Although my research is on indefinite/terminal hiaitus, I am happy to see my last seminar remains online. It is certainly far from my best – given under circumstances of COVID lockdown, and after I had left my last academic post – but at least there’s a record for anyone interested in Prostanthera pollination.
The seminar was given as part of the special Prostanthera series of events held by the Australian Plants Society Victoria.
Two-fifths of a tennis court. About six car park spaces. Three-tenths of an IMAX screen.
That’s the size of my front yard. Yet despite its limited expanse, and its densely urban situation 10 km north of Melbourne CBD, my yard is habitat for at least five species of native bees.
I began watching the bees closely last year in lockdown. The tiny, faintly metallic Sweat Bees (Homalictus) are most common. They appear first in Spring, visiting the Wahlenbergia, the Oxalis weed in the lawn, the strawberry, and rocket flowers; anywhere there’s pollen.
Later, the bold and stripey Lipotriches turn up. Like rock-climbers gripping an overhang, they lock themselves upside down to the anthers of dangling Dianella flowers, emitting short zip-like buzzes as they work with methodical focus.
Then when Summer days begin to blaze, the hyperactive Resin Bees (Megachile) arrive, with that distinctive ember thumb print on their behinds. They fire around the yard like deranged bullets, collecting pollen and scouting for cracks to nest in.
That such biodiversity endures in this landscape—once grassy woodland, now houses, roads, and light industrial—is a testament to these species’ resilience. But their persistence also begs the question of which species might now be absent, less tolerant of such drastic change.
The White-headed Digger Bee (Amegilla albiceps) is one such bee. Large, rotund, and covered in a pelt of golden and white fuzz, one has not been recorded in Melbourne for at least 70 years, perhaps longer. In a Summer free of travel restrictions, I’ll leave town to seek the White-headed Digger. But for now, I’ll keep discovering the delightful locals. It’s Homalictus season now.
This mini essay was originally written for the Urban Field Naturalist Project
Bees are an effective treatment for depression. Well, my depression. And specifically the kind of malaise that comes from being locked out of our national parks and wild places for a second Spring running.
After monitoring my small front yard last Spring-Summer, I knew there was a set of small but diverse native bees that revealed themselves when the weather was warm and the yard was blooming. This year, I’ve decided to go deep and get to know them a whole lot better.
Getting even a basic knowledge of the 2000 native bees of Australia is a very big task. Getting to know the native bees of a single 50 km2 local government area (where I live) is much easier. So I set out to reconcile all the official and unofficial records for native bees within Moreland City LGA (just north of Melbourne CBD), to build a species list. And after going to that effort, I figured the local community would probably also like to have that information. So here is version one of the ‘Native Bees of Moreland‘ infographic (PDF link):
I started by pulling all of the records for bees in Moreland LGA from Atlas of Living Australia. After taking out the two introduced species, there were 12 species-level identifications plus 52 records for bees identified only to genus or subgenus. I then validated the species identified against their geographic ranges to exclude any obviously erroneous records. After that I reviewed iNaturalist records for bees in Moreland to see if I could identify any species that did not appear in the Atlas records.
My summary from this process is in the table below:
| Species | Status | Notes |
| Amegilla (Zonamegilla) asserta | Reliably present | A. chlorocyanea also possible given distribution, observations in nearby LGAs, and iNaturalist records |
| Lasioglossum (Homalictus) sp. | Reliably present | No species-level identifications confirmed. But the genus is very common. At least two species are in Moreland. Possibly L. punctatus, L. brisbanensis, L.urbanus, L. sphecodoides |
| Hylaeus (Prosopisteron) littleri | Reliably present | Unlikely to be the only Hylaeus species in the area |
| Hyleoides concinna | Rare and present | No record since 1946, however one record from neighbouring LGA, Mooney Valley, 2017 |
| Lasioglossum (Chilalictus) calophyllae | Reliably present | Common and recent records |
| Lasioglossum (Parasphecodes) hiltacus | Historical | No record in the LGA since 1956 |
| Lasioglossum (Chilalictus) lanarium | Historical | No record since specimen from 1894 |
| Lipotriches (Austronomia) | Reliably present | No identified specimens, but iNaturalist observations confirm the genus is present |
| Megachile (Eutricharaea) obtusa | Historical | No record since specimen from 1906 |
| Megachile erythropyga | Reliably present | Pinned specimen from 1987. iNaturalist observations since |
| Megachile (Rhodomegachile) deanii | Doubtful record | Far outside known distribution. Must be erroneous. |
| Braunsapis sp. | Doubtful record | B. unicolor and B. plebeia specimens from 1958. Very far from known distribution. Must be erroneous records. |
Clearly, for a very populous area, there are very few records. This is the case for not only bees, but insects in general. An added challenge is that it is often difficult to diagnose bees to species level. Together, that means it has been very easy to find bees that have never been recorded in the area.
For example, the most common small bee in my yard is a tiny, dark Homalictus with a faint green wash on the thorax. It most closely resembles Lasioglossum (Homalictus) sphecodoides, but this species has never been recorded in the area – presumably because no one with the right taxonomic expertise has collected bees, or examined Homalictus specimens from Moreland. Indeed, no species-level identification for a Homalictus has been made for Moreland at all.
In the first-bee hunting trip I took outside my yard this Spring, I even recorded a new genus for the area. I caught both male and female reed bees – Brevineura sp., flitting around a flowering Diosma in the cemetary.
Then there are those historical records – bee specimens collected 60 – 100 years ago and not seen since. How tantalising! Perhaps they are extinct in the area? Or maybe they are just so rare and scarcely recorded. Well not long after finalising the infographic, I rendered it instantly out of date by finding a Lasioglossum (Parasphecodes) hiltacus for the first time in Moreland since 1956.
In just two short trips outside the house I’ve recorded a new genus to the area and made the first local observation of a species since 1956. While I’m aware that our small, arbitrary local government boundaries bear no influence on ecology, it does make a useful context for illustrating just how under-studied is our urban bee biodiversity.
With Melbourne in lockdown and my change in career, time in the bush has been scarce for me this year. So it was with some relish that I recently headed out to Pyrete Range for a therapeutic communion with some native plants and pollinators. Most of Spring flowering had passed already, but I found a large population of Prostanthera saxicola var. bracteolata in peak flower. It’s a pretty restricted and uncommon shrub, so there are not likely to be many other floral visitor observations that have been made on this species.
I spent a relaxed hour or two on a warm day wandering between plants, making informal observations of flower visitors, and photographing interactions. The most frequent floral visitor was a native reed Bee (Exoneura sp.) which was in high numbers and reliably visiting flowers. I must have observed around 50 or more foraging bouts by reed bees, crawling deep into the flowers for nectar and collecting pollen from the anthers in the upper corolla.
I have known reed bees to nest in fern fronds (in wet forest) and in rushes and sedges (in the high country). Quite where they are nesting in this dry sclerophyll habitat, I do not know. But there is obviously a very large population of them.
Honey bees were also somewhat common visitors, as were some striking iridescent blue-green forester moths (family Zygaenidae). I saw six forester moth visits, but am not convinced they could be effective pollinators. They usually perch on the outside of the flowers, extending their proboscis into the base of the corolla for nectar, scarcely contacting the anthers.
One surprise was a single visit observed by this jewel beetle (Castiarina sp.), which was enjoying a feed on Prostanthera pollen.
Wild yeast hunting doesn’t always strike gold. Sometimes you end up capturing something that faithfully recreates the odours of vomit, or sweat, or cheese, or maybe all of them at once. Even if it’s disgusting, I still find it immensely fun to be hit with a surprise nostril assault and find the words to describe it.
In the interests of publishing negative results and sharing my yeast capture method, here’s the grotesque outcome of a recent attempt to capture brewing microbes from a Eucalypt blossom.
9 April 2020
The yellow gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon) in my Melbourne front yard is currently going bonkers. Every day its teeming with lorikeets, bees, and flies, which I assume must be moving nectar-inhabiting microbes around, spiking the very open nectaries with potentially useful fermenters.
I clipped off several branchlets with fresh-looking flowers, and brought them inside, careful to not handle or touch the flowers I was going to use for capture. In my improvised biological safety cabinet (stove-top, gas hob on low, extraction fan on), I picked flowers off with flame-sterilized forceps and dumped them into four sterile jars of media, each jar had two flowers in about 80mL. All incubation took place in a warm spot above the heat lamp in the python’s tank. The jars probably cycle through swings from 10 – 25 degrees C.
Wild capture media (1 litre)
86g pils DME for a target 1.030
25mL EtOH for 2.5% abv
1 drop of tetrahop
Adjust pH down from 5.5 to 4.5 with 88% lactic using narrow range pH papers
18 April 2020
After just 9 days, there’s already a terrific pellicle growing on a couple of the jars. I removed the flowers from all of the jars with sterilized forceps, decanted some of the liquid, and topped up with fresh capture media.
My notes on appearance for the four jars below.
#1: Pellicle forming. Cloudy.
#2: Slightly cloudy, no pellicle.
#3: Robust pellicle. Cloudy.
#4: Very cloudy, no pellicle.
01 May 2020
By now, I should have cultured up the bugs that were going to grow, and filtered out the ones that can’t survive in the presence of low pH/alcohol/alpha acids. I swirled each sample jar and decanted a small amount into a fresh and sanitized 250mL flask to inoculate fresh 1.037 LDME wort within.
05 May 2020
I think #4 has possibly caught a Saccharomyces infection. Froth and bubbles present, but were not in the initial capture.
11 June 2020
Time to smell, taste, and measure. I decanted a 100mL sample from each flask, then replaced the volume with more fresh 1.037 DME wort.
#1: Thick mat of white mould on the surface. Discarded.
#2: Gravity is 1.024. 34% apparent attenuation.
Appearance: Solution is bright. Nothing in suspension. No pellicle.
Aroma: Smells of Eucalyptus oil (most likely still hanging around in solution after coming off the flower), heavily phenolic, smokey, leather, solventy like acetone or ethyl acetate. Then there’s a faint background sick and cheesy vibe. Just faint. The whole sample is very pungent. Aroma is overpowering, and not something I want to taste.
#3: Gravity is 1.024. 34% apparent attenuation.
Appearance: Cloudy yellow. Robust white pellicle.
Aroma: Smells sharply and impressively of sour sweaty feet, with a dash of body odour, and slightly like vomit. Could be isovaleric acid. I don’t like foot smell and I am not tasting it.
#4: Gravity is 1.015, so this one has achieved a reasonable 59% attenuation, which fits with the bubbling I noted on 5th May.
Appearance: Cloudy yellow. Rocky white pellicle…. and then I tried to decant the sample and boy was it thick and ropey. It has become sticky and glutinous like Chinese takeaway sweet-corn soup.
Aroma: Smells sort of intermediate to #2 and #3. It has the light Eucalyptus and smoke presence of #2, along with the vomit and cheese of #3. Again, I’m not putting this in my mouth.
10 July 2020
A last chance at redemption. Have any of these turned a corner and presented anything remotely appetising to warrant continuing the experiment?
#2 is dropping clear and bright. It smells phenolic, but there’s some fruitiness in there too! A white-wine like fruitiness. There’s also an enteric slightly vomity backdrop there. I dared to taste this one, just a small sip, then spit, and it does taste quite fruity too. Nothing fantastic, and the wort is still very sweet indicating no further attenuation.
#3 is hazy. Stills smells strongly of sour foot sweat. It’s going down the drain.
#4 is still grotesquely goopey and smells like it did one month ago. Kill it with fire.
Conclusion
My first attempt to capture an estate culture from my own small patch of suburban Melbourne has failed. Yet the impressive bouquet of bodily odours produced by these microbes was a fun display of nature in action.
Legend has it that skulking on Austalia’s forest floors is a bird which forages for earthworms by farting. The hapless worms are so startled by the sensory assault of a Bassian thrush’s fart that their dismayed writhing puts them in mortal danger. Following a quick toot, the gaseous bird simply plucks whichever vermiform vittles volunteer themselves from their humic harbour.
The Bassian thrush (Zoothera lunulata) is a bird of gullies and damp forest floors. Its predominant distribution is south east Australia. Image by Leo (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Today, for those who believe this marvel of natural history, the world becomes a little less magical.
Having incorrectly answered a trivia question on Bassian thrush farting, I was recently moved to fact-check this suspect nugget. My initial searches found nothing but a few webpages referring to one another, a book without citations, and nowhere could I find a reference to the primary source. A literature search also turned up nothing useful apart from a 2016 paper describing observations of Bassian thrush foraging ecology, yet there was no mention of the birds venting vapour.
Bassian Thrushes fart while foraging for earthworms. I learned this in a trivia Q the other day. Several websites claim it is truth. Yet I cannot find a primary source for this “fact”. Where does this comes from???
— Michael Whitehead (@Mikey_Whitehead) July 23, 2020
Following a plea to Twitter’s sharpest bird and fart minds, the primary source was soon unearthed for all by Alex Berryman.
It is from Edington (1983): White’s Thrush: some aspects of its ecology and feeding behaviour. South Australian Ornithologist 27: 57—59.
[Knowing taxonomic history helps with searches like this!]I’m afraid the observation therein is a lot less rigorous than you might hope. pic.twitter.com/beu7nacY8y
— Alex Berryman (@AlexJB497) July 23, 2020
The original observation appeared in a 1983 paper published in South Australian Ornithologist. The reason I couldn’t find anything was that both the bird’s common name and scientific name have changed since the publication of that article.
So what is the evidence that has carried this remarkable phenomenon into Bassian thrush canon? The paper describes a behaviour of dipping the tail (“vent-dipping”), coincident with a noise “similar to a jet of air”. Probing of the soil surface for worms immediately follows. Between vent-dipping, the birds also “shiver”, and whilst shivering there is audible a “very soft sound somewhat similar to an inhalation gasp”. We aren’t told how many birds were observed doing this, and on how many occasions (the paper records 29 total observations of thrushes), so it is up to the reader to decide how common or deviant this behaviour is.
The speculative leap made from this unusual behaviour is that the fart is a strategy to induce the worms to suddenly convulse in repulsion, and reveal their location to the flatulent forager.
From Edington, JSL. 1983. White’s Thrush: Some aspects of its ecology and feeding behaviour. South Australian Ornithologist, 29, pp.57-59.
“The louder of the two noises described (that accompanied by a downward movement of the vent) may well be a ‘scare tactic’ to induce earthworms to contract reflexly (or other prey to move away) and so betray their presence to the Thrush through noise or litter movement and vibration. That these louder noises were made only during foraging, were antecedent to the probing and were more frequent with more intensive foraging, suggests that they were indeed somehow used to detect prey.”
Further, that shivering serves to reload the bird’s cloaca for another blast.
“If the source of the louder noise is assumed to be from the quick passage of air through the vent, then the softer, antecedent noises (each accompanied by a body shiver) might be explained as aerophagia – the gulping of air.”
Now this sphincter-percussion all sounds a bit bizarre, but is not without some scientific precedent. One expert to chime in on Twitter was Dr Dani Rabiotti, author of the book Does it Fart? The Definitive Guide to Animal Flatulence.
It’s generally accepted most birds don’t fart but I guess, similar to some snakes, they could suck air into their cloaca than expel it. I suspect it may just be a myth though – similar to honey badgers farting on bees to subdue them.
— Dr Dani Rabaiotti (@DaniRabaiotti) July 23, 2020
Dani suggests this could be a case of ‘cloacal popping’, or simply a sick bird.
That sounds more akin to cloacal popping, but given it’s observed from a single individual and no one since seems to have seen it, if it was farting it may just have been unwell 😅
— Dr Dani Rabaiotti (@DaniRabaiotti) July 23, 2020
After scratching through the litter of evidence here, I feel it’s time to clear the air. There is simply no compelling evidence that the Bassian thrush uses farts to scare and catch worms. There are some curious but unquantified observations of a bird or birds at one site making some noises that could be due to aspiration and expulsion of air via the cloaca. There are no observations tying this to success in foraging. There have been no subsequent observations supporting the behaviour described in the original paper.
I’m afraid we, as lovers of truth and nature, must let the air out of this myth. Finally, we must all commit from now on, whenever we see a Bassian thrush, to carefully watch its arse, for science.
The raw food dog diet is based on the simple principle that raw meaty bones, organs, meat and vegetable scraps are what dogs have evolved to eat, and therefore what they are most likely to thrive on. In contrast to the ubiquitous mass-market dog food full of cheap carbs and offal, this is not a hard argument to accept. It’s basically the paleo diet for dogs.
As well as prey, wild dogs would typically eat vegetables and leaves from their environment, as well as the semi-digested vege-matter from the stomachs of their herbivore prey. Although she would probably survive in the wild, Pixel doesn’t have access to the stomach contents of Moose-carcasses, so we instead feed her a porridge substitute called “Vet’s All Natural” (or VAN for short). It’s a product developed by an entrepreneurial vet with good credentials in animal nutrition. When rehydrated, left to begin a natural ferment, then served with raw mince, VAN provides the nutrients and roughage required to round out the raw diet. Alternating this with raw meaty bones, and occasional organs, eggs, fruit and veg, completes Pixel’s diet.
Using the ingredients reported on the packet and website, and a series of sieves, I reverse engineered VAN so that we could make it ourselves from scratch.
The back of the packet quotes the following ingredients:
Rolled oats, cracked barley, flax seed meal, whole cracked oats, carrots, split peas, calcium carbonate, parsley, kelp, lecithin, barley grass, vitC, dried garlic.
Assuming they are listed by conventional order of largest fraction to smallest, you can see that VAN is mostly grains (oats and barley), with some minor fractions for nutrition and taste.
The dishes photographed below show sieved fractions from 50g of VAN. I mixed the bag very well by shaking, before drawing this sample. For fractions containing multiple ingredients of similar size, I picked out the pieces with forceps (for example, all the carrot pieces). I then weighed the fractions to convert the ingredient to an overall percentage by weight. Due to the limit of measurement on my equipment, there are errors around these estimates and the totals do not add to 100%. But hey, this is nutrition, not chemistry.
From top to bottom: 1: split peas, 2: rolled oats, 3: cracked barley and oats, 4: carrot, 5: cracked barley and oat fragments, 6: fine grain/fibre/greens/carrot, 7: powder and meal
Weights for VAN fractions pictured above
So VAN is mostly cheap grain—around 50-55% oats and barley by weight, divided between rolled oats, cracked oats, and cracked barley. Dehydrated peas and carrots make up close to 10% of the mix. Judging by the substantial meal fraction and flax seed meal’s appearance as 3rd in ingredients list, it composes something like 20 – 25%. Then the remaining 10 – 20% is formed by the dried greens and supplements.
Using this guide, I concocted my own raw dog food supplement porridge recipe:
Recipe for 1 kg dry dog porridge. To be prepared in batches by mixing 1:1.5 volumes dry porridge to room temperature water, and allowed to Lacto ferment for some hours.
One could just feed raw carrot from time to time instead of dried, or sub grain fractions for other grains if necessary. The important thing with these bulk ingredients is to get fiber, carbs, and protein in there. Oats have a different protein and fat content to barley, so I wouldn’t sub them wholesale for each other, however the form they take could be flexible.
Supplements. VAN contains VitC, Lecithin, and Calcium carbonate as supplements in the mix. The calcium amount is easy to dose given the information on the package (2800mg/kg), however the others are difficult to extrapolate from my weighing. The safest policy is therefore to feed foods rich in these elements as well. e.g. fish/eggs/organs/soy for lecithin, and fruit and veges for vitamin C. VAN needs to be nutritionally complete when mixed with mince, yet my own mix does not need to be as rigorous if we are sensible in supplementing Pixel’s diet with other foods.
Puppies. This is not designed for puppies. We trusted products nutritionally designed for growing dogs when Pixel was a pup.
Some tips on sourcing ingredients
With the best deals I’ve found on bulk ingredients, I estimate the final cost of my home made mix to be $5.15/kg.
Edit: I have updated the original recipe with less garlic after the original turned out to be rather pungent.
If you are seated in an emergency exit row you may be called upon to assist crew members in the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation.
Those who contemplate disaster may enjoy the extra leg room. Thankfully, the probability of any given academic career stalling and rapidly losing altitude is orders of magnitude higher than it happening on your average flight, but my conceit is simply to make the point that preparing for emergency leads to a more comfortable ride. The same can be said for bunker-dwelling, tin-can stockpiling Doomsday Preppers, who are easy to make fun of, except that their backs must be stiffened by a dose of confidence inspired by addressing their perceived existential threat.
In this uncertain and hyper-competitive job market with falling availability of research-focused academic positions, if a postdoc is not preparing to walk away every two or three years they’re a star-performing outlier, or blissfully unaware. It is shocking therefore how often I have encountered postdoc research scientists who simply have never thought about how to get a job outside of their narrow research domain. This should start in their PhD years. In fact, in light of the harsh jobs climate in research, it is unethical for a supervisor or university department to be ignoring the pressure for postgrad students to develop career capital that can serve them and the community outside the narrow field of academic research.
At the end of my first postdoc in 2015, I was beset by anxiety blooming from the combination of scarce opportunities and academic job rejections. I needed to look beyond academia and it took me months to refine strategies to identify jobs that I might be capable of getting an interview for. Eventually I got an interview for a government department, which turned into a job offer. It sounded like an ok job, I didn’t end up taking it, but the fact that I had been offered a decently paying position after successfully marketing my unique set of skills was strong salve to my career anxiety. It gave me some confidence that I could walk away when I needed to.
The chart below shows every ongoing role I’ve applied for since completing my PhD in 2013. As you can see, I have applied for 15 ongoing university academic roles in the past six years and received exactly one interview. Contrast this to the ongoing non-academic government jobs I’ve applied for (five), where I’ve attracted two job offers—a substantially higher strike rate! My research is not easily and directly tied to government priorities, so I’d argue that my single case study supports the assertion that the world outside the ivory pressure cooker is wide and full of opportunities.
I have applied for 24 ongoing jobs since 2013. My two job offers have come from non-academic government roles, for which I have only made five applications. (Scroll below article to see the same visualisation for fixed-term applications)
In light of my experience, this post is for academics who want some pragmatic advice on accessing the diversity of alternative careers.
– Learn to job hunt. You might not have ever used non-academic modes for job-hunting, you might be baffled as to what keywords will find you relevant positions, and one of the big uncertainties is often not knowing what’s available to you. So take the time to learn how to drive the commercial job advertisement search engines, as well as the relevant government and industry outlets. From the Australian point of view, this means Seek.com.au, federal, state, and local government job sites. Spend time using all the keywords you can think of, learn which ones are productive, then set auto-alerts for these (e.g., keyword “plant” was useful to me). Doing this, you will probably learn about interesting jobs you never knew existed.
Actually there are no jobs in “speciation”. Four employers misspelled “specification”.
– Scan for jobs early and often. Start looking early. Earlier than you think is necessary. Repeat your jobs search regularly, at least once a fortnight. Make it a part of your weekly routine, or spend time doing this instead of wasting time online on a demotivated Friday afternoon. It’s really not arduous. This ongoing jobs market research will a) arm you with information about the reality of the jobs market before you need it, and b) identify opportunities that might sound attractive now, perhaps even worth leaving a postdoc for. Don’t miss out on a promising alternative career opportunity because you weren’t paying attention.
– Learn to apply for non-academic jobs.This is a big one, and something you want to practice well before your first “must-get” job. Other industries have their peculiar CV or resume formats, and virtually no industry has CV conventions like academia. Learn to craft a CV targeted to the job/industry. For example, consider adding a “skills and expertise” section highlighting your strengths and transferrable skills. While you might need to completely overhaul your academic CV, that doesn’t mean you have to avoid mentioning all your papers or teaching. Just re-phrase and perhaps contract the detail. For example, I reduced my teaching experience to eight lines on a recent CV because it offers evidence of important skills, but the detail of subjects taught and years of experience don’t matter outside tertiary teaching. Learning to apply for non-academic jobs is learning to market your skills to a non academic audience. A PhD and postdoc in science equips you with a diversity of useful skills, but you have to translate them into the keywords that employers want to hear. Examples of skills most STEM academics can speak to include:
| Communication | Analytical | Management: projects & people | Technical |
| Writing complex and technical subject matter for specialists
Communicating complex and technical concepts to non-specialists Professional oral presentation and seminars Grant writing Tertiary teaching to a diverse student population
|
Research and synthesis of specialist and technical information
Critical thinking Higher order logic and reasoning Executing sound professional judgment from expert knowledge Conducting and interpreting statistical analysis Experimental design Rigorous attention to detail An ability to quickly assimilate new and often complex information |
Managing complex and competing priorities
Supervision and mentorship Communicating with influence, in writing or in person Working effectively in teams, building and maintaining collaborations Working independently with minimal supervision, demonstrating initiative Careful and effective stakeholder engagement |
Programming skills
Laboratory skills Field skills Data visualization GIS |
– Practise applying. Even if you don’t think you’ll take the job, apply anyway. If you’re offered an interview, you might find out information that changes your mind on accepting the job. If you’re offered a job, whether or not you accept, I guarantee this will make you feel better about possible future academic extinction.
– Arm yourself with skills for your desired job. See a job you like, but can’t fulfil the selection criteria? Great. Now you know what you need. Find the time during your postdoc to develop some of these skills. Craft yourself as a candidate for the job you want, ideally by building skills that you can apply to your research now. The counter to this is: Avoid sinking time into skills that are not marketable outside academia. This is a tough line to walk, because some skills that might serve you in research are a hard sell on the outside. For example, learning to master that peculiar and poorly-written R package for detecting hybrids in polyploid organisms, or the latest technique for extracting DNA from sub-fossil sea-urchins might be useful for your research program now, but long-term useless. Can you get a collaborator on that, and instead spend time learning general stats and programming skills to analyse and visualise the results?
– Network, and learn from others. Don’t just sit on the internet reading quit-lit. Tee-up coffee meetings with other scientists who have made the jump. Ask them the obvious and practical questions you think sound dumb. Meet for coffee with people you don’t know who work in the jobs markets you want to explore. Find out: where are the jobs?, how are people getting them?, what are the attractive things about the job you might be overlooking?, what are the negative things you might be overlooking? Networks pay off in unforeseen ways. A 30 minute coffee meeting with someone new is never a wasted 30 minutes.
– Share job information, help each other! Whether or not it’s an academic job, keep your close colleagues and collaborators in the loop. While an isolated job ad can be zero-sum, you operate in an environment of repeated opportunities that is certainly not zero-sum. If you’re applying for a lectureship, don’t let it pass by your postdoc colleagues, share the job ad (but only to the nice, supportive, friendly ones). If you don’t get the position, you’d prefer they got it than a stranger, right? If you see an attractive non-academic job that’s not for you, pass it on to that postdoc colleague who seems like a good fit, even if they are not looking for jobs. A small network of colleagues helping one another catch the opportunities that fall through individual nets.
Overall, the most important and productive thing is to prepare yourself for an exit before you need it, even if you never need it. Taking concrete and practical steps towards building a safety net will give you confidence working under uncertainty. Even if you stay in academia your whole life, never having to break the emergency glass, planning for the event will be invaluable experience to pass on to your future students.
All 16 fixed-term roles and fellowships I have applied for since 2013.
I recently put together some material on my work for the University of Melbourne open day. As a teaser for the papers in current preparation, here’s an abstract and some visuals on the project.
While we simply do not know what pollinates many of Australia’s plants, there is good evidence emerging showing Australia to be a global hotspot for bird-pollination. This raises questions about what ecological and evolutionary factors might encourage plant lineages to adapt to use birds as couriers for their pollen. As well, we might ask what the outcomes are when a plant species ties its reproductive fortunes to a bird, rather than an insect.
My project employs custom cameras designed for motion-capture data capture of insect visitors to flowers, in order to demonstrate contrasting bird versus insect visitation in pairs of closely related native shrubs. Fine-scale population genetic analysis in these plants is revealing evidence for systemic differences in the movement of pollen under these different pollinator regimes.
Styphelia stomarrhena is pollinated exclusively by birds.
The video below shows bird visitation by a number of honeyeater species, as well as the way in which floral morphology excludes bee pollinators from accessing pollen or nectar in Styphelia stomarrhena.
Styphelia xerophylla is the sister species to S. stomarrhena and has evolved a tight relationship with a single species of native bee: Leioproctus macmillanii.
The videos below show motion-captured footage of the native pollinator of Styphelia xerophyllum, a female native bee (Leioproctus macmillani).
However the flowers are also visited by introduced honeybees (Apis mellifera).
A quick note on plant names: These species recently underwent taxonomic revision, moving them from genus Astroloma to Styphelia. It is rather new, hence the confusion over these shrubs apparently having two names.
In arid Southern Africa there exists a most fantastic species of cucumber. Like other cucumbers, its fleshy fruits are refreshingly high in water. Unlike just about any other flowering plant, these fruits develop beneath the ground, concealed and entombed by soil and sand. This bizarre trait gives the cucumber its scientific name: Cucumis humifructus, humi- referring to soil, fructus referring to fruit. To understand this deviant fruit, you must know who or what is responsible for fulfilling the purpose of this, or indeed any fruit: to promote the spread of its seeds. The only creature capable of finding and eating the fruit of Cucumis humifructus is one of our most fanciful and enigmatic mammals: the Aardvark. And this gives the plant its common name: the “Aardvark Cucumber“. In the context of seed dispersal, Cucumis humifructus is an extreme ecological specialist, having evolved to employ just a single species to eat its fruit and distribute its seed. The Aardvark itself is also an ecological specialist, its diet is composed exclusively of ants, plus the occasional Aardvark cucumber.
The Queensland Lungfish (Neoceratodus forsteri) is one of only a handful of extant lobe-finned fishes, having existed largely unchanged for over 100 million years—a time when the Cretaceous Empire of the Dinosaurs was at its ferocious zenith. The fish is remarkable for having the ability to breathe air via a rudimentary lung, which when combined with its fleshy limb-lobes, gives it the power to locomote and survive for days out of water. It is also the only fish with a soul (Figure 1). The age of first breeding for a lungfish female is 22 years. Read that again. 22 years! Lungfish development and reproduction is a longer and more drawn-out affair than our own spawning. You see, the lungfish is what ecologists would class as a K-selected organism, she grows slow, reproduces slow, and invests heavily in a few offspring. A temperate and upstanding lungfish will lay a few hundred eggs over her lifetime, while for contrast, the profligate and rapacious common carp can spawn 300,000 in a single season.
Figure 1: Cladogram for the vertebrates placing the evolutionary origin of the soul approximate to the divergence of the Actinopterygii.
So here I’ve described the extremities of two separate axes in ecological strategy. The generalist-specialist axis describes the narrowness with which certain organisms have adapted to specific niches in their environment. A generalist can tolerate a wide range of environmental variables, while specialists (Aardvark cucumbers) are exquisitely adapted to maximising the narrow case. The r- and K- selected life histories describe how organisms reproduce and grow, from boom-bust generations and mass dissemination of cheap offspring, to the heavy investment and delayed pay-off of fewer offspring, with better odds of survival for each one.
Academic science incentivizes production of K-selected specialists. Specialists are encouraged, and rewarded, because one has to specialise to not only reach the horizon of knowledge for a subject, but also to contribute to moving it back a meaningful amount. And academic scientists are K-selected. The gestation and development of a scientist is slow and long (4 years undergraduate and 3 years PhD at minimum), and the best outputs of academics take years to produce. It routinely takes years to get an original study from idea, to funded, to conducted, to published. It can routinely take a year to merely progress a paper from first submission to publication!
The problem with being a K-selected specialist however, is that they do very poorly in unpredictable and variable environments. The early career trajectory in research science is both highly unpredictable, and highly variable. With the scarcity of jobs, fixed term contracts lasting a maximum of three years and most frequently shorter, and low funding rates in grant schemes exacerbated for the young, those navigating this foggy career path frequently find themselves dealing with the anxiety of not knowing where or who they will be working with in the coming months. Add to that most support for ECRs drops off after five years, and its a direly unpredictable environment for a K-selected specialist to find itself in.
There are plenty of other careers that are similarly “contract-to-contract”. Freelancers, some Government roles, creatives, consultants, and so on. Compared to those careers though, academic success depends on the outcomes of projects borne of very long gestation periods (K- selected outputs). For a researcher, it can feel pointless developing new ideas, growing new collaborations, and applying for research funding if the funding outcomes are not known for nine months, and the money won’t be available for another six months—a future point for which they cannot forecast their own employment status. Therefore, many researchers must prepare to walk away every couple of years, a cycle that corrodes career momentum and mental health.
At the end of my first postdoc, I had a crisis. The end was steaming up and I had nothing to go to. While it’s a common feature of academic careers, no one knows how they will handle it until they get there. For many, it’s tough. The anxiety of the unknown can run riot through your life, dominating thoughts, detracting from focus at work, interrupting sleep, and sapping motivation—a cloud of noxious gas growing in saturation as the contract end date approaches.
I wasn’t totally surprised that it was hard to nail down another job straight away. What really caught me by surprise was how I responded to the uncertainty. Since I was a kid I had wanted to be a scientist, and now confronting the long-held idea that I may not be a professional biologist challenged a deeply held and largely unexamined part of my identity.
I was able to jump that chasm in 2015, and I’m on my third contract since that time. But I’m glad I went through that, because it forced me to face uncertainty, reflect, and adapt. I have learned to be ok with uncertainty, and today look at the possible future extinction of my research science career with much less emotion than I did four years ago. Not to say I don’t occasionally have bad days, but the days of amity now outweigh the days of anxiety.
In case the time I have invested in wrestling this might return some interest for postgrad students and postdocs with the same worries, here’s some unsolicited advice on building resilience in the face of postdoc career anxiety.
Where are the exits? The most important and productive thing to do is prepare yourself for an exit before you need it. I have a whole post on this in the works. So for now, lie down on this couch and lets talk about our feelings.
Is your job your identity? This is both an asset and a liability. Academic careers reward those who let career conform the shape of their lives. Surrender to it and your platter of opportunities broadens. But hitching your identity to a job also makes you vulnerable when things aren’t working out at work. Finding meaning outside of work is a healthy strategy for taking pressure off career as a means to fulfillment. Think of it like an investment portfolio, spreading risk and associated reward. If your relationships, family, pets, hobbies, community work etc are thriving and fulfilling, you’ll be buffered against career anxiety.
Another sensible strategy is re-framing your identity around skills, rather than a role. The talents and skills you hone are more a part of you than the job title, however society more often places prestige on the title, not the skills.
Thinking about what else you could or should be doing is totally normal. Everyone is doing it, all the time. Most postdocs I talk to, many lecturers, most people in most jobs. I don’t know if this cognitive bias has a name, but it probably should. There’s no harm in occasionally fantasizing about the vineyard/cafe/photography/alpaca business you could go and open, but you’re probably falling victim to the focusing effect (see below).
Exiting academia won’t be your last move. There’s only so much momentum a publication record gives you to exit, re-enter and remain competitive. This increases the stakes on the decision to leave or not. However your first move out of academia need not be immune to revision. Release yourself from the pressure of finding the perfect job straight out of research. Trying new things is the only way to settle on what works for you, and in many ways researchers have been conditioned to avoid swapping and changing, because singular focus and narrow expertise is rewarded in academia.
Beware the grass-is-greener. Focusing on contract impermanence might lead you to think that other jobs with ongoing status are more desirable than they really are. This is the focusing effect, where we compare complex things along only one or two axes of variation. Plenty of people with ongoing jobs are unhappy and think your job looks marvelous because…
There are perks to this job. In science and academia we have the opportunity, at times, to make work a pleasure. Take advantage of that. If you’re not going to get to do this job forever, focus on the good things, don’t make it shit for yourself. Enjoy the moment.
The abyss is exciting. The end of a contract and unemployment can be seen as a career existential oubliette, or an exciting opportunity forcing your hand into taking a risk and trying some new things. Framing is powerful. Deliberately try to look at the same event from different angles.
Talking to colleagues can get tough. Don’t whinge, but never avoid communicating the facts. If you let your anxiety too often cloud your interactions with co-workers, you will find no one wants to get stuck in a conversation with you. When you need to talk, find the colleagues/mentors who you trust and can speak to in confidence, vent to family/friends, or speak to a counselor.
Stop looking sideways. People are going to get the jobs you want and missed out on. People are holding jobs you could probably do better than them. Dwelling on the number of people with your equivalent expertise who have found an ongoing role is demoralizing and unhelpful. It is also classic survivorship bias. It is easy to count the number of jobs that get filled by someone other than you, but much harder to count the number of failed job applications alongside yours.
If you’re feeling down, get off Twitter. Academics on Twitter are commonly whining or flexing, neither of which will make you feel better.
You won’t starve, life goes on. You’re a highly trained, intelligent individual with skills to offer. I cannot speak for all economies, but in Australia there are jobs everywhere for people like you. It’s also the case that for most of us, we return to baseline fairly quickly and adapt to what’s in front of us. The very worst outcome of a career change is highly unlikely to live up to the weight of anxiety the transition can create.
Michael Whitehead 