The most difficult thing I have ever had to write – Insects – A Very Short Introduction

The book!

I have written a lot of papers (more than 220 according to Web of Science) and quite a few books, two real ones (Leather et al., 1993; Leather & Bland, 1996) and eight edited volumes, over the last forty odd years. Up until now I thought the most exacting piece of writing I had ever done was my entry for the Biological Flora (Leather, 1996).  I mention this because it has a very similar feel to my most recent, most difficult piece of writing, Insects, A Very Short Introduction.

I did my PhD on the bird cherry aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi (Leather, 1980) during which I developed a real love for the bird cherry tree, Prunus padus. Just to illustrate this, my second son’s middle name is Tuomi – Finnish for bird cherry. Over the next decade or so I expanded my studies on to the different insects associated with it and also became quite adept at striking scions, grafting it and manipulating its phenology. I could (and still can), thanks to sampling bird cherry trees in Finland in the depths of winter, identify it in the dark by the smell of the bark 😊 In the mid-1980s, I jumped on to the species-area relationship bandwagon (Leather, 1985, 1986) and discovered the wonderful Biological Flora of the British Isles, hosted by the British Ecological Society. Armed with the arrogance of youth, and obviously at the time, not suffering from ‘imposter syndrome’, I contacted Arthur Willis (the then Editor of the series) and volunteered to write the entry for bird cherry. Pretty cheeky for an entomologist, but hey, both my parents were botanists and me and bird cherry were old pals! Arthur said yes and sent me the instructions for contributors which included all the headings and sub-sections required. It looked pretty straightforward to me; go down the headings, insert the information and write the narrative. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.  Or so I very naively thought ☹ I whipped through the headings, filled in the data that I had, wrote the accompanying narrative and posted it off to Arthur.  Job done! A few weeks later he returned my manuscript telling me that I was also expected to fill in the missing data gaps with data collected by me, not just leave them blank! 

Reality strikes!

So, over the next two years that is exactly what I did.  I checked out which mycorrhizae were associated with bird cherry, collected seed and calculated germination rates, sketched the different seedling stages, did NVC surveys at six different sites, characterised the growth structure of the tree and shrub forms and looked at responses to defoliation. I learnt a lot of botany! Arthur was an incredibly helpful editor and without his encouragement I would never have completed the entry.  I did, however, turn down Arthur’s suggestion that I do the entry for Prunus avium 😊

In 2018 I was contacted by Latha Menon, a Senior Commissioning Editor for OUP, who wanted to know if I would be interested in writing a book for their Very Short Introduction series, in this case, insects.  Having since 1990 grown older and picked up imposter syndrome on the way, I was initially a bit hesitant and asked if it would be possible to have a co-author.  Latha was somewhat lukewarm about this, saying that what the series was about was producing an extended essay (35 000 words) for a general audience reflecting the expertise and enthusiasm of the author.  I pondered about it and thought, well I’ve been a professional entomologist for more than forty years, and an amateur for my whole life, and taught entomology for more than thirty years, so how hard could it be to write 35 000 words about insects? I have also been blogging for what I have envisaged as a mixed audience since 2012, so surely within my capabilities?

I should have known better

It turns out that you can know too much about insects at the same time as you don’t know enough about them! First, I had to decide on a structure for the essay and also what particular aspects of entomology would leap off the page and grab my readers.  Much as I love aphids, other insects would have to feature.  The obvious place to start, I thought, would be to look at how our entomology course introduced the subject to new students, so Chapter 1, In the beginning was born. This was actually not that simple as I had to deal with the evolution of insects, their classification, their anatomy, a lot of their physiology, and also why they were and are so successful. Trying to make that not like a series of Wikipedia sections was not easy.

Now to me, one of the things that make insects so spectacular and evinces amazement in non-entomologists, is how good they are at reproducing themselves, hey presto, Chapter 2, Prolific procreators and the need to discuss sexual selection, mating behaviour, courtship, lekking and much more. I had originally planned to cover host selection and life history strategies in this chapter, but found that it didn’t sit very well in that context.

Instead, I moved on to Chapter 3, On the move, which began with the evolution of flight, much, of which, despite my decades of experience, was quite a revelation to me. From flight I moved onto host selection, and the physiology and ecology of specialist and generalist feeding. These first three chapters were the most difficult to write, bearing in mind that my readers need to understand the basics of how insects work to fully grasp the wonder of what insects are actually achieving. I had to rewrite these first chapters three times before my Commissioning Editor, my non-entomologist lay-reader (my wife, a humanities graduate), a botanist colleague and an entomological colleague, were happy with them.

Those chapters behind me, I now felt it was time to move on to those aspects of entomology that had super wow factor, those facts that would make my readers exclaim things like “I didn’t know that” and encourage them to pass them on to their friends and relatives. Heavily influenced by my childhood love of social insects, Chapter 4, Living together, appeared on the scene. As well as talking about the well-known bees, ants and termites, it also gave me the chance to discuss lesser known examples such as dung beetles, social bugs, insect symbionts, insect-plant interactions, and yes, of course, aphids get more than a passing mention😊

The next three chapters are a bit niche, but gave me the chance to launch Chapter 5, Aquatic Insects, into the mix and talk about the importance of freshwater insects and even more excitingly, wax lyrical about the little known truly marine Ocean Skaters, which I first came across on a work trip to Mauritius in the mid-1990s. Judging by what I see on social media platforms, non-entomologists are, in the English vernacular, totally gob-smacked by how insects can pretend to be something else, so this made Chapter 6, Crypsis, mimicry and blatant advertising, an obvious heading.  I had a lot of fun with this, but was slightly hampered by the restriction placed by OUP on how many illustrations I was allowed to include, and also sadly not being allowed colour.

To me, the ability of insects to live in very inhospitable conditions, from deserts, to ice caves, to mountain tops and to survive arctic winters and other extreme weather conditions without the benefit of fur coats and cold baths, made Chapter 7, Against the odds, a natural.

I have, over the years, been amazed by how limited many people’s appreciation of the positive economic, social, artistic and health benefits of insects to the human world are (Leather, 2015), hence Chapter 8, The good, the bad and the ugly.  Here I dealt with pests, disease vectors, biological control, maggot therapy, pollinators, the role of insects as ecosystem engineers, as waste-disposal specialists and as recyclers.

I began my book by describing the diversity and ubiquity of insects. I discussed their origins and marveled at the ways in which insects have adapted to a wide range of environments and the roles that they play in maintaining ecosystem health. Given that for at least the last twenty years or so, entomologists and ecologists have been warning about the dangers of losing species I felt it fitting to end it by discussing the harm that we are doing to insects and the planet that we, and they, inhabit, and ways in which we might act to halt or reverse our course, if it is not already too late.  I finished with a warning, and the hope that we are not too late to stem disaster, Chapter 9, Ecological Armageddon—insects in decline?

It was, primarily due to the fact that at times, for every word I took out, I seemed to add another ten, both one of the most frustrating but also satisfying pieces of writing that I have ever done. I just hope that when it hits the shops, my readers will find as much to enjoy as I have since I first came across insects just over sixty years ago.

References

Leather, S.R. (1980) Aspects of the Ecology of the Bird Cherry-Oat Aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi L., PhD Thesis University of East Anglia, Norwich.

Leather, S.R. (1985) Does the bird cherry have its ‘fair share’ of insect pests? An appraisal of the species-area relationships of the phytophagous insects associated with British Prunus species. Ecological Entomology, 10, 43-56.

Leather, S.R. (1986) Insect species richness of the British Rosaceae: the importance of hostrange, plant architecture, age of establishment, taxonomic isolation and species-area relationships. Journal of Animal Ecology, 55, 841-860.

Leather, S.R. (1996) Biological flora of the British Isles Prunus padus L. Journal of Ecology, 84, 125-132.

Leather, S.R. (2015) Influential entomology: a short review of the scientific, societal, economic and educational services provided by entomology. Ecological Entomology, 40 (Suppl. 1), 36-44.

Leather, S.R. & Bland, K.P. (1999) Insects on Cherry Trees, Richmond Publishing Co, Ltd, Slough.

Leather, S.R., Walters, K.F.A. & Bale, J.S. (1993) The Ecology of Insect Overwintering, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Booze, sweat and blood – the birth of a paper

Of my top five most cited papers two are reviews, two are opinion pieces and one is a ‘real’ paper.  I have written about the serendipitous event that resulted in my second most cited paper (Leather, 1988), but now it is the turn for Number 5 to make the headlines 🙂 Number 5 (Ward et al., 1998), is a ‘real’ paper in that it tests an hypothesis and is based on data. It would, however, almost certainly never have come into existence if my friend and former lab mate, Seamus Ward, hadn’t come to visit me at Silwood Park in the spring of 1997.

Seamus was in the year below me in Tony Dixon’s lab, originally taken on to work on the maple aphid, but it transpired that his life history traits were not suited to maintaining host plants and aphid cultures.  Luckily it turned out that his true talents were in the area of theory and mathematical ecology; when you were talking to him about your aphids and what they were doing Seamus would sit there turning your description into equations. He thus ended up doing a PhD looking at life-history traits in aphids.  I make no claims to being mathematically oriented, but do take a quiet pride in being pretty good at running practical experiments and this made for a good partnership in the group, in that Seamus would come to me when he needed some experimental support (real data). This was mutually beneficial and resulted in papers we would not necessarily have written otherwise (Leather et al., 1983; Ward et al., 1984).

Having not seen Seamus for some time, since finishing his post-doc in the mid-1980s, he had been based in Australia at the University of La Trobe, we were reminiscing about old times. I happened to mention that I had fairly recently examined one of Tony Dixon’s PhD students who had been working on the carrot-willow aphid, Cavariella aegopdii and the evolution of aphid life-cycles (e.g. Kundu & Dixon, 1993, 1995). This of course got us on to talking about host alternation and why, if it is so risky, (there were estimates of less than 1% surviving the journeys between hosts (Taylor, 1977)), some aphid species. albeit only 10%, had adopted that strategy. In another paper, Tony and Raj had suggested that even if only 1 in 10 000 survived

The words that inspired us  – from Dixon & Kundu, 1994)

the migration from host to host, the high fecundities that host alternating aphids can achieve on their primary hosts (Leather & Dixon, 1981), would make it worthwhile (Dixon & Kundu, 1994). This got us thinking – how many aphids did actually make it and could we work it out?  We discussed this for a while over a beer, (we were in the Silwood Bar at the time), and Seamus decided that what we needed were some data of numbers of aphids on the ground and the number of aphids in the air at the same time. As it happened, I had a ten-year run of bird cherry aphid data on their primary host, Prunus padus trees in Roslin Glen (Scotland) (from my bird cherry aphid side project) and as a subscriber to the Rothamsted Aphid Bulletins, I had in my office, copies of the weekly aphid bulletins for the nearest suction trap to Roslin Glen, East Craigs.  This was enough for us to get started.

The bird cherry aphid side project data – still with me today and more analysis yet to be done 🙂

An example of the old paper version of the weekly aphid bulletin – I now subscribe electronically – a great resource https://insectsurvey.com/aphid-bulletin “The Rothamsted Insect Survey, a National Capability, is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council under the Core Capability Grant BBS/E/C/000J0200.”

The next day I started collating the field data and Seamus started to model.  We were totally engrossed and kept at it all day, breaking only for meals and coffee. After dinner, armed with a bottle of whisky and bubbling with ideas we returned to the computer and Seamus started taking me through his model and fitting the data.  Following the intricacies of the model was not easy for me and made my brain work so hard that my forehead started to sweat 🙂 Sometime near midnight, the bottle of whisky was empty, we had a working model and could put a figure on how many migrating aphids made it from the secondary host to the primary host – 0.6%.  Now, all we needed to do was to get the official aphid and weather data from the East Craigs suction trap and write the paper, which with the collaboration of Richard Harrington and Jon Pickup of Rothamsted Research Station and East Craigs respectively, we successfully did, the paper being submitted in August 1997, and appearing in early 1998 (Ward et al., 1998). In case you were wondering how many bird cherry aphids make it from the secondary host back to the primary host, for every 1000 that take-off, 6 make it, so less than Roy Taylor’s estimate but more than the number that Raj and Tony suggested were needed to make host alternation viable.

So that is the booze and the sweat accounted for, but what about the blood? I had, as an undergraduate, become a regular blood donor and the day after our marathon data crunch, was my scheduled blood donation.  That sunny morning, and somewhat hung-over, I walked across to the blood wagon, conveniently parked outside my office, made my donation and after my biscuit and cup of tea, headed back to my office.  As I was passing the toilets, I felt the need for a pee, so nipped in to relieve myself, stood at the communal urinals, unzipped and started to pass water, as I did so, my blood pressure dipped and I started to faint, my last thought before I passed out was that I didn’t want to fall face down in the urinal gutter, so pushed away from the wall with one hand. 

Not the actual urinal (they have long since been replaced) but this gives you the idea of what I didn’t want to fall into. Image source

I woke up some time later on the floor bleeding copiously from a head wound caused by me falling across one of the wash basins.  To cut a long story short, I was rushed to the local hospital, my head repaired, and, as I had a post-donation faint, no longer allowed to donate blood.  On the plus side, the paper has been very successful and I have an amusing after-dinner story to tell and the scar to prove it 🙂

References

Dixon, A.F.G. & Kundu, R. (1994) Ecology of host alternation in aphids. European Journal of Entomology, 91, 63-70.

Kundu, R. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1993) Do host alternating aphids know which plant they are on? Ecological Entomology, 18, 61-66.

Kundu, R. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1995) Evolution of complex life cycles in aphids. Journal of Animal Ecology, 64, 245-255.

Leather, S.R. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1981) Growth, survival and reproduction of the bird-cherry aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi, on it’s primary host. Annals of Applied Biology, 99, 115-118.

Leather, S.R. (1988) Size, reproductive potential and fecundity in insects: Things aren’t as simple as they seem. Oikos, 51, 386-389.

Leather, S.R., Ward, S.A. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1983) The effect of nutrient stress on life history parameters of the black bean aphid, Aphis fabae Scop. Oecologia, 57, 156-157.

Taylor, L.R. (1977) Migration and the spatial dynamics of an aphid, Myzus persicae. Journal of Animal Ecology, 46, 411-423.

Ward, S.A., Leather, S.R. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1984) Temperature prediction and the timing of sex in aphids. Oecologia, 62, 230-233.

Ward, S.A., Leather, S.R., Pickup, J. & Harrington, R. (1998) Mortality during dispersal and the cost of host-specificity in parasites: how many aphids find hosts? Journal of Animal Ecology, 67, 763-773.

Is it time to abolish Vancouver?

How about that for a clickbait title?  I was going to call it “Editors of journals with number based referencing systems – use your power to change the system” but in these days of impact factors I thought I would emulate those journals with exceedingly high IF scores, which seem to specialise in non-informative, yet grabby paper titles, and many of which persist in using my bête noire, the Vancouver style of referencing.

The hated (by me) Vancouver style

So why am I sounding off now? Well, I was just about to submit an invited review, but thought I had better read the instructions to authors first 🙂  To my horror, I discovered (yes, OK, I should have read the instructions to authors before starting to write the paper) that the journal in question wanted the references formatted in Vancouver style. I don’t have much time for even vaguely sensible numbered citation styles such as the Chicago system, but as you will already have gathered, the Vancouver style really, really, annoys me.

Source – http://www.idioms4you.com/img/angif-blow-your-top-scen02.png

Defenders of the system (and I am sure there are some) might point out that in these days of reading online,  journals such as Science,  that use this awful system have active links to the numbers within the text which bring up the citation in a separate box. This does, however, involve moving your mouse/cursor/finger to it instead of reading it instantly. As a reader I find this unsatisfactory to say the least. I like to see the authors as I read the text.  It may seem picky, but this gives me instant context.  As someone who has been around a while and usually knows the field quite well and, as a field ecologist, blessed with an excellent memory, seeing the name and date, gives me a pretty good idea of the accuracy of the citation context. Displaying references in non-alphabetical order also gives me brain ache. I visualise my brain in two ways, first as a series of file record cards and then as a series of filing cabinet drawers in which the folders (memories) are arranged alphabetically and by date. I then mentally find the right folder and on reaching the appropriate record access it.  My office may be (in)famous for its chaotic appearance, but my brain

My office – the perfect working environment (I know where everything is) 🙂

is obsessively and very neatly arranged and catalogued 🙂 as are my bookshelves and offprint collection. The office is a different matter.

As a referee, where, in my opinion, you most definitely need to know the citation context, you do not have the click and display facility that readers of the published paper have. This makes checking references onerous, frustrating and very annoying.

As an author the situation is even worse, although I guess those folk who have sophisticated cite as you write systems will laugh knowingly and make comments about being stuck in the past. What really is frustrating to me is that I have to

Stuck in the past – me?

go through the paper line by line and manually convert the author date citation in the text (I have to use that system when composing, to keep track of what I am referring to) to numbers and then if I find that I have to add a new reference or if Referee 3 demands that their papers are cited, renumber everything.  Arghh!!

It would be so much simpler if all journals used the same system, preferably that used by the journals of which I am an Editor, and as an example and to to gratuitously draw your attention to another of my bugbears, in the text, (Leather 2004) and in the reference list, Leather, S.R. (2004) Reinventing the wheel – on the dangers of taxon parochialism and shallow reference trawling! Basic and Applied Ecology, 5, 309-311.

One reason given for using the Vancouver and Chicago systems is that it saves space. This might have held some water in the days of print journals and page budgets, but now that most journals are electronic and page budgets no longer exist, it is not a valid excuse. I therefore implore my fellow editors, reviewers and authors to join me in condemning the Vancouver system and to convince their publishers to abolish Vancouver, the system that is, not the city, which I am sure is a beautiful place and well worth preserving and visiting.

Why using an expert to review a paper is sometimes a bad thing

I have written about the importance and role of paper reviewers before, but a recent experience has prompted me to put fingers to keyboard yet again. As an Editor, my practice when choosing referees is to invite, whenever possible, an early career researcher (ECR) and a well-established expert in the field. My reasoning behind this being that the ECR will be very au fait with the current literature and techniques (statistical and experimental), and very likely to do the job quickly. The ancient professor old fogey well established expert, may take longer to respond, but will definitely know the early literature and be in a good position to judge the novelty of the work and point out if the wheel is being reinvented (Leather, 2004).

Until recently I thought that this was a fool-proof approach, but then I had the opportunity to referee a paper right up my street; the study organism was the subject of my PhD and I have continued working with it (albeit recently, mainly via PhD and MSc students) for the last forty years.  The paper described a well-designed and analysed experiment, and, miracle of miracles, cited me all the relevant literature.  I had only a few minor points and enthusiastically recommended publication with only minor revision.  I was a bit surprised when I received notice of the journal’s decision to see that they had given the author a major revision. On reading the other reviewer’s report, (the practice of copying the reviewer’s reports to each reviewer is a fantastic service), I realised why.

Having being involved with the topic for a life-time, I knew exactly what the author had done and what their rationale was, so hadn’t picked up on the fact that some of the methodology and whys and wherefores would be somewhat opaque to non-experts.  This is of course why we get (or should) our colleagues to read our papers before we submit them.  Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, but it can certainly lead to a false sense of how niche one’s research area actually is.

I will, despite this, still continue to use well-established experts to review papers but will try not to weight their opinions more highly than those of the ECRs. As for me, I will, in future be looking much more critically at the approaches and rationale of papers that deal with subjects very close to my heart. Alternatively, I could just give up reviewing papers 🙂

Reference

Leather, S.R. (2004) Reinventing the wheel – on the dangers of taxon parochialism and shallow reference trawling! Basic and Applied Ecology, 5, 309-311.

A rose by any other name – In praise of the Rosaceae

I’ll start with a question. What do Lady’s Mantle, Great Burnet, Agrimony, Mountain Avens, Cotoneaster, cinquefolil (Potentilla), strawberries, raspberries, cherries, sloes, apples, rowans and almonds all have in common? The answer may come as a surprise to many; they are all members of the Rose family. This may shcok some of you, but I don’t have a great deal of time for the domesticate hybrid tea roses so common in many gardens.

Hybrid tea rose – looking nothing like the real roses

I think they’re vastly overrated and as many varieties do not produce pollen or nectar as far as insects are concerned they are a waste of space. My experience of working on members of the Rosaceae arose as a by-product of working on the bird cherry-oat aphid, the primary host of which is the bird cherry, Prunus padus (Leather & Dixon, 1981), and the bird cherry ermine moth, Ypomeuta evonymellus which specialises on the bird cherry (Leather & Lehti, 1982). Strangely, it was my interest in island biogeography, in particular the species-area relationship, that got me hooked on the Rosaceae.  I had noticed while sampling bird cherry trees that relatively few insects attacked them, and so wondered if they were special in some way compared with other species of Prunus, and sure enough using host plant records, they did seem to be less insect friendly than their congeners (Leather, 1985). Having got hooked on counting dots on plant distribution maps and realising that the Rosaceae would be a great plant family to test the idea that the species-area relationship would be improved by confining it to a single family (Kennedy & Southwood, 1984), I embarked on a marathon dot counting and host plant record seeking quest (Leather, 1986).

For the paper, I restricted my analysis to the 59 species that Perrings & Walter (1962) listed as native or naturalised to the British Isles, but there are of course many more members of the Rosaceae than that to be found in Britain. They are an extremely important plant family both economically and horticulturally speaking, with over 2500 species in 90 genera to choose from (Sytsma, 2016). The Rose family is divided into four subfamilies based primarily on their fruit. The Amygdaloideae, those species characterised by the possession of fleshy stone fruits, almonds, cherries, peaches, plums etc. The Maloideae, trees with pomes, fruits in which the floral hypanthium becomes fleshy, e.g apples and pears. The Rosoideae, which includes species such as roses, and burnets, with dry fruits that do not open (achenes), and the brambles, raspberries and strawberries, which have drupelets, small, aggregated drupes, and finally the Spiraeoideae, species with dry fruits that open on one side (follicles) e.g Spirea, Physocarpus).

Rosaceous fruit

To me, however, the thing that makes a rose a rose, is the flower. Typically, rose flowers have five sepals which are easier to see before the flowers open and five petals, although there are always some exceptions; for example, Mountain

Sepals for the uninitiated; luckily I have a rose bush that seems to be able to flower all the year round (this picture taken October 28^th)

Avens, Dryas octopetala, which as the name tells us, has eight petals but still manages to have that rose ‘look’.

Dryas octopetala an exception that proves the rule J By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28317727

As you might expect from a family that has produced the much loved (but not by me) hybrid tea roses, not all the flowers are white, even within the same species, brambles for example, range from the ‘normal’ white to rich

Pink hedgerow brambles, Sutton, Shropshire September 2020.

pinks, and many of the herbaceous members have bright yellow (e.g. Agrimony and Wood Avens) or orange (e.g Water Avens) flowers.

Delicate herbaceous plants with white and yellow flowers.

White flowers do, however, seem to be the rule in the woodier members of

Shrubby bushes with white flowers.

the family, although pink shading is not uncommon.

Tall fruity trees with white flowers some with pink hints.

The ways in which the flowers are presented can also vary between species, single flowers being the exception rather than the rule.

Cloudbursts (corymbiform panicle),  racemes and compound cymes, but still roses. Fun fact, Meadowseet, Filipendulal ulmaria, is rich in salicylic acid and can be used to cure headaches.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this ramble through the roses as much as me, but finally, as an entomologist, it would be remiss of me not to point you at one or two spectacular examples of insect-rose interactions.

References

Kennedy, C.E.J. & Southwood, T.R.E. (1984) The number of species of insects associated with British trees: a re-analysis. Journal of Animal Ecology, 53, 455-478.

Leather, S.R. (1985) Does the bird cherry have its ‘fair share’ of insect pests ? An appraisal of the species-area relationships of the phytophagous insects associated with British Prunus species. Ecological Entomology, 10, 43-56.

Leather, S.R. (1986) Insect species richness of the British Rosaceae: the importance of host range, plant architecture, age of establishment, taxonomic isolation and species-area relationships. Journal of Animal Ecology, 55, 841-860.

Leather, S.R. (1991) Feeding specialisation and host distribution of British and Finnish Prunus feeding macrolepidoptera. Oikos, 60, 40-48.

Leather, S.R. & Dixon, A.F.G. (1981) Growth, survival and reproduction of the bird-cherry aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi, on it’s primary host. Annals of Applied Biology, 99, 115-118.

Leather, S.R. & Lehti, J.P. (1982) Abundance and distribution of Yponomeuta evonymellus (Lepidoptera,Yponomeutidae) in Finland. Notulae Entomologicae, 62, 93-96.

Perring, F.J. & Walters, S.M. (1962) Atlas of the British Flora. BSBI Nelson, London & Edinburgh.

Sytsma, K.J. (2016) Rosaceae, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Paper reviewers are a valuable resource – Editors, please treat them with respect

Maybe I’m getting grumpy in my old age, but I think not.  In fact, I think I am now seen as the go to nice Referee 3 for when the Editor wants a sympathetic split decision breaker; something on the lines of he is a bit of an old-fashioned grammar pedant, but he is always willing to see the positive side of a study so long as the methodology is sound :-). I know what of I speak. As an Editor myself, I have a mental list of which Referee 3 to approach to help me soften the blow, put in the knife or contradict what I consider an overly harsh Referee 2.

Referees, or reviewers as we now tend to call them, are the life-blood of a successful journal; as I have written before, good reviewers are worth their weight in gold and should be treasured and encouraged.  A major problem is that with what seems to be an exponential increase in the number of journals and papers submitted, reviewers of any sort, good, bad or average, are in short supply.  The problem is exacerbated by a misguided notion held by many potential reviewers of how many reviews they should do a year (Didham et al., 2017).

As someone who does far more than my fair share of paper reviewing, I average about three to four papers a month, I think this puts me way ahead of the pack. To back this up, Publons tells me that over the last twelve months, I have reviewed 42 papers, 1.4 reviews for every paper that I have published.  I think that by any criteria this makes me a good citizen, if not a saint :-).

I was thus somewhat miffed*  the day before yesterday, when, with one week to go before the agreed due date for a review of a paper I had, against my better judgement, agreed to do, the following email arrived.

 

“Dear Dr Leather:

Recently, I asked you to review Manuscript XX-XXX-000 entitled “How to annoy a reviewer”

It has since become apparent that I will not need you to review at this time. If you have already put some work into it and are near completion, you could send it along to us, just email to: inconsderateditor@journalwhichjustlostmygoodwill

If you have not started the review, then you can relax and cross it off your “to do” list.

Many thanks for your good intentions and I hope you will be able to review other manuscripts in the near future.”

 

 

I’m not a great fan of the late Mr Morrison, especially his politics, but this reverse quote sums my feelings exactly.

Gritting my teeth, I very politely replied, to the Editor, thanking him for letting me know that my services were no longer needed. In reality, I was fuming and almost instantly posted an anonymised Tweet to let off a bit of steam.  Now, I don’t know about you, but as an Editor I would never do this.  If you have, as all Editors do, invited more than two potential reviewers at the same time, it is extremely poor editorial practice, ten days later, to tell a reviewer they were superfluous to requirements.  As it happened, I was, when the email arrived, just about to write the review.

Now, as an Editor, I would have no compunction in sending a similar email to a reviewer who was showing up as overdue on the system.  To someone who was well within the specified return date, I would never ever consider dumping them at this stage, even if by some miracle, I had already received three reviews, not just the magical two.  I don’t think any author would begrudge an extra day or two to hear back from the journal.  In my judgement, this is an extremely effective way to antagonise reviewers, and I, for one, will no longer be willing to review for this particular journal.

 

What do you think?

 

Some editors may try to blame the automated system for the email, but that is a very poor excuse.  The system tells you when the required number of reviews (usually two) has been achieved.  As an Editor, if you still have a reviewer listed as awaiting review, you just change the number of reviews required to three, thus preempting the automatic email. Easy peasy, and very importantly, you have not lost the good will of your reviewer.

Reference

Didham, R.K., Leather, S.R. & Basset, Y. (2017) Don’t be a zero-sum reviewer. Insect Conservation & Diversity, 10, 1-4.

 

* incandescent with rage probably describes my feelings more accurately 🙂

Should we boycott journals that use bullying tactics to speed up their review process? The Verdict

In which, Dear Reader, I reveal the results of my recent poll, discuss the dilemmas faced by journal Editors and call most earnestly upon the scientific community to help us in our endeavours.

Three weeks ago, incensed by a request (from a journal that shall remain nameless), to turn round a review within a week, I put fingers to keyboard and asked the world if we should boycott such journals.  I rarely run polls, but I did on this occasion; for two reasons, one I was genuinely interested in how others felt about this, and second, because as an Editor the topic regularly comes up when we meet with our publishers, who are always keen to reduce the time allowed to referees to return their reviews.

My first question was whether we should boycott those journals that ask referees to return their reviews within one week.  As you can see, the response was overwhelmingly in favour of such a boycott.

87% of respondents thought we should boycott journals that ask for a one-week turnaround

My other question was to do with what people felt was a reasonable time to complete a review. As you can see most respondents felt that at least

Respondent’s views on the reasonable time in which to complete a review

three weeks was a reasonable time in which to complete a review, with a hefty (note that, tempted as I was, I did not use the word significant) proportion suggesting a month as the ideal time span in which to complete their review.

I was reasonably happy with the results of the polls as the two journal that I edit both ask for a three-week turnaround, and we have so far, resisted pressure from the publishers to reduce this to two weeks.  As Editors, we rightly feel a responsibility to our authors to make a decision on their manuscript as quickly as possible, although as Steve Heard has pointed out, authors need to be realistic about how long they should expect to wait. Spoiler alert, it is a lot longer than a week.  We also have considerable pressure from our publishers to constantly “improve” our turnaround times as this is one of the metrics they push when ‘selling’ our journals.  They tell us, time after time, that as well as the dreaded Impact Factor, time to publication, which is a function of review turnaround time, is one of the metrics that influences author journal choices.

Journals need good submission rates to allow us, the Editors, to fill our page allocations with high quality manuscripts.  If paper submission rates fall we can panic and fill the pages with poorer quality papers, or stand firm, and either delay publishing an issue (not good from the point of view of the publishers and Web of Science), or produce a timely, but thin issue (not ideal for our subscribers). The pressure from the publishers, even if you are lucky enough to be editing a journal for a learned society, can, on occasion, be quite stressful. Given this, you may well wonder, why people choose to be Editors; this post from some time ago might help you understand our motives. 🙂

Good referees are like gold dust, and as most journals do not pay them, we very much rely on their good will. Now this is where we have a dilemma. Good referees are experts in their fields, which they have proven by having published in journals such as those I and others edit. As an Editor I know how difficult it is to get the minimum two referees needed to maintain, however imperfectly, the academic standards we all hold dear.  My record to date is thirteen refusals, for a paper that was perfectly fine, but for some reason, unclear to me, no one seemed to want to review. It is at times like those that I have some sympathy for the views of those who feel that we should do away with the current peer review system and let papers find their own level (Kovanis et al., 2017).  This is, of course untenable, as although specialists in the field would know to steer clear of the dross, there would be many, and not just the media, but those with either hidden agendas or lack of discernment, who, either knowingly or unwittingly, would report them as fact. In my opinion, which I think is an informed one, a robust and peer review system is still a necessity. Imperfect as the one we currently have, it is the best available.  We need to conserve what we have, whilst acknowledging that we can, and should improve upon it, not wreck it by imposing impossible demands on referees by assuming that authors are selfish self-seeking opportunists*.  So, authors step up to be referees, and journal editors, resist the demands of publishers to impose unrealistic turnaround times on your editorial teams and reviewers.  Editors and referees, are, in the main, also authors, so we should all be on the same page, or am I being incredibly naive? 🙂

 

References

 

Didham, R.K., Leather, S.R. & Basset, Y. (2017) Don’t be a zero-sum reviewer. Insect Conservation & Diversity, 10, 1-4.

Kovanis, M., Trinquart, L., Ravaud, P. & Pörcher, R. (2017) Evaluating alternative systems of peer review: a large-scale agent-based modelling approach to scientific publication. Scientometrics, 113, 651–671.

 

*

Some may very well be, but in my experience, and I have been an Editor for more than thirty years, most authors are very reasonable people.

Should we boycott journals that use bullying tactics to speed up their review process?

This morning, the 26^th March, I received an email from a journal for which I had agreed to referee a paper.

I should add that this is one of those journals that asks you to return your review within ONE week and if you accept and click on their little calendar you find that the longest you can delay the return date is to a generous (!) ten days. As an Editor myself, and knowing how difficult it is to get referees at the best of times, I, against my better judgement, agreed to review the paper, but did say in my return email, that three weeks was a better time frame. I was thus somewhat surprised, a mere three days after accepting the invitation, to get this email from the Editorial Office.

You will note that they totally ignored my request for extra time

If you were an old softie like me, always willing to see the best in everyone, you might call this passive-aggressive behaviour, but really, I think you can construe this as bullying, especially, if, unlike me, you are new to the reviewing game. I was very tempted to reply saying that I had changed my mind and wasn’t going to review the paper after all.  I had, however, read the paper and made my preliminary notes, so despite my anger, they will get a review from me this time, but I have vowed to turn down all future invitations from this particular journal.

Given that Steve Heard thinks that the fastest review time an author should expect is seven, yes SEVEN weeks, then, by golly, asking a reviewer to do it in one week is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  Yes, we don’t want to return to those days in the 1980s, when I once waited 18 months for a decision from the Journal of Applied Ecology, but there are limits, and one week, is as far as I am concerned, taking the mickey.  I know from personal experience, that as journal Editors we are under pressure, (unduly so I think), from our publishers to improve our turnaround time, for example, the four journal with which I am involved, ask reviewers to return their reports within three weeks, but I am always happy to extend this if asked*, but I will say this again, one week is just not on!

 

I don’t often do polls, but here we go.

 

Finally, as an Editor, can I just add two pleas; first, if asked by a journal to review a paper, please reply promptly, even if it is to say no; second, if you do agree to review a paper, please either return by the stipulated date, or ask for an extension.  We will, and I am sure I speak for the majority of Editors, be happy to oblige.

 

*and yes I hate those automatic reminders just as much as you do 🙂

We can’t all be groundbreakers – we need bricklayers too

Groundbreaker – someone who changes the way things are done, especially by making new discoveries

Groundbreaking – new and original, not like anything seen before from the Cambridge Dictionary

All of us who aspire to publishing our hard-won data will recognise the phrases below, taken from the overview pages of highly reputable ecological and entomological journals. Everyone wants to push back the frontiers of

Anonymised quotes from journal overview pages – I am sure that you will recognise some of them

knowledge, but I feel that the focus by journals and funding bodies on ‘novelty’ is bad for science and bad for researchers.  I am certainly not the first one to say it, but it bears repeating, there is a tyranny of novelty pervading the research community and this has also infected the way that science is reported. This focus on ‘novelty’ and its link to promotion, grant application success and job tenure, can mean that careers are damaged, research areas ignored (Leather & Quicke, 2009), an imbalance of disciplines within university departments leading to piece-meal degrees and the dilemma of where to publish. The dilemma being do you publish where it does the most good for science and wide access or for your career, which are often mutually incompatible.

Looking at the selection of journal guidelines above, for me, this particular phrase is the most disturbing, “Confirming or extending the established literature, by for example showing results that are novel for a new taxon, or purely applied research, is given low priority.”   In terms of science, at the very least, this stance leads to nobody checking to see if a study is truly valid or just a statistical artefact or, as is very likely, a special case. A recent paper suggests that in ecology, less than 0.03% of published papers are true replicates of previously published studies (Kelly, 2019), while in behavioural ecology, the figure is a round zero, although about 25% of studies are partial replicates (Kelly, 2006).

Although I am not a great believer in the Open Access author pays dogma (after all, in the world of novelists and poets, only those who can’t find publishers pay and we term that ‘vanity publishing’), the publishing ethos of  PLOS ONE “We evaluate submitted manuscripts on the basis of methodological rigor and high ethical standards, regardless of perceived novelty”, is very welcome. It is a shame that more journals, particularly those where publication is free of charge, have not adopted the same principle.  The preoccupation with ‘novelty’ also has the consequence that academics, particularly those at the start of their careers or those working in institutions where ‘novelty’ is seen as the only way to gain advancement or retain one’s position,  feel under pressure to only publish in certain journals and to emphasise ‘novelty’.  This can, and I am sure it is inadvertent in the majority of cases, result in authors limiting their search for previous work to the immediate horizon rather than diving deeper into the ocean of past literature, and often ‘reinventing’ the wheel’ (Lawton, 1991; Leather, 2004), which does past academics and science a great disservice.

An alternative title to this post might have included the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants”, often attributed to Isaac Newton but according to Wikipedia almost certainly older than that.  As some of you may know, one of the categories on my blog is “Ten papers that shook my world” (now supplemented by Ten more papers that shook my world), in which I discuss papers that have had a major influence on my scientific development and publication list.  According to the Web of Science I have written 210 papers*, of which, in my opinion, only one is truly ‘novel’**. I hypothesised from field evidence (Leather, 1988), and later demonstrated experimentally (Leather, 1993), that insects sharing the same host plant could, by altering plant architecture, compete, despite being separated temporally and spatially.  Actually, now that I reflect upon it, even this idea could be said to be based on the ‘apparent competition’ hypothesis put forward by Bob Holt (Holt, 1977).  I should add that neither of those ‘novel’ papers of mine have made the big time, both have been cited a mere eleven times, in contrast to those papers where I was inspired by the work of others.

To end on yet another building metaphor or two; I have, in my forty-two years as a research scientist, never felt that I have wasted my time. I have been content with adding bricks to the scientific edifice, grouting in between entomological and ecological tiles and adding pieces to the vast jigsaw of life. Yes, there is a problem in that some institutions are reluctant or unwilling to recognise the contributions made by those of us who reinforce the various academic structures, but my message to you is Illegitimi non carborundum, don’t give up and be proud of what you have achieved.  There may be times when you feel unappreciated, or indeed, as I have at times, rather angry, but remember, they need us, for without us, the whole structure will fall into ruins.

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” Dorothy Day

References

Gish, M. & Inbar, M. (2018) Standing on the shoulders of giants: young aphids piggyback on adults when searching for a host plant.  Frontiers in Zoology, 15, 49.

Holt, R.D. (1977) Predation, apparent competition, and the structure of prey communities.   Theoretical Population Biology, 12, 197-229.

Kelly, C.D. (2006) Replicating empirical research in behavioural ecology: how and why it should be done but rarely is. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 81, 221-236.

Kelly, C.D. (2019) Rate and success of study replication in ecology and evolution. PeerJ:e7654

Lawton, J. H. (1991). Warbling in different ways. Oikos, 60, 273–274.

Leather, S.R. (1988) Consumers and plant fitness: coevolution or competition? Oikos, 53, 285-288.

Leather, S.R. (1993) Early season defoliation of bird cherry influences autumn colonization by the bird cherry aphid, Rhopalosiphum padi. Oikos, 66, 43-47.

Leather, S.R. (2004) Reinventing the wheel: on the dangers of taxon parochialism and shallow reference trawling!  Basic & Applied Ecology, 5, 309-311.

Leather, S.R. & Quicke, D.L.J. (2009) Where would Darwin have been without taxonomy? Journal of Biological Education, 43, 51-52.

Murphy, S.M., Vidal, M.C., Hallagan, C.J., Broder, E.D., Barnes, E.E., Hornalowell, E.S. & Wilson, J.D. (2019) Does this title bug (Hemiptera) you? How to write a title that increases your citations. Ecological Entomology, 44, 593-600.

Ward, S.A., Leather, S.R., Pickup, J. & Harrington, R. (1998) Mortality during dispersal and the cost of host-specificity in parasites: how many aphids find hosts? Journal of Animal Ecology, 67, 763-773.

 

*

my own publication list has me at 298, but that includes books, conference papers, research notes and popular articles; Google Scholar has me at 235.

**

I have not included a paper that I am a co-author on (Ward et al., 1998), as although ‘novel’, it was not my idea.  I supplied the data and the whisky and acted as a sounding board during one very long evening of mathematical inspiration by Seamus Ward 😊 The following day I made a blood donation and fainted shortly afterwards, resulting in a nasty head wound and a visit to the local hospital!

Should a paper title tell you what the paper is about? Yes, but not the way Simon/Steve thinks

Image: You know what you’re walking into. © Gary J. Wood via flicrk.com, CC BY-SA 2.0

This is a joint post (argument and rejoinder) from Steve Heard and Simon Leather.  You can find it on either of their blogs.

Should a paper title tell you what the paper is about?  Yes, but not the way Simon thinks.

Steve opens with – A few weeks ago, Simon Leather blogged about one of his writing pet peeves: “titles of papers that give you no clue as to what the paper is about”.   I read this with great interest, for a couple of reasons – first, Simon is consistently thoughtful; and second, I’m terrible at titles and need to learn as much about good ones as I can!  Much to my surprise, I found myself disagreeing strongly, and Simon was kind enough to engage with me in this joint post.

I don’t mean that I disagree that a paper’s title should tell you what it’s about.  That’s exactly what a good title does!  My disagreement is, I think, more interesting.  Simon offered some examples of titles he scored as failing his tell-you-what-it’s-about criterion, and some he scored as passing.  I found myself scoring those examples exactly the opposite way: the ones that failed for him, succeeded for me; and vice versa.

What gives?  Well, most likely, I’m just wrong.  Simon has a couple of years more experience than me in science, has published many more papers than I have, and has significantly more editorial experience.  But “oh, I guess I’m just wrong” doesn’t make a very interesting blog post; so I’m going to work through my thinking here.

Here are two titles from Simon’s disliked list:*

Towards a unified framework for connectivity that disentangles movement and mortality in space and time

Seasonal host life-history processes fuel disease dynamics at different spatial scales

And here’s one from Simon’s liked list:

Ecology and conservation of the British Swallowtail Butterfly, Papilio machaon britannicus: old questions, new challenges, and potential opportunities

They’re on exactly opposite lists for me.  Simon dislikes the first one because “it takes until line 9 of the Abstract before you find out it’s about an insect herbivore, [and] until the Introduction to find out which species” (he dislikes the second for the same reason).  Simon likes the third because “you know exactly what this paper is all about”.  I think this is all wrong (sorry, Simon).   Since I’ve been writing about scientific writing as storytelling lately, let me put it this way.  Simon would like to know that the paper is “about” an insect herbivore, or “about” the British Swallowtail Butterfly.  But to me, that isn’t what it means to say a paper is “about” something – the study species is character, not plot.  Would you say that The Old Man and the Sea is “about” Santiago, or that Slaughterhouse-Five is “about” Billy Pilgrim?  Well, maybe in casual conversation, but not in a book review you were getting graded on.

I want a paper’s title to tell me about its plot.  By “plot”, I mean the questions the authors ask, and the way the experiments (or observations, or models) answer them.  That’s what a paper is “about” – the way The Old Man and the Sea is about a man’s struggle with his catch, his failing career, and his mortality (but I should stop before I venture further into literary criticism for which I am poorly qualified).  The “unified framework” and “seasonal life-history” titles tell me what questions the papers ask and answer.  It’s true that they don’t tell me which characters (species) they answer them with, but that’s not what I’m looking for in my first pass at a title.  And the swallowtail title?  It tells me nothing other than that the paper has to do with conservation of the swallowtail.  It mentions “questions”, but doesn’t say what they are; and it mentions “challenges” and “opportunities”, but these remain similarly shrouded.

A title that announces what species a paper is about doesn’t grab me, unless I already work on the species (or a similar one).  Who would pick up the swallowtail paper, except someone already interested in swallowtails or similar butterflies?  Is that the only audience the authors want?  What if the paper asks questions with implications for the conservation of mammals, or birds, or orchids?  Those audiences won’t be engaged.  With a title that announces what question a paper is about (and if possible, what the answer is), authors can recruit a broader audience.**  And readers can find out what species the question is asked with (and ponder whether the answer applies more broadly) at their leisure.

 

Should a paper title tell you what the paper is about?  Yes, but not the way Steve thinks.

Simon replies – I totally see where Steve is coming from with his point about plots and storylines and his references to Slaughterhouse-Five and the The Old Man and the Sea (although I could of course, somewhat tongue in cheek, riposte with a whole slew of titles such as Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield to name just a few.***) I think that I come at paper titles from two aspects of my academic profile.  First as an applied entomologist, I really do want to know if the paper is about the particular species or related group of species that I am working on – so referring back to Steve’s footnote about Tables of Contents (or even Current Contents)****, both of which I remember – yes, the title needs to be highly specific. Second, this is a debate I have had with conservation biologists working with vertebrate animals.

I am, as my Twitter handle indicates, an entomologist, and at the risk of being seen as narrowly partisan and parochial, means that I, and all other invertebrate zoologists, work on, until evidence is presented otherwise, the animals most relevant to ecology in general 🙂 . A paper on the movement ecology of zebras, for example, is unlikely to give me any insight into the migratory behaviour of aphids (of which there are more species than there are mammals), whereas an insect migration paper might give a mammal ecologist something to think about (incidentally I just realised that this helps Steve’s argument, in that an unwitting mammalogist might read an opaquely titled paper about insects). As a PhD student, when I first got interested in life history traits, I noticed that many vertebrate zoologists were publishing papers addressing concepts that were already well known to entomologists (e.g. Tinkle, 1969*****),  but not referring to those studies; so much so that I made rather a point of referring to vertebrate papers in my thesis whenever possible 🙂

And in the spirit of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, third, (yes I know I said two things initially) is the point I made in my blog post about ‘scientific fashion’ and what we now call ‘click bait headlines’ (my example of one of my own titles in that post underlines this very neatly).  On the other hand, as Steve and other commentators have pointed out, there is a cost to both download and citation rates when titles of papers are very specific and lengthy (Letchford et al., 2015), which is surely why high impact and more general journals encourage the titles I abhor, and Steve favours. A new pet hate of mine, and something favoured by high impact general ecology journals, are titles with question marks: it is obvious that the answer is always going to be yes!

A thought (oops, now a fourth point – the Spanish Inquisition strikes again) that occurred to me as I was writing this and beginning to feel that I was succumbing to Steve’s cogent and compelling arguments, has to do with science communication.  We are being encouraged (some would say forced) to become ever more open access so that in theory  the whole world can read our outpourings (although I suspect that most proponents of Open Access are more concerned with their ability to instantly access data, than for the general public to access the ever increasing number of academic papers).  If this is the case, then surely, rather than use titles that are said to increase scientific citation rates, we should perhaps be using very explicit titles that will enable the general public to know what to expect?

To wrap up: Steve admits to being terrible at titles, and to Simon being a more experienced author and editor than he is.  And yet Simon admits that Steve’s arguments had him (ever so briefly) questioning his own.  So we’d like to turn this over to you.  Where do you stand on titles, character, and plot?  Please tell us in the Replies.

© Stephen Heard and Simon Leather August 27, 2019

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*^I decided that I wouldn’t actually read any of the papers.  I wanted to react to titles as I would if I encountered them in a Table of Contents (anybody remember those?) or in a Google Scholar alert.

**^The obvious compromise is a title that reveals both of those things.  I like that sort of title, although the cost is they can get long, and there’s empirical data suggesting that they reduce citation rates.

***^Steve can’t help himself, and footnotes Simon’s half of the post (chutzpah!) to point out that saying that David Copperfield is a novel about David Copperfield is true, but not particular enlightening.  He doubles down on his argument, therefore, while wondering what the Dickens was up with that particular novelist’s penchant for character-based titles.

****^I felt that as this is a joint effort with Steve, parenthetical interjections were essential 🙂

*****^Incidentally, the title of that paper fits Steve’s point under his second – that the ideal paper title reveals both character and plot, although this one does it even better: “Grazing as a conservation management approach leads to a reduction in spider species richness and abundance in acidophilous steppic grasslands on andesite bedrock”.

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Letchford, A., Moat, H.S. & Preis, T. (2015) The advantage of short paper titles. Royal Society Open Science, 2, 150266.

Tinkle, D.W. (1969) The concept of reproductive effort and its relation to the evolution of life histories of lizards. American Naturalist, 103, 501-516.