Scicomm

AI and Insect SciComm

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AI is here (and has been for a while). It provides hope and potential solutions to many scientific problems, but also raises many ethical problems that can’t be ignored.

For insect biodiversity and conservation research, AI tools can support ID and analysis of species, traits, interactions and behaviours and have huge potential for large scale monitoring.  If you use iNaturalist, AI has helped you narrow down your observation ID to relevant ‘suggested species’ (and is usually pretty accurate).

But on social media, does it help or hinder?

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Social media declines and the academic blogosphere

Manu Saunders6 Comments

At the end of 2022, we all thought Twitter (now called X) was about to break. In my broader twitter network of mostly academia and ecology/enviro interested folks, I started losing connections by the day as many people deleted or walked away from their accounts and started up somewhere else. I hung on because I’m an optimist and it had been such a positive experience for me, so I hoped the storm of new ownership would blow over.

I signed up to Mastodon just in case, but after a few weeks it wasn’t really replicating my Twitter experience at the time and I stayed on at Twitter/X hoping things would improve. I also signed up at LinkedIn and tried out Reddit, but neither filled the twitter-shaped hole.

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Spiders, SciComm and Body Butter

Manu Saunders2 Comments

In a fitting end to the ridiculous year of misinformation that it was, this fake news story on spiders being attracted to a particular brand of body butter caught my eye.

It’s clickbait, it’s misinformation, it’s disinformation…and it’s a great illustration of how the online universe creates more complex challenges for science communication.

According to the story, a customer wrote a negative review on the website of a popular cosmetics brand claiming that a particular body butter, when applied appropriately, attracted spiders (specifically, wolf spiders) to them. Other people then jumped on to various social media platforms claiming similar experiences with the same body butter.

This phenomenon is not biologically plausible, and I sympathise with the numerous experts who had to interrupt their holidays to explain to multiple journalists that no, it was extremely unlikely that the body butter was bringing all the spiders to the yard.

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What do covid, climate change and the biodiversity crisis have in common?

Manu Saunders3 Comments

Anyone who has worked in climate and biodiversity sciences over the last few decades has experienced the deep grief, frustration and helplessness that comes from watching leaders (political, corporate and cultural) ignore the science and intensify the crises we face, as society generally carries on as if the world is not burning around us.

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Academic blogs: knowing where your work ends up

Manu Saunders2 Comments

This week, a syndicated article appeared across a number of online media platforms under various different headlines. It covers the doomsday insect apocalypse narrative and appears to cast doubt on the issue of insect decline, largely blaming media and ‘activists’ for promoting the hype. The author links to my blog posts on the insect apocalypse, my BioScience paper co-authored with Jasmine Janes & James O’Hanlon, and my American Scientist article as evidence against the hype, and some sections paraphrase or directly quote from my work. To the average reader, it could appear that I have talked to the author, and that I endorse the article. I did not, I do not, and I was not aware the article was being written.

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More on insect conservation

Manu Saunders1 Comment

A few recent panels on insect conservation I’ve contributed to:

Off Track – great program on ABC’s Radio National (Australia) telling stories of nature. This week, the program featured myself and a couple of other Aussie invertebrate experts, Kate Umbers and Nick Porch. We talk about insect conservation in Australia, as well as challenges facing conservation policy and action in Australia more generally.

LISTEN to Off Track: Conserving small things on a big scale

British Ecological Society – the society recently ran a number of events as part of National Insect Week and the Edinburgh Science Festival in the UK. I contributed to an excellent panel discussion on the Insect Apocalypse and insect conservation, along with Adam Hart, Nick Isaac, and Ashleigh Whiffin.

WATCH the panel: Insectageddon: is global insect extinction real?

What the windscreen anecdote tells us about science

Manu Saunders2 Comments

The windscreen anecdote has been doing the rounds on social media again.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why this anecdote is not reliable evidence of insect population trends.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it goes a little something like this. “When I was a kid we would drive long distances for holidays and get bugs all over the windscreen. I don’t see any bugs on the windscreen anymore, therefore….” The interpretation, whether implied or stated explicitly, is that this is yet more evidence that a global insect decline is happening.

There are obvious flaws in this assumption, but the anecdote still strikes a chord with so many people, perhaps through some kind of confirmation bias. We know that biodiversity is in trouble, we know humans are having damaging effects on the environment, so it must be true, right?

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Last year

Manu Saunders5 Comments

A lot happened last year.

Twelve months ago I’d been breathing bushfire smoke for months and I was struggling with despair and anxiety (personal and empathetically global) over Australia’s devastating bushfire summer, after our hottest and driest year on record, and the lack of responsible climate action our government maintains.

Now, we’re on track to have experienced one of the wettest years on record for our region, with some areas flooding in recent months, others seeing welcome regrowth in farms, forests and gardens. After severe drought and bushfires, some places may not find the sudden deluge so exciting. While our new garden is loving the conditions, our garage has suffered some minor flooding as the dehydrated clay soils slowly drown under the weight of water. (Nice reminder that climate change brings rapidly changing extremes, not static increases or decreases.)

In between, we’ve suffered from pandemic anxieties, losses and inconveniences, along with the rest of the world.  

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Admin: drowning, not waving

Manu Saunders8 Comments

I worked in admin before my science career, in many roles, in many sectors. I’ve worked as a corporate receptionist, oversaw corporate communications, worked in document control for engineering consultancies, and managed content translation requests for university students with learning disabilities. I’ve been co-managing an unfunded citizen science project for more than six years.

So I’m no stranger to admin and I have no grudge against admin professionals – they are essential!

But, in some cases, the admin sagas that academics are forced to star in are a bit much.

Universities hire admin staff. Even within our own departments, academics generally have access to department-specific admin, finance and technical professionals. So why is so much of an academic’s time taken up with enforced admin, when it’s not technically part of their job description, and they’re not trained to deliver the desired admin outcomes?

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Why common names are essential for bee conservation

Manu Saunders11 Comments

This is a guest post by Dr Tobias Smith, a bee ecologist and stingless bee expert at University of Queensland. He founded Bee Aware Brisbane and is also on the board of Wild Pollinators Oceania. Tobias is one of Australia’s leading native bee experts and has published an easy to use identification key to Australian bee genera, which you can download for free here. Effective communication plays a key role in conservation of bees (and biodiversity generally), a topic Tobias and I have published on before.

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Lately on social media I have seen some spread of the idea that common names for bee species are detrimental to the science and conservation of bees and so should be avoided. I disagree, and in fact I regard common names as a vital part of bee conservation. Let me explain why.

First of all, let’s look at scientific naming, using Australia’s two biggest bee species as an example, Xylocopa (Koptortosoma) aruana and Xylocopa (Koptortosoma) lieftincki. These are big (males up to 26mm in length, females up to 22–23mm in length) beautiful, furry, yellow and black bees. These bees have the genus name Xylocopa. In Australia there are eight known Xylocopa species, but there are hundreds more found around the world. The second name, Koptortosoma, is the subgenus name. It tells us which part of the evolutionary tree of Xylocopa these bees are in.

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