state of our knowledge of marine biodiversity. This interest can take various forms – previous work, for example, has documented biases in where in the water column we tend to look for marine species (in a nutshell: we look at the surface, or on the sea bed, but hardly ever in the big blue bit in the middle!). But over the last couple of years myself and some colleagues have been trying to document the extent of our biological knowledge of UK marine species. By ‘biological knowledge’ I mean the most basic natural history: How big does a species grow? What does it eat? How many offspring does it produce? And by ‘UK marine species’, I’m referring to a good subset (about 1000 species) of the more commonly encountered, large (comparatively speaking – bigger than a millimetre or so, anyway) fish and invertebrates which tend live on or near the sea bed.

I’m delighted to say that this work¹ has now been accepted for publication in Global Ecology & Biogeography, and I may write more about it when it actually comes out. Suffice to say: for most invertebrate species (and a surprising number of fish), we know little more than how big they get (if that). Basic natural historical knowledge for most marine species in the UK is sorely lacking – and note that we have probably the most intensively studied marine fauna in the world.

The question then is, can we fill these yawning gaps in our knowledge? I can’t see any funder jumping to pour money into 19th Century-style descriptive natural history (although it may be possible to sneak some in to more ‘impactful’ proposals…), so the first step is to ensure that we have properly mined the available data. For our study, we largely relied on data already entered into publicly available databases like FishBase and Biotic. But the suspicion remains that more data are out there, on dusty library shelves and in forgotten filing cabinets.

So, last summer my colleague Paul Somerfield from Plymouth Marine Lab and I set Calum Watt, a willing undergraduate student, loose in the MBA’s National Library, with 100 species names randomly chosen from our UK list, and the instruction to find as much biological information as he could – and to time himself doing it.

Now, there are various problems with the design of this ‘time trial’ – for instance, Calum’s species list was a random selection of all our species, but was not randomly ordered. So, because he only got 25 species in, he covered Annelids and most Arthropods, but didn’t get to Cnidarians, let alone Molluscs! His search strategy was deliberately rather haphazard too, and a more targeted approach may have proved more effective. Hell, there’s a reason why this is a blog post, not a paper!

Anyhow, his data have sat on my hard drive for a year, until I managed to find another willing student – Beth Mindel – to make some sense of all the “=NOW()” entries in his spreadsheet, and summarise what he found.

I guess the encouraging thing is that Calum did find some new trait data. He filled at least one gap (and often more) for 16 of the 25 species that he tackled, most frequently adding body size data, but also information on reproductive strategy, feeding method and diet. Also, when he found data on traits that we already thought we knew, in most cases the new information matched (or nearly did) the existing data, which was reassuring!

A couple of other (not unexpected) patterns emerged: the more time he spent searching, the more information he found and the more gaps he filled. Now, obviously at some point even the MBA library will be exhausted as a source of information, and we wouldn’t expect the accumulation of new information to continue on this linear trajectory indefinitely. But given that we have no idea when it might start to plateau, and given that this is just a bit of fun, we can at least wildly extrapolate from the 26 hours that Calum spent on this project to give a ‘best case’ indication of how long it might take for us to fill all the gaps in our database.

So, assuming that the Annelids and Arthropods are broadly representative of the 825 invertebrate species in our database (and so ignoring the 148 fish species for now), what are the numbers?

We collected data on 8 broadly-defined biological traits, so there are 825 × 8 = 6600 gaps to populate. In our study, we had filled in 1630 of these, leaving 4970 to fill. Calum managed to fill in an average of one gap every 29 minutes. So, at this rate of productivity it would take 144130 minutes, or approx 2400 hours to fully populate our database. 100 days, in other words, for a student (i.e. discounting sleep, days off, etc.). Or, 65 working weeks if we were to cost it properly.

Just goes to show, I think, that regardless of all the online tools now available, and the vast digitising projects underway, making the best use of the work of past generations will still require hard slog for someone in a good old-fashioned library.

¹Full ref: Tyler, Somerfield, Vanden Berghe, Bremner, Jackson, Langmead, Palomares and Webb. Extensive gaps and biases in our knowledge of a well-known fauna: implications for integrating biological traits into macroecology. Glob Ecol Biogeog, in press.