Keeping up, carnival edition

Recent carnivals it’s more than time to highlight:

April Berry Go Round

March Berry Go Round

May BGR is coming soon!

The Game of Evolution (CoE #170).

Have a good read!

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Beescopic

An old picture I created a few years ago…

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Nature Geek Porn

Lately I was discussing with a colleague about an invasive slug. My friend is an incredible naturalist but this day he had trouble remembering the slug’s name, so we had to try several sets of key words request before getting to the critter. Then, we had a comment as to how some species get weird names. And there was slug porn germinating in our heads. Good I thought, let’s keep it for the day I’d like to silly blog.

Since I don’t have much time to blog currently, this turns out to be the time it gets here. Fortunately, there isn’t much traffic to begins with, and porn can help boosting it a bit, while hopefully there will be more posting here when readers return.

So the question is, what would nature geek porn look like? In my informed opinion, it’ll be like this:

If you wonder why, it’s not just because. One of the synonyms for the slug illustrated here is Vaginulus floridanus. The flower is Clitoria ternatea. And you know what? Besides rocketting traffic in here, and despite a pure nature geekery, it is still very suggestive and hopefully some good porn… :-)

And it’s also safe for office.

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#MyGenderGap filters out

Yes, I know I was five days away from the initial buzz, but considering how slow stream Seeds Aside is, that’s not too bad. (This is perhaps the first time in its history that SA is taking a ride at all :)

A few blogs have analysed the extant of the gap:

How to calculate #MyGenderGap for publishing scientists

#MyGenderGap

#MyGenderGap – my history of inequality in numbers

My CV is a Sausage Fest

#MyGenderGap

The stream is mostly in tweets, you can still reach them to get an idea… even if untweeting. Or even better, just here.

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Berry Go Round #64

Previous Berry Go Round is found at For the love of plants.

This is edition #64.

Unfortunately, I’m currently only left handed, so this edition will be more like a round of links and probably less wordy than could have been.

Any typo is mine…

Are tannin familiar to you? Did you know about how there’s even a special organella devoted to them? Then you should learn about it thanks to Kathleen Raven at Food Matters:

• Tannosomes and the trickle-around effect: a new cell organelle is discovered

This is a wonderfull collaborative blog, so you may find a lot of other stuff of interest, with or without plants but plenty:

• Cultivating Reform: Planting The Seeds For Healing The Food System, By Patrick Mustain

• Flour Power: Exploring the Nutritional Potential of Grape Pomace Flour, By Layla Eplett

• Organic Synthesis: Towards An Inclusion Of African Americans In Organic Farming, By Layla Eplett

And even GMOs debate going on:

• GMO Labeling, I-522, and Why This Debate Sucks for Progressive Scientists Like Me, By Kevin Bonham

• GMO Labeling Debate Follow-up, By Kevin Bonham

Anyhow, please have a nice blog mining, and hopefully we’ll meet Food Matters on next occasion!

Season is falling in tempirate climate, so how do trees cope? Find out in good company at… a rocking plant I thing:

• Autumn Tree Strategies, I
• Autumn Tree Strategies II

Unless you’d prefer Ghosts in the Rocks and spectacular spectralities!

• Needles to say, sheathe got an option! Looking closer is always good…

• … at least as good as chasing farther away. As long as it’s for plants of course:) it’s all in our Art: Plant Hunters – Marianne North

If it’s edible… it’s also readable:

• The Queen’s mulberries
• Unles you’d rather go for the Pea soup. It all depends on genealogy!

• But if it’s barely eaten, you can still “voir la vie en rose” or blue… (Metaphorically, blogging is for flowers too: see a Thanksgiving Tribute)

Or passing by, can you take it warm?

• A Plant Sexual Thermostat? – New Information About Temperature Controlled Flowering

Some more Raflesia on the internets: How A Plant Makes The Biggest Flower of Them All…

Aren’t plants always a mass of stuff? Well, while some families are familiar, the other are… Malpighiales: A Glorious Mess of Flowering Plants

Mossible? Unmossible?

• The Misery of the Misting Moss

•  Sooty mould makes a killer honey (in the “not a plant but still you should go” category)

Climate change is happening (one more bit of evidence):

• Grassland managers not responding to phenology shifts

Okay! Left hand tired flat! Oh, but there are many more gems over over!

For example, what’s in a tropical understory? A sub story of some sort? Probably not:

• Rainforest understory

And browse the recent tropical blogging at Phytofactor!

Wants more? Well, next Berry is expected soon! Please volunteer if you feel like, you’re welcome to too!

Late edit: forgot this submission, about Larchness monster.

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Commenting on a science poster !1!

In August, I presented a poster at ESEB 14th (biannual meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology), that took place in Lisboa, Portugal. (ESEB was not especially commented upon by bloggers, maybe coverage was greater with other social media though… Anyway, you may find a few posts, there, there or there).

ESEB was apparently already known for its poster sessions… Just so you know.

Poster sessions this year were huge… I was breathing out with the latest genetics experiment (it was already 6 months old, but that’s still young to go to a science symposium). Maybe I was experiencing “poster solitude“. Indeed, people were’nt really staying that long. Maybe this is not a year to work on local dispersal, or maybe pathogenic fungi are just boring study models…

So, I always left readers stay, say, 10 seconds before I would show up and ask if there was any question. Safe bet, for 10 seconds is about the time needed to evaluate self interest in a random poster. Then, I got one attendee that stood up my own treshold. (I might even write swamped, because the time I went by it was probably already worth 20 seconds reading). “If you have any question…”, I enquired softly. But all I got back was a “Oh, I was just pretending!”. And she moved away.

This is the weirdest comment I ever had about a poster. Did it already happen to you?

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September BGR

Oops, I’m late. Please find September’s edition of Berry Go Round.

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Tenured!

It’s been quite silent in here in the last weeks months… For several reasons, RL reasons.

One of them –and not the least- is that tenure clock was on the ringing phase. Let’s see a bit around now: since two weeks, I’m officially tenured. Whoot whoot. (ok, easy, but so happy).

Let’s admit this was nothing like a USA tenure thingie. Here in France you have only one year of practice before that tenure decision is made. Much shorter then a 10-year test. Of course, expectancies are a bit less fancy. I secured funding for a project (yay! I have something to investigate deeper in the next years), got a ms in the pipeline (and other experiments in the medium term pipeline), a lot of work for september and that was it. So I may really truly resume blogging only in next october.

But the news are good and you’ll see Seeds Aside soon.

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Fern poetry

Just played again with a random poetry generator. Made it for ferns. Made my moment.

First try is not bad:

Sporophytic Food

Horticulture bugs with actual fossile record.
Shall not a taxonomist radiate with Carboniferous phenotypes?
Direct sunlight is used as the ferns of plenty of families,
But the study of ferns ponders many taxa.

Growing garden!
Hark!
The fern radiation allows for the sister species’ spores.
Forget it!

or even this second one:

The Study Of Ferns’ Fossile Record

Direct sunlight has the fern radiation’s importance,
But It reduces the wind’s phenotype.
Wet conditions begins with actual garden.
Oh, no!

Classification disperses the food of Fern’s spores.
Alas!
The sister species is called growing period.
Ah, but a taxonomist ponders cheap taxa!

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Fern lapse for rainy saturday

Timelapse of fern sprouting. Saturday like.

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