Sugar teaspoons for bees and science communication




But what price new audiences? Continue reading

Insect Armageddon reprise




Limitations of using Altmetrics in impact analysis




Ecosystem services or Nature’s contributions to people?





Flower Visitors vs. Pollinators: no evidence that honey bees are the most important pollinator worldwide

Pollination is a complex process. It’s not as easy as an insect simply visiting a flower.

This is important to remember when talking about which species are the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ pollinators. Simply observing an animal visiting a flower is not, on its own, evidence that the animal is pollinating the flower.

Many insects (and other animals) visit flowers, to feed on pollen, nectar or other flower parts. Many of these interactions result in pollination…although some visitors are better pollinators than others. Some of these visitors commit floral larceny – they are robbers or thieves (there’s a difference!) of either pollen or nectar, and they leave without pollinating. Some might even damage flower parts so much that they indirectly affect the flower’s capacity to be pollinated by other visitors.

To know for sure that an insect is pollinating a particular flower, we first need to know what kind of reproductive system that flower has. Is it male, female or bisexual (containing both male and female parts)? Can it self-pollinate, or does it need to be outcrossed to another flower or plant of the same species? Once we know this, we then need to watch the behaviour of the insect that visits that flower. Does the insect visit one flower and fly away, or many flowers in a row? Does it move between plants? Does it actually touch the reproductive parts of the flower when it visits each flower? Continue reading

Blogging for the science community



Do scientists need Twitter verification to be credible?

A recent blog post by Andrew Kurjata asks some questions that many people have considered. Why does Twitter’s explanation of the sort of people who can be ‘verified’ not include scientists or knowledge brokers? Are politicians, singers and actors more worthy of public interest than scientists? No, of course they’re not. So why are we putting so much faith in the blue tick in the first place?

When I joined Twitter a few years ago individuals couldn’t ask to be verified. Instead, Twitter would “reach out” to eligible accounts when the time was right. I distinctly remember the words used. How snobby, I thought. The implicit assumption was that “reaching out” would occur when the account was deemed famous enough.

Now, the policy has changed, probably because Twitter employees got sick of spending all day reaching out to famous people on Twitter. Now anyone can ask for a blue tick of approval (but not everyone gets it).

Does this change the distribution of people that get verified? As with most awards and honours, women, minorities, or introverts are less likely to self-nominate for prestige, even if they righteously deserve it. Continue reading