Posted on by DagmarJW

Some Recent SciComm

Science communication is a critical part of being a scientist. The ability to explain our research in a simple, easy-to-comprehend manner allows us to share our work with the general public. Telling others scientists about your discoveries is all well and good, but ultimately our work should be shared with the wider world. In the past year, I have started doing more science communication. Most of this has been done on Twitter, but I have also had the privilege to take part in some other ventures.

Back at the end of February, I was lucky enough to speak with Ellen Weatherford of Just the Zoo of Us, everyone’s favourite animal review podcast, about my work with archerfish. It was my first podcast appearance, and I really hope it won’t be the last. Being able to talk about my research topic and the fish I have come to love since starting my PhD was a perfect way to share my knowledge with the rest of the world. I’ll put a link to Spotify at the bottom of this post, if you want to listen.

I’ve also been lucky enough to take part in the 15th and last iteration of FameLab, an international science communication competition. Every contestant has three minutes to explain any scientific topic. I made it through the St Andrews heat by explaining how archerfish eyes are far more complex than our own, and through the Scottish Finals by discussing how archerfish are able to make complex decisions with only six neurons. I’m incredibly excited to take part in the FameLab Masterclass next week in preparation for the British Finals on the 9th of June.

Science communication is incredibly important. The more scientists we can persuade to translate their sometimes complicated-sounding research into a format accessible by those outside of academia and industry, the better the world will be for it. The pandemic has shown us just how important clear communication is, especially on subjects like health and medicine. However, that doesn’t mean ecological topics, like fish intelligence, should be left out of science communication. Policies on animal welfare, conservation, and climate change can all be affected if we (fail to) communicate our research to the general public.

Want more fish sciComm from me? Check out #5PMFishFacts on Twitter, with new facts every Friday!
Listen here to the Just the Zoo of Us episode on archerfish, and find out all the fun facts you didn’t already know!
Posted on by DagmarJW

My Best Poetry Read of 2020

I have a confession. When I decided to make a series of blog post about my favourite books of 2020, and I decided to include a separate post for poetry, I knew that I had only read one poetry book this year. This whole blog post is just an opportunity for me to gush over Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’ The Lost Spells, which is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I love poetry. When I was 13, and we were learning about poetry in English class, we were tasked to write something like 5 poems each, and we’d have to present them at a Poetry Café the teachers put on. I wrote 100 poems instead, and I continue to write poetry to this day. I like to think my poetry has improved since I was 13, but it is not on the level of The Lost Spells.

I bought this book on a whim, because I loved the drawing on the front. My mom had tried to send me a copy of its precursor, The Lost Words, but accidentally sent me a CD instead, and I still hadn’t listened to it. The Lost Spells entranced me, the drawings and the poetry blending together to form an utterly beautiful experience. There are good lessons among those pages, and I know I will return to them in the future. I’ve since also listened to The Lost Words, and I am going to buy a physical copy of that book too, so that I can read those beautiful phrases whenever I feel the need.

I don’t usually read poetry books in one go. I have two sitting on my bedside table (a collection of Donne, and one of Wordsworth), and I read from them occasionally, usually picking a page at random. The Lost Spells, however, is one I could read front to back many times. I highly recommend it.

Want to see what I plan on reading next? Check out my Goodreads!

Posted on by DagmarJW

My Best True Crime Read of 2020

I know it can be a controversial topic, but I will gladly admit that I love true crime. It has always been a part of my life, as my dad was Chief Superintendent of the Amsterdam Police when I was little. He worked on the Heineken Kidnapping, among others. That’s not the end of my introduction to true crime: the Dutch director Theo van Gogh (a descendant of the other Theo van Gogh) was assassinated around the corner from my best friend’s house. Her mom stole a bit of crime scene tape, and I remember being absolutely fascinated with it. I was 8.

I love true crime shows and podcasts, and I’ve recently started reading true crime books as well. I do prefer true crime that is victim-focused, or about the forensic process. I’m not interested in stories that glorify the killers, I don’t think Ted Bundy is attractive, and I hate victim-blaming mentalities, which are still pervasive in true crime media. I also agree (as does my dad, incidentally) that all cops are bastards. Don’t @ me with your cop-apologizing bullshit, that’s not why I like true crime. I like true crime because I have never been able to wrap my head around how people are capable of committing such heinous crimes, and I’m fascinated with the science that helps catch these killers. Two books (of the six I read this year) stood out to me, for how they covered crimes which go beyond my imagination. The first was Helter Skelter, the story of the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family. The other, and my favourite true crime read of 2020, was I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark tells the story of McNamara’s investigation into a series of rapes and murders in California that spanned more than 10 years. She called the perpetrator the Golden State Killer, and was largely responsible for bringing his crimes to the public eye. McNamara worked together with web sleuths and law enforcement to try and uncover who the Golden State Killer is. Sadly, she passed away before he was caught on April 24, 2018, the same day a tv show based on this book began filming.

Michelle McNamara’s book goes through her journey to find the man now know to be Joseph James DeAngelo, from her initial interest through all her theories, all her travels through California to get inside this man’s head, and to bring him to light. The last chapters of her book were composed by her husband Patton Oswalt and her collaborators from her notes, as she never got to finish the story. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is an homage to the victims of the Golden State Killer, and to McNamara herself. I wish I could read more of her work, I really do. She would have done so much more good in this world.

Honourable Mentions:

My worst true crime read of 2020

As mentioned above, my preferred type of true crime is victim-focused. A book that really struck the wrong nerve with me, and thus my least favourite true crime read of 2020, was Talking with Serial Killers: The Most Evil People in the World Tell Their Own Stories by Christopher Berry-Dee. Yes, I know, I should have known I wasn’t going to enjoy this book just from the title, but it had some good reviews. I got the book in a two-for-one sale on Audible, so I’m not overly sad I didn’t enjoy it. The book literally is just interviews with serial killers, and I felt it was too glorifying. Those people don’t need a platform, and any author who is willing to publish a serial killer’s story without analyzing the true facts, without criticizing the murderer, is a bastard. I’ll be giving Mr. Berry-Dee a miss from now on.

Want to see what I plan on reading next? Check out my Goodreads!
Posted on by DagmarJW

My Best Science Read of 2020

Unlike with my fiction reads, picking my best science read of 2020 was not difficult at all. I only read 10 science books, out of my 17 non-fiction reads (the rest were true crime, or comedic), and the best one was The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction by David Quammen. It was given to me by my grandfather because of how much he enjoyed reading it, and I’m so glad that I shared this reading experience with him.

My grandad was a Professor of Chemistry for many years, but his recent interests have always leaned more towards history. He shares that passion with my brothers, one a history lecturer and the other an army engineer, but it has never really been my area. Reading this book made me feel closer to my grandad, and that is at least part of the reason why I loved this book so much. David Quammen’s ability to weave a story, to blend his own modern experiences with the history and evolution of the study of island biogeography, is the other reason.

This book may seem daunting, especially to those who are not scientists, or who know little about island biogeography. It is a very long book, so hefty that when my flatmate first saw it she declared she didn’t like it, solely because it was too big. It took me a long time to read. However, it was worth every moment. I don’t cry easily when reading, but this book made me cry at least twice. I blinked tears off my eyelashes onto the pages, learning about the lives of the people who made island biogeography research possible. I cried at the end, too, the final sentence a perfect summary of the book, a beautiful moment of hope after a story that often seemed hopeless.

It taught me a lot about the state of this world, about why extinctions occur, and how we are responsible for a lot of those reasons. It taught me about people whose names I had never heard, and have not heard since, and showed me species I didn’t know existed. It showed me how islands thrive, and survive, and eventually die. David Quammen has a way with words that I have not seen very often, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future (I have Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic on my Kindle). The Song of the Dodo is a book which I know I will reread in the future, and I hope it can be a book that you will read too.

Honourable Mention:

My worst Science read of 2020

My least favourite science read of 2020 was Dr Julia Shaw’s The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. I feel a bit bad about this one, because the book isn’t actually bad. It just wasn’t, ironically, very memorable. I may have to give it another go, as it is a topic that interests me both for applications in my personal life as well as in my research (can fish form false memories? I hope so). I’m first going to work on getting my list of unread non-fiction down, though. I have far too many gathering dust on my shelves!

Want to see what I plan on reading next? Check out my Goodreads!
Posted on by DagmarJW

My Best Fiction Read of 2020

As mentioned in my last blog post, I read 27 fiction books this year. This makes picking a best fiction book quite difficult, but ultimately, I had to settle on just one: The Tropic of Serpents, the second book in Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series.

I would recommend reading the first book in the series (A Natural History of Dragons) before diving into The Tropic of Serpents, of course, but if you enjoy stories of discovery and exploration that actually pass the Bechdel test and contains queer characters, this is the series for you. Mrs. Isabella Camherst breaks the boundaries of her rigorous pseudo-Victorian society to travel to the continent Eriga to search for the legendary swamp-wyrms. Her quest to record (and protect) all dragon species continues, trumping her desire to stay home with her family. In Eriga, she is tangled up in a web of lies, deceit, and colonialism, and confronted with treachery, illness, and near death. With only her associate Mr. Wilker and her friend, runaway heiress Natalie Oscott, for support, Isabella Camherst discovers things beyond her wildest dreams.

The book mixes the story of Isabella’s personal struggles as a woman and mother in a time when women were expected to do anything but travel to remote areas of the globe to describe dragons for science, with tales of exploration and descriptions of creatures’ natural history. When I first thought about becoming a scientist my mind was filled with visions of such exploration, so this book allows me to immerse myself in a world where this kind of research remains the norm. I have the next two books in the Lady Trent series on my bookshelf, and I look forward to reading them in the coming year. If they’re even half as good as The Tropic of Serpents, I know they’ll be fantastic reads!

Honourable Mentions:

My worst fiction read of 2020

Although the majority of the books I read this year were really good, some were garbage. Now, when it comes to books I believe there are two kinds of garbage: the kind that you read knowing they are garbage, just because you want to read a quick thriller or detective novel, and that you actually kind of enjoy, and the kind that gives you hope maybe one day you could publish a novel, considering how low the standard seems to be.

There is one book of the second category of garbage that I read this year that stands out to me, mostly because I astonished myself by actually finishing it. I’m not one of those people who feels the need to finish every book I start; if I don’t enjoy it, why should I waste my time? But this book was one in a series of rapid-fire reading I did during my summer holiday in August, and it was surrounded on both sides by garbage reads of the first variety. This book, the worst book I read this year, was The Naturalist, by Andrew Mayne.

Forgive me if my memory of this book is flawed, I read it very quickly because it frustrated me so much. It is not a well-written book, and it is not well-thought-out. I had high hopes, so that makes this all the sadder. The premise started out good: a young Professor of Biology leaves his job to hunt down a serial killer who is leaving corpses scattered around Montana. Theo Cray uses all his biology knowledge to uncover the bodies and profile the murderer, while worrying he could become the next victim. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? I’m a biologist, I like true crime, and if I wasn’t a biologist I’d want to be a detective or forensic investigator of some kind. This book seemed right up my alley.

The problem is, Theo Cray is a computational microbiologist. There is nothing wrong with being a computational microbiologist per se, but when that computational microbiologist shows up in an unfamiliar state and starts pulling corpses out of the ground based on the natural history he finds there, I become very skeptical. Professor Cray even admits he is not the best natural historian, so how come he suddenly becomes an expert on the local flora within seconds of setting foot in Montana? It just isn’t realistic, and it ruined the whole novel for me. This is one book which I will not recommend.

Want to see what I plan on reading next? Check out my Goodreads!

Posted on by DagmarJW · 1 Comment

2020: A Year of Many Books

I have always been a voracious reader, ever since I was young. I remember when I was 7 or 8, and my teacher told me I could move up to the big kids’ reading level, something that really only happened when you were 10+. I was so proud, that even while I was struggling to make sense of Michael Morpurgo’s Why the Whales Came I refused to admit that it was too difficult, really. I powered through, and eventually moved on to more complicated texts. I still love to read for fun.

As an academic, it can be difficult to motivate yourself to pick up a book in your free time, especially given how much reading we have to do to keep up with the literature in our fields. However, for me, reading offers a nice escape from that pressure-cooker environment. I often reread books I already know, especially Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series, and Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Fisher and Corinna Chapman series. They are familiar; I know what will happen, how it will end, but for a few hours I can immerse myself in a fictional world where my research does not exist.

What I read is highly variable. I usually try to have both a fiction and a non-fiction book going at the same time (yes, I know), and I tend to lean more towards fantasy and detective fiction, and towards popular science. I certainly don’t allow that to limit my choices, however. At the time of writing, I currently own 59 unread books in Scotland (real, e-, and audio-books), and even more back in storage in the Netherlands, which I promise I will read one day. I’ve placed a small embargo on buying new books, and the pile has definitely reduced a lot since I first made the list last year, when I think there must have been upwards of 70 unread books.

This year, 2020, the year that wouldn’t end, I managed to read 45 books. In total, I read 14,830 pages. Some of these were certainly much shorter than others, but I’m hoping I can keep this pace up, as that means in about 1.5 years, all the current unread books should have been read, and will almost certainly have been replaced by even more unread books. The shortest book at only 190 pages was The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by a certain transphobic author who shall not be named, while the longest was David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo (more on this in the near future), which was 702 pages long. Of the books I read, 17 were non-fiction, 1 was poetry, and the remaining 27 were fiction. 1 book was written in Dutch (a recommendation by my grandmother), and the other 44 where written in English.

I’d like to share with you my favourite, and least favourite, books which I read over the past 12 months, in the categories of Fiction, Science, True Crime, and Poetry. I’ll be sharing my opinions of those books in future blogs, all to be posted before the year is out. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking through my Excel spreadsheet of unread books, adding in the books I received for Christmas, and selecting my next reads.

Want to see what I plan on reading next? Check out my Goodreads!