by Sammy Burke

In June 2020, the International Statistical Ecology Conference (ISEC) moved to a virtual setting (vISEC) as a creative solution to the current travel restrictions presented by the coronavirus. Despite the challenges of a new format, the conference was a resounding success and a wonderful experience. Conference attendance soared over past conferences with more than 850 participants – a statistic attributed to the accessibility of the conference to those with limited means to travel.

Participants and organizers were connected via a Slack workspace which acted as a program guide, Q&A forum, news bulletin, presentation and discussion rooms, and even social centers for chatting over a coffee. This streamlined the user experience, allowing for easy switching between mingling and learning. While this space was available at all hours, activities such as plenary talks and pre-organized social events (including a fun trivia night) were centered around two time slots which allowed for participants in any time zone to have at least one live session they could attend. This international accommodation made the conference incredibly accessible to all.

One of the great perks of conferences is the opportunity to network and meet other researchers in a similar field from other institutions. At in-person conferences, you can naturally introduce fellow lab-members to renowned colleagues during casual interactions. At virtual conferences, you must introduce yourself to someone in a direct message or join a random call with strangers who may have already been chatting for some time. You may find yourself overthinking when the right time is to join in a conversation, or how to smoothly contrive a new connection. These mildly awkward barriers seem to decrease the amount of mingling in “public” spaces.

Time also plays a role in mingling opportunities at virtual conferences. Because participants are spread out across multiple time zones, the people with whom you can chat in real time becomes skewed to those who share your time zone. For example, if you consistently attend the conference at 6pm AEST, you are unlikely to encounter many American researchers who are awake at 4am EST. However, with direct message chat features like those in Slack, you may still be able to reach out to someone with whom you’d like to speak. This feature nearly guarantees the opportunity to ask a question of almost any speaker during the conference, where you may not have gotten the chance to see them across a crowded room at an in-person conference.

I’ve always struggled with planning a schedule at conferences because there are often multiple talks I’d like to attend which occur at the same time or in opposite areas of the conference space. Virtual conferences are the best solution for this – allowing participants to switch easily between talks by simply clicking into a different video. At vISEC, participants were able to watch every talk as they were archived for viewing after the live session ended. This accommodated an international audience, allowing those who would normally be asleep during the live session to still hear it, or to just catch some extra information, at a more convenient time.

Many successes of this conference stemmed from an effective utilization of online services. This includes the “Slack Workspace” service - a website that allows teams to organize communication platforms into channels for different topics or groups. The video communication and streaming services Zoom and YouTube were also utilized for the presentation components. The vISEC organizers generated a virtual conference hub as well as a virtual stage that mirrored a near-normal conference experience for its participants around the globe.

While the virtual conference design format arose from the unprecedented circumstances of 2020’s global pandemic, many successful aspects of this virtual conference may – and probably should – be applied to future conferences. The connectivity, accessibility, and organization were of a high caliber, as were evidenced by the conference’s large attendance and positive reception. We can only guess where this will lead the future of international conferences, and how features of this conference will shape future experiences in science research networking and collaboration.

by Losia Lagisz

Just as humans, individual animals differ in their propensity to see if the glass is “half-full”, or “half-empty”. Animals cannot talk, but they can react to ambiguous situations and cues in a way that suggests expectations of a positive outcome (optimism) or expectations of a negative outcome (pessimism).

For example, when black bowl is associated with sweet food, and white bowl with bitter food, grey bowl would be an ambiguous cue. How would animals react to grey? A spatial version of this test would be placing identical bowls either on the left or right sides of a test chamber, and then checking whether an animal would approach a bowl at intermediate locations.

A “judgement bias test”, based on this phenomenon, is not only a window into animals’ inner lives, but also a potential tool for improving animal welfare and developing new psychoactive medicines. To validate this test’s potential promises, we have recently conducted two meta-analyses (both accepted in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews), collecting results of tests on animals ranging from insects to primates.

The first meta-analysis summarises studies using judgement bias assays as a measure of animal welfare (comparing animals in relatively better and relatively worse conditions/treatments), whereas the second meta-analysis synthesises studies measuring effects of various psychoactive medicines (comparing animals given the drugs to animals given placebo/no drug).

In our meta-analyses, we have shown that “judgement bias test” is valid and widely applicable measure of animal affect in both cases. However, our work has also revealed that the test is not always showing clear or large effect and it needs to be customised for specific species tested.

by Patrice Pottier

Have you ever wondered what physical activity would suit you best? I have, several times. I tried many different sports throughout my life, but I have never been consistent with any of them. 
It was a never-ending quest to find the golden sport, until now... I finally found it! Let's talk about surfing!
 
It might sound trivial from an Australian point-of-view, as most of the population lives not far from the coast, but it's not an activity I had the chance to practice back in France. I always lived far from the coast, and jumped on a surfboard for the first time in Sydney three months ago. It was a revelation.
 
I always wanted to be a surfer. I've been skateboarding for many years when I was a teenager, and always wondered how it would feel to ride waves instead of concrete (hint: it's very different, and a surfboarding background doesn't help as much as I thought).
I really enjoyed skateboarding, but after breaking my arm, twisting my wrist, and harming my hip - it was time to move on. 
 
Surfing now feels like getting back to skateboarding, with the bonus of spending time in the Ocean. I now surf at least 4 times a week, and I feel unimaginably good after each session. It also keeps me fit, which can be challenging with the amazing food scene of Sydney 😄 
 
Most importantly, surfing helps me find a good work-life balance. Without exercising, I tend to work too much and not give enough time for myself, which, in turn, decreases my productivity at work. 
No matter how much you love your work, it shouldn't come at the expense of your mental health. Give yourself time to shut off sometimes, and do something you love! Spending time with your family and friends and giving time for your hobbies will make you happier, and this could only boost your productivity! 
Personally, after one-hour surfing in the morning, I'm ready to kick in at work! 
 
If you're interested about knowing how it feels to ride along waves, I compiled 15 tips to begin your surfing journey:

6. Take your time and don't get tangled with the big dogs 

It is usually a good option to start your surfing experience on the white water. You can learn how to pop up and you will have a ton of fun!

When you feel bored with the white water, transition to small waves - but do not go on the peak with 4+ feet waves! 

​It could be dangerous because you will be surrounded by more experience surfers. You will make a lot of mistakes and you want to avoid being hurt, and hurt someone else. Stay on small waves as long as needed. 
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7. Get out of the crowds

 If you can, get away from the crowded beaches of the Eastern suburbs. Catching waves will be more challenging and you have a higher chance of getting injured (especially if others don't follow the code). Therefore, less crowded beaches will allow you to progress faster in a safe environment. 
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If you can't get out of the city (e.g. in the morning before work), try not to go where everybody already is – you can find good spots few meters away.
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10. Learn how to wipeout (and enjoy it!) 

Surfing is not all about riding waves, but also getting ridden by waves - the Ocean loves to remind us that! 
It's really important to know how to fall and keep calm under the water. Don't panic, the small waves won't hurt you if you keep calm.
​
That may sound slightly weird but, eventually, you will learn to have fun of your wipeouts. It's part of the process!
When you can, fall flat as a crêpe, as far from your surfboard as possible, and you won't get injured 😉 
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11. Don't be afraid

Surfing comes with its dangers and you have to be mindful of the risks. However, if you play it safe (e.g. know how to fall, follow the rules), you will unlikely be injured. 
​
Don't be intimidated by the waves, they are mostly friendly, especially when you begin with small waves.
 

12. Practice, practice, practice

Surfing is hard, progress is slow, and it can be very frustrated. Even though you might spend hours not catching a single wave, do not give up! With time, you will learn how to read the waves, and your technique will improve - you will get more and more waves. The key is to spend as much time in the water as possible.
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Sooner than you think, you'll be at the peak, and you'll realize how much you've progressed (and it feels good!)
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13. Give time for recovery

It's a very demanding sport, and your muscles will let you know that. You will feel as sore as after a huge workout! Although you might be excited to get back in the water, it's also important to give time for your body to recover. 

​It is also a good reason to turn your early alarm off, and sleep in 😉
​

14. Be ready to change your mindset

After few weeks, you will realize your mindset changed. 

​You will never see the water in the same way. While looking at a landscape, your attention may be driven by the waves, you may imagine yourself on them. You may think about your next session at inappropriate moments or dream about surfing - it may become an addiction. However, that's an healthy one so you shouldn't worry too much.
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​by Losia Lagisz
 
Get right tools for the right jobs. Surprisingly, decision trees are seldom mentioned in the context of systematic reviews / meta-analyses (I will use the latter term thereafter). An obvious application is to use decision trees to streamline screening of hundreds and thousands of publications found in online databases of academic literature.

​It is easiest to imagine them as a list of interlinked questions, where each answers leads you to the next appropriate questions. More formally, they are a structural representation (usually visual) of a series of decisions that have to be made. When screening literature, we need to assess each paper against all our pre-defined inclusion criteria. These criteria, expressed as a series of questions, naturally form a backbone of a linear decision tree. It is easy to build a decision tree if we break our inclusion criteria according to PICO (or similar) components of our research question. Thus, a generic decision tree for screening literature would look like this:

​by Losia Lagisz

Finding full texts of articles takes time. Especially when if you need to locate hundreds of pdf files and attach them to bibliometric records in a reference manager. Although some reference managers claim to have capacity to automatically locate full texts, the actual retrieval rate can be quite low. For example, in EndNote it can be less than 10% of the records. Zotero seems to be doing much better. Below, I show the most efficient workaround I am currently aware of.

1. Use Zotero desktop.
It is a free reference manager, but you may need to pay for extra storage if you use it extensively. It also has a web-browser counterpart, browser plug-ins that help harvesting citations from webpages, plugins for text processors and cloud-based storage. Overall, Zotero offers great functionality, but it can get quite slow when working with big volumes of data.
​
2. Install Zotero DOI Manager plug-in.
It checks, reformats and fills in missing DOI. Actually, the package is called shortDOI and it can be found at https://github.com/ethanwillis/zotero-scihub/releases. Download the latest release as an .xpi file (in Firefox try to right click on the .xpi file and select "Save As..."). Back in Zotero, select from the top menu: Tools -> add-ons -> Tools for all Add-ons (upper right) -> Install from file. Then point to your downloaded .xpi file. Zotero will ask you to allow it to restart.

3. Find pdf full texts using DOI. Only publicly available full-text files will be found and added to the records (so it may work differently from university and from home, as via university address you will have access to many more pdfs). To run the search, highlight the records you want to find pdfs for and right-click the selection to display the floating menu. From the menu select “Find Available PDFs” (first from the top):

Test workflow
1. Install and set up the DOI Manager plugin in desktop Zotero.
2. Use Scopus to find 74 records of papers published by Shinichi that mention meta-analysis in title, abstracts or keywords: TITLE-ABS-KEY ( meta-analy* )  AND  ( LIMIT-TO ( PREFNAMEAUID ,  "Nakagawa, S.#55949096500" ) ). You can use any other set of records.
3. Export all records to a .ris file and uploaded this file into a new Zotero library: Zotero -> File -> Import -> From file -> select downloaded .ris file -> and ask to place it in new collection. Long DOIs were be automatically updated by the DOI plug-in during the upload.
4. Run automatic Zotero search: highlight all records, right-click and select “Find Available PDFs“. This step is going to take a while, depending on your Internet connection speed and the number of records.
 
I was able to find 42 full texts (Open Access only, since I was not at the university) out of 74, which is quite good. Working from university I could probably get 100% or close.

by Dom Mason

Sometimes, scientists travel far and wide to communicate their hard work (or so I’m told) and further the spread of scientific knowledge. Alas, we didn’t have to travel very far at all to attend the Australasian Evolution Society (AES) 2019 conference. Held at the UNSW Roundhouse in late November, it was a great way to cap off the year that was.

​Being my first conference, I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it was catered. It turns out delicious spreads have an uncanny ability to take your mind off how you forgot to say that one important thing in your talk. Just be careful not to take any pastries before morning tea officially begins – I can say with great confidence that you will be told off. Good food, great talks, amazing people, it seemed to me to be a sort of festival for scientists. On a whole, it reminded me of a music festival. There were unfortunate clashes with who I wanted to see, and friends leaving the group to go to different rooms. People pushing in line… I mean waiting in line, and the excitement of seeing a performance that I didn’t plan to see but still being blown away by them.

And the headlining acts (plenary talks), seamlessly confirmed why they were chosen to speak at this conference. From the humour of using modern scientific methods to find the loch ness monster, to the ethics of using gene drive to reduce or eliminate wild populations, and the importance of the fluctuation of inflammation during pregnancy from an evolutionary perspective. A common theme of bringing together different fields of science for a common goal was clear. It was truly inspiring to be given an insight into the work of not only the distinguished scientists but also early career researchers who gave talks to conclude each day; fortifying that great achievements can arise from novel and creative thinking.
 
Sharing the same stage, so to speak, as these researchers and esteemed professors was a great experience, especially if you were fortunate enough to keep their crowd for your talk. This unity projected a real sense of community. To me, this was confirmed during casual discussions, where I heard about exciting new projects or funny asides about trivial scientific concepts. I would deem these interactions to be the best part of the conference; getting to know scientists and other students on a casual level. It was like having a backstage pass to your favourite festival, being able to stand next to the shoulders of giants. And when people I look up to told me that I did well in my talk, it made the experience that one bit better.

If I didn’t spend too much time at the cheese platter during the breaks, I was talking to people about their studies. And to my surprise, I was approached by a student during lunch and asked a question about my talk. It was a great feeling to have someone interested in my study and being able to explain concepts that for me have become second nature. One last thing I can’t ignore is the quality and diversity of our labs talks. It seems we may have every evolutionary biology field covered (except phylogeny but I’m not too sure even phylogeneticists have that covered). With all this in mind, I would have to say this conference was a hit and I’m keen for the next one! I just have to save for a ticket, wait for the line-up, see which of my friends are going then plan my outfit.

by Hamza Anwer

I’ve always told people that straight roads don’t make good drivers. Why? Because, in the context of life, a straight road is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. While this analogy may sound overly dramatic, I’ve always held it in great regards. I hardwired this belief into me, because I knew there will be times when I would have no choice but to display resilience and think about long-term success over short-term satisfaction.  My resilience was on show the minute I ruptured my anterior cruciate ligament playing football. The anterior cruciate ligament runs through the middle of the knee, providing rotational stability to the joint. My foot got stuck in the mud when I went to change direction, as a result, there was a twist with excessive force, and I heard a loud pop. I was on the floor in agony, and had to be carried off the field. I couldn’t walk but out of pure resilience and emotional adrenaline, I drove myself to the hospital. I had an MRI and it confirmed what I had feared the most (see my MRI scan below). ACL injuries are so dreaded because of the lengthy process is takes to come back from them (minimum 6-9 months of hard work for a full recovery).

Following surgery, I took the steps to heal, physically, mentally, and emotionally. I didn’t want to make excuses, I just wanted to put my head down and work knowing it would pay off… and it did, my resilience worked wonders. It seemed so long ago that I was on crutches, unable to walk, but I feel stronger than ever, and my PhD is in a good place. There are good times ahead and I’m excited for what the future holds.

Straight roads don’t make good drivers… so, when you come at an unexpected turn, take some time to reflect, and invest on what you need to do to continue your journey. You will always be better for it.

by Losia Lagisz and Joanna Rutkowska

For the occasion, we decided to make a poster that can be used to promote EcoEvoRxiv. The poster summarises  already submitted preprints and gives basic info about EcoEvoRxiv. Feel free to use the poster (pdf file)!

by Losia Lagisz and Shinichi Nakagawa

A recent paper by Brady et al. (2019) gives an excellent overview of  biological maladaptation. The 9 main scenarios of biological maladaptation are explained by using an archery metaphor. Accompanying figure (below), illustrates how combinations of characteristics of the environments and populations (in the figure columns) can lead to 3 types the maladaptive effects (in the figure rows).

​So, how this picture could be translated into academic (mal-)adaptation? Imagine, the arrows are your publications that will ultimately allow you to obtain an academic job (“the target”). This academic job could be having a relatively secure and fulfilling permanent research position – that's the “bull’s eye” of your target.
 
Now let’s consider how could the 9 academic maladaptation scenarios look like (in the same arrangement as in the original figure above):

​Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? Can they help you to avoid academic maladaptation?

by Dom Mason

Before I arrived as an intern in the I-DEEL lab, Shinichi purchased four completely automated experimental boxes from Zantiks Ltd – a behavioural research equipment company. Sent all the way from Cambridge, the boxes arrived soon after I began working at Garvan Institute of Medical Research.

These new ‘Skinner boxes’ were to be utilised in a variety of zebrafish experiments, providing experimental standardisation and requiring minimal set up. The boxes can perform behavioural assays involving tracking, feeding and light stimuli. They are equipped to record video and have plastic inserts to modify the zebrafish arena. Fish are tracked and recorded by an infrared camera to ensure light (or lack thereof) does not impact data collection. Tracking data can then be exported as .csv files for analysis.

My initial goal was to implement two behavioural conditioning assays using the boxes – appetitive learning (food reward) and aversive learning (undesirable stimuli). As scripts are required to run the automation, the first challenge was to understand the code that drives the boxes. I wasn’t much of a programmer before tinkering with the scripts; fast-forward 6 months, and I’m still not much of a programmer. In saying that, I did get some practice modifying the base scripts which Zantiks provided.

Eventually, the scripts were suitable to begin pilot experiments. While it would be i-deel (😉) to implement both aversive and appetitive learning trials, we decided to focus solely on aversive learning due to time constraints involved in getting the fish to learn.

They say you should never work with children or animals. I don’t know who they are, but they are not wrong.

Many mornings and afternoons have been spent toiling over which settings would yield the best results; and whether these results can be replicated. A key lesson learned was to give heed to all aspects of the experimental process provided by the literature. Once we included an acclimation period at the beginning of the assays, our confidence in the boxes reached an all-time high.

The next set of assays will set out to determine the variance in preference with different colour combinations – if there is any preference at all. And once we produce a consistent output of ‘significant’ results, other lab members can include Zantiks assays (quite easily) into their own work!