My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand
And that animal is just thriving out there,doing literally none of the stuff his buddies do, and noone really understands why or how the animal is continuing to live its best life out there.
And when you tag an animal like this it often causes a lot of panic because you're forever like oh shiiii it's been in the same place for 3 days wtf is it dead? Has the mortality sensor malfunctioned? Then you go check on it and its straight up chilling.
Anyway this is dedicated to the urban foxe I tracked nightly when I was an undergrad who just sat under a shed in some blokes back garden for 3 months.
I love the amount of researchers posting about their own Lazy Geoffs in this thread
In ecology & conservation the skills PhD students need for a career in academia are almost totally at odds with what nonacademic jobs are looking for. The sector is really asking people to put all their eggs in one basket if they want a research career.
If they want a research career students need to entirely focus in papers and grants.
Time spent gaining important skills like supervision, sitting on committees, running events, on outreach etc is time away from that and unlikely to help land an academic role. Especially at postdoc level.
I think we can all agree the true villian in the wobbegong drama is 'Arcane Animals' on Youtube, a channel that scrapes content without credit, and which was the origin of the mislabelled photograph.
If you thought it couldn't get any more contentious they also have a pro mandarin duck video.
Literally using my colleagues photos uncredited for their mountain chicken video 🙃
Do you hate running but are thinking about taking it up? Here's a few things people don't tell you: 1. It might not become enjoyable and that's ok. Two years in and I still hate it with the burning passion of 1000 firey suns.
2. Even if you hate it and don't get runners high it can still make you feel better. Whenever I feel low it's like we'll, it could be worse, at least I'm not running right now.
3. You don't have to go far. I run ~3km 3 times a week. It takes me like 20 mins. But my lungs are very grateful for it and it still improves my fitness.
So I've seen a fair few 'it's wrong to send a rover to mars when species are dying' takes - and I personally think they are misguided and potentially damaging.
And I say this as someone who really doesn't like space! (1/n)
First off, let's look at the cost: $2.6 billion.
That's literally a drop in the ocean in terms of government budgets. They could quite easily spend that on sending a rover to Mars AND spend the same on conservation. (2/n)
The US military budget is $849 billion. Yet no-one is ever like how come the govt is spending money on bombs not conservation. It's only ever when it's another field of science, or something culturally important like the Notre Dame fire that this comes up. (3/n)