Author: Christie Wilcox

Dr. Christie Wilcox is a science writer based in the greater Seattle area. Her bylines include National Geographic, Popular Science, and Quanta. Her debut book, Venomous, released August 2016 (Scientific American/FSG Books). To learn more about her life and work, check out her webpage or follow her on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook.

School Fish By Enriching Their Habitat

Smart fish
Don’t let his looks fool you — this goldfish is probably smarter than your average bowl variety because his tank is decked out!
Image credit: sbotas

Think that little plastic castle in your goldfish tank is just decoration? Not so, say scientists. Having such obstacles and spatial variety might be making Goldie smarter.

When humans first started keeping animals in captivity, we kind of sucked at it. Even when we met an animal’s every obvious need — nutrition, water, shelter, etc — some just didn’t do well. As we learned more about the minds of animals, we realized that they needed more than sustinence, and the concept of enrichment was born. Since the 1980s, captive animal facilities have been required to provide an adequate physical environment to promote the psychological well-being of species like primates and marine mammals. Most zoos and aquariums go above and beyond the mandate, insisting that the animals’ emotional and mental health is paramount. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums even goes as far as to state that enrichment is “as critical to an animal’s well-being as having the right food and medical care.”

Usually, the focus is on the smarter animals, with enrichment entailing activities like giving monkeys toys to play with, or placing an octopus’ dinner in a sealed jar for it to open. Fish aren’t exactly known for their smarts, but that doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from an enriched environment, too. New research has found that fish brains are boosted when humans add a little variety and diversity to their life, and this knowledge may help conserve key species. Continue reading “School Fish By Enriching Their Habitat”

Fish-Slapped! Thresher Sharks Stun Sardines With Speedy Tails

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a truly hard slap knows just how jarring forceful impacts can be. In the animals world, slapping can be used to disorient and stun prey, making them easy pickings for an intelligent predator. Creating a slap with such force can be tough, though, especially in a liquid environment. Killer whales can do it. But while scientists have long hypothesized that thresher sharks might use tail-slapping to stun prey, none had actually studied the kinematics of their tail-waiving behavior to determine if these sharks actually slap or just herd fish with their tails like dolphins do.
The impressively long tail of a thresher shark.
Photo by Flickr user Raven_Denmark

Thresher sharks are found worldwide, and are known for their particularly stunning rears. The tails of these sharks can represent an impressive 50% their total length! A fact which is even more daunting when you consider that the common thresher shark (Alopias vulpinus) can grow up to 20 feet long and weigh in at over 1,000 pounds. But these giant ocean predators don’t tend to hang around our shores; lucky for us, they prefer the open ocean where they travel long distances to feed on schools of fish. Continue reading “Fish-Slapped! Thresher Sharks Stun Sardines With Speedy Tails”

Conservation Success To Boy’s Club: The Hawaii Creeper In Danger Of Extinction

The beautifully diverse honeycreepers. Cover art for Current Biology, volume 21, issue 22

Though most people focus on Darwin’s famous birds, I would argue that the Hawaiian honeycreepers are the most dazzling example of adaptive radiation, especially by a finch. From a single finch ancestor arose a stunning diversity of honeycreepers, from the brilliant red I’iwi with its long, curved bill to the small, rotund ʻAkikiki. Over 50 species of these colorful forest birds once brightened the islands from Hawaii to Laysan, putting the 14 Galapagos finches to shame. Their tale is not just one of rapid evolution, though; it’s one of a brief and fleeting existence on this planet. All but eighteen are extinct, and of those that remain, ten are endangered or critically endangered and five are listed as vulnerable, leaving only three species that seem to be holding their own against the every-growing list of threats to their survival. Continue reading “Conservation Success To Boy’s Club: The Hawaii Creeper In Danger Of Extinction”

A letter to eighteen-year-old me, on her birthday

In a decade, you will find yourself unable to fall asleep, having just turned twenty-eight. You’re still young, and you know that, but the number will seem big. Nearly a third of your life, even if you live as long as your great-grandma did. As you toss and turn, the decade beween eighteen and twenty-eight will roll around in your head. It will grow larger and larger, snowballing into something intangibly huge. You’ll remember how, a decade before that when you were only eight, your lifelong dream and desire was to be sixteen. Sixteen, like Kelly Kapowski in Saved By The Bell, because when you were eight, sixteen seemed like the distant future. At eight you believed that sixteen was when you’d reach some life peak, and you’d be driving around in some cute car with a cute boy wearing cute clothes, and that all of that cute was life at its best. You’ll be a little embarrassed by how silly you must have sounded when you told everyone at Concord Academy about this childish fantasy in your senior chapel that you gave only months away from your 18th birthday. High school was very different from what your younger self envisioned, and at eighteen, you feel like you are wise beyond your years. Oh how you, eighteen-year-old me, thought eight-year-old me was so sweet and naive.

Oh, eighteen-year-old me, you’re still so sweet and naive.

Continue reading “A letter to eighteen-year-old me, on her birthday”

Over at Slate, more Scientist in vivo

“Do you know what this is?” James Morris looks at me, eyes twinkling, as he points to the guts of a dissected lionfish in his lab at the National Ocean Service’s Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research in Beaufort, N.C. I see some white chunky stuff. As a Ph.D. candidate at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, I should know basic fish biology literally inside and out. When I cut open a fish, I can tell you which gross-smelling gooey thing is the liver, which is the stomach, etc.

He’s testing me, I think to myself. Morris is National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s pre-eminent scientist studying the invasion of lionfish into U.S. coastal waters. He’s the lionfish guy, and we met in person for the first time just a few days earlier. We’re processing lionfish speared by local divers, taking basic measurements, and removing their stomachs for ongoing diet analyses. Not wanting to look bad, I rack my brain for an answer to his question. It’s not gonads. Not spleen. I’m frustrated with myself, but I simply can’t place the junk; I’ve never seen it before. Finally, I give up and admit that I’m completely clueless.

Learn what I learned: head over to Slate to read the rest!

Scientist in vivo lets you peek behind the scenes at what my life is like as a researcher so you can learn more about what I actually do for a living and what makes my job so rewarding. 

More info on the lionfish invasion:

Choose your cutlery carefully: what you eat with changes how food tastes

My dessert competition entry for my workplace Christmas party last year: eggnog cheesecake. The tough judges from HIMB, like those on TV cooking shows, were scoring looks as well as taste, so I had to go all out!

I have a particular fondness for cooking competitions. Whether it be Iron Chef (the original and the American spinoff), Cupcake Wars or Chopped, once the burners are lit, I can’t seem to look away. Over time, I’ve come to notice that all cooking shows tend to incorporate the same elements when it comes to judging. Taste, of course, is paramount. Creativity and surprise seems to rank high as well. But almost as important as the dish itself, whether a chef is competing in Hell’s Kitchen or on Top Chef, is how it looks. Called presentation or plating, it incorporates everything from the colors of the food to what dish, bowl or glass it’s served in.

Don’t get me wrong — I like pretty things. Some of the stuff these chefs whip up could just as easily belong in the Louvre as on my dinner table. But I never really understood why presentation is so important. Who cares if it looks like Alpo if it tastes delicious? I simply didn’t get the obsession with the visual — until, that is, I began to read the research of scientists like Vanessa Harrar and Charles Spence.

Taste, they have found, is in the eye, ear, and hand of the beholder.

In a study published today in the open access journal Flavour, Harrar and Spence show that even something as overlooked as our cutlery can change our perception of foods.

Continue reading “Choose your cutlery carefully: what you eat with changes how food tastes”

Here Be Dragons: The Mythic Bite of the Komodo

Here Be Dragons: first written on the Hunt-Lenox Globe c. 1510 as the latin phrase HC SVNT DRACONES.

To a mediaeval mapmaker, the world was a vast and scary place. Explorers that braved the seemingly endless oceans in search of new worlds often didn’t return, and those that did carried with them nightmarish tales of monsters and serpents. It was the mapmaker’s task to warn future travelers of the dangers that awaited them in far-off lands. Based on their drawings, I cannot even begin to imagine the beasts that haunted these cartographer’s dreams. Their creative expressions of fear were eventually distilled into a single, ominous phrase: here be dragons.

Lands that still deserve this cartographer’s omen, however, can be counted on one hand. They are the Indonesian islands of Rinca, Gili Motang, Flores, and Komodo — the only places in the world where dragons still roam. Continue reading “Here Be Dragons: The Mythic Bite of the Komodo”

The Very Thick Line Between Raising Concerns And Denialism

The real question is, which side of the line are studies that lack scientific rigor on?
Image credit: silent47

Recently, Kara Moses asked Guardian readers: “Should we wait for conclusive scientific studies before becoming concerned about an issue?” Her personal answer was no; that special interest groups should perform and publicize their own findings. “I believe they should be given a voice,” she concluded, “not dismissed out of hand for lacking the scientific rigour demanded by professional scientists.”

Quick to support her was Treehugger writer Chris Tackett. “The point here is that scientific proof matters in science, but it shouldn’t necessarily be what determines our actions,” he wrote. “We can intuit that some things are unwise or dangerous or against our values without needing reams of scientific data to back up our concerns.” While Kara’s piece talked only about the use of glyphosate (the pesticide known by its brand name RoundUp), Chris used it to attack both the pesticide’s use and Monsanto GM crops.

I understand where they are coming from, but the hair on the back of my neck bristled reading those words. I think they’re both getting into very dangerous territory (or, in the case of Chris’ comments later, happily dancing around in it). The trouble is, it’s one thing to notice a potential danger and raise a few alarm bells to get scientists to investigate an issue — it’s a whole other to publicize and propagandize an unsubstantiated fear despite evidence against it. The former is important, as Kara suggests, and should occur. I have no problem with non-scientists raising honest concerns, if their goal is to have the concerns considered — so long as they’re actually willing to hear what the evidence has to say. The latter, on the other hand, is denialism. You see, once scientists have weighed in, you have to be willing to listen to them. Continue reading “The Very Thick Line Between Raising Concerns And Denialism”

The Sweet Taste of Conservation | Scientist in vivo

Do not try this at home.
This is not the right way to eat lionfish!

According to many biologists, you don’t really know your research inside and out until you’ve tasted what you study (there is, quite literally, a badge of honor for it). I’ve known biologists who have chugged shots of plankton, taken bites from agar plates, and some have even drank water that’s a billion years old to attain the dubious honor. You’d be surprised* just how many times I’ve gotten into conversations about my research and my study organisms only to be interrupted by “that’s great and all, but have you eaten them?” And every time, I had to hang my head in shame and confess that, alas, I had not. Now, I’m thrilled to report that while I was in Beaufort, NC to collect samples, I finally joined the cool biologists club. I ate my study species.

And they are delicious.

Continue reading “The Sweet Taste of Conservation | Scientist in vivo”

On The Danger Posed By Non-Expert Critiques Published To Large Audiences

Geoffrey North, the editor of Current Biology, has written a critical editorial that questions the role of social media in science (which I strongly suggest you read before continuing). In it, he refers to blogs as “”vanity publications”,” written by those “prone to self-indulgence”. He warns that blogs can be dangerous, that their speed and virality pose a serious risk to the foundations of peer-review and the scientific process. While many were taken aback by his bold claims, I think he makes a lot of very astute arguments.

First, of course, he’s correct in saying not all blogs are bad. The case of arsenic life and Rosie Redfield may go down in history as the first great example of blogging truly blending with and supporting research, changing the way we view peer review and the overall system of science publication and communication. It validated the beliefs of many that social media was not the enemy of science but instead its under-utilized ally. Shortly after, even major journals began to see the merits of these new media platforms for research and outreach.

Continue reading “On The Danger Posed By Non-Expert Critiques Published To Large Audiences”