Spring 2008 - Graduate Group in Ecology

Newsletter of the ecology graduate group
The EGG
Winter/Spring 2008
In this issue
But officer, I’m a marine ecologist
A good dissertation is a done dissertation
A couple of book reviews

Editors Corner
Winter/Spring 2008| Issue 1
Editors
Karthik Ram
Liz Moffitt
YOU?
Send submissions to
karthik@ucdavis.edu
After having been in Davis for a few years, you’ll know that
it’s really spring time when the UGGs disappear and the
Juicy shorts abound in the quad. Well, that and the pollen
floating around everywhere (is it just us or is it really bad
this year?). That's not all. It is also the season when grant
agencies and jobs get back to you on the applications you
slaved over this past year. Remember working on those late
nights revisions, only to find out that the deadline was
midnight eastern and not pacific ? No matter how things
turned out, take some time to be good to yourself. Graduate
school can be is rough and one needs to recharge before
going back for another round. If you need suggestions, try
the coast (Fisherman’s festival in Bodega bay this weekend,
for example) or picnic day the following weekend. Either
way, we hope you’re out and about making the best of the
nice weather.
We continue the slim issue trend, this time featuring a
faculty poll for advice handed down from their graduate
advisors. I (Karthik) already know what I’ll be telling my
future students. Grow a thick skin early and don’t take
rejections personally.
- Eds.
PS: The egg rarely rejects any submissions we get so go
ahead and email us something. We promise we’ll send you a
really nice acceptance email.
NEXT DEADLINE: MAY 15
Online archives:
http://ecology.ucdavis.edu/administration/egg.ht
ml

From the archives of the sleep-deprived…Heidi W.
Weiskel
“But Officer,
I’m a marine
ecologist!”
I leave Davis late. I am exhausted, but I
do not admit this to myself, because I have to get
home. I am playing all the games—loud music,
leaving chatty messages on my sleeping friends’ cell
phones, gum, singing (oh dear), rolling the window
down, blasting the AC. I make it as far as the
Strawberry Village/Mill Valley exit on 101 south. I
am 20 minutes from home but I am hallucinating
and realize I must get off the highway. There’s a
frontage road near the ACE hardware I have been to
100 times and which feels enough like home that I
decide it is a good place to pull over and just close
my eyes for a moment or two.
If you have ever been awakened by the
brightest light you can imagine, you’ll know what
I experienced next. “Hello, God?” Nope, just the
Tiburon cops. I roll down the window and squint at
the guy, who is also squinting at me.
Itell this story as a cautionary tale to those
who operate under the assumption that
sleep is a voluntary undertaking.
One evening last summer I was driving back
from Davis to my apartment in San Francisco. I had
been in the field all morning, then had a meeting
and run errands at school, and was now returning
home. It was about 2:30 in the morning, and I was
approaching a 24-day, as I had been up well before
dawn to prep for sampling.
Working in soft sediment habitats is fun
and important but there is no getting around the
mud factor. Even the most conscientious of us can
get, well, filthy, all in a day’s work. This was not
a concern while in the field, nor at Davis, but it
became a concern as I was driving home. Keep in
mind, in addition to the general mud condition,
that my usually unruly hair was no doubt in fairly
severe disarray by the end of the day. Keep that
image. Then add the boxes of supplies in my truck:
a big Fisher order had just come in. I had boxes of
syringes, centrifuge tubes, heaps of plastic bags,
and gloves. I also had a GPS, flashlight, duct tape,
shovel, and wire cutters. Do you see where this is
going?
“Ma’am? What are you doing here?” I am
immediately pissed and feel like responding, “1)
Isn’t it obvious, I’m sleeping? And 2) I am nowhere
near old enough to be addressed as ‘Ma’am.’”
Instead I explain as politely as possible that I was
exhausted and pulled over for a quick nap before
driving home to the city.
“Your truck doesn’t have any plates…want
to explain that to us?” the less friendly (more
menacing) of the two cops says to me. “Unh, yes.
I just bought it, and the plates haven’t come yet.”
“Do you have proof of that?” I am curious where
he’s going with this line of questioning, and cast
my mind around to what I might have in the truck,
which I did just buy in April, that would prove that.
Before I can answer the officer satisfactorily, he
moves on. “What’s up with the shovel in the bed of
your truck? You on your way somewhere?”
“Oh, the shovel. Yes, well, I’m a marine
ecologist; I work in San Francisco Bay, studying the
effects of nutrient pollution on invasive gastro—”
“You sure you aren’t running from
something? Somewhere? Where are you coming
from?”
“Well, I live in the city but am coming from

Davis, where I go to school.”
“Looking like that? You don’t look so good.”
(This is not an embellishment, the cop actually said
this to me.)
“Yes, well, we don’t usually wear our best
clothes out in the mud.”
This answer does nothing to reassure the
officers. In fact, I am beginning to realize that
nothing I am saying is getting through…is being a
marine ecologist a cover for some activity I don’t
know about? What can I do to convince them?
“Ma’am, we’re going to have to search your
truck.”
I can’t believe it. I am angry, now. Surely they
cannot suspect me of wrongdoing. I was bloody
napping, for Christ’s sake!
One officer takes me out of the truck and we
go around and I sit on the tailgate, while the other
officer goes through everything in the cab. “Whoa,
what are all these syringes for,” he comes over,
holding the box in front of him. “Can you explain
400 syringes to us?”
would discover the meth if they just looked hard
enough. When none surfaced (shocker), they pulled
out their ticket book.
“You have got to be kidding! What have I
done?” I uttered, before thinking better of it.
“No sleeping on a frontage road, Ma’am.”
I am not sure if I was more incredulous or more
indignant, but something on my face appeared to
make them hesitate, and then, the citation book
disappeared.
“Just never do it again, Ma’am.”
Note to self. “Thanks for your time,
gentlemen! ‘Twas a pleasure I shan’t forget soon.”
And I was free to go.
So next time you are thinking of pulling an
all-nighter and getting busted by the cops, think
twice. Or at least, do not rely on being a marine
ecologist to keep you out of trouble.
“Oh yes,” I smile, happy at last to be back
on my turf, where I can make sense of the scene.
“Those are for my samples from San Francisco Bay.”
“Your samples?” “Yes, I smile as brightly as I
can, though I imagine I do look a sight. Having been
woken from a deep slumber, I am dirty, my hair
is unkempt, and my eyes are probably bloodshot.
The significance of their suspicion has yet to hit me
fully.
“What about these tubes and gloves? Are
those for more of your ‘samples’?” The officer
smiles in the least friendly way I can imagine. Unn…
Eventually, the two have completed
what was likely the most exciting event of their
week. Tiburon does not get much action and the
officer who had searched my truck was clearly
disappointed. I believe they had been certain they

A Good
Dissertation
Is A Done
Dissertation
After nagging numerous people to write or
suggest ideas for the EGG, it was great to see
a brilliant suggestion from Mark Lubell. During
a conversation with one of his students, Mark
recalled three ‘pearls of wisdom’ handed down
from his advisor (see first one below). With no
expectations whatsoever, we polled the GGE
faculty to see if they could recall similar pearls of
wisdom handed down to them from their advisors
(hey, they were grad students at some point too).
We were quite happy to see many responses to
our little poll. We hope you find them inspiring
(although it is a little late for some of us. or just
maybe Karthik).
- Eds
If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.
These detailed field logs provided contextual
material for surveys and other quantitative data. I
remain immensely grateful to her to this day.
-Ben Orlove
Publish early and often.
-Peter Richerson
Do good work and publish it in a timely manner.
And a great recipe for grilling salmon involving
lemon, garlic and olive oil (I worked on the
physiology of salmon olfaction and only needed the
noses so that is all I ate, being very poor).
-Gabrielle Nevitt
You are known as much by your worst papers as
you are by your best ones.
-Alan Hastings
Even Michelangelo started with a single brush
stroke (in reference to writer’s block)
It’s a matter of emphasis (in reference to writing
strategically)
-Mark Lubell
Take Professors, not classes!
-Bruce Winterhalder
Just because it has been done before doesn’t mean
it’s been done well!
You should write that up, it’d make a nice little
paper, it won’t take you very long...
Select a clear story and write that up, you don’t
have to publish everything!
From John Lawton who wasn’t my advisor but I
wish he had been because mine provided little
other than funding!
-Marcel Holyoak

There’s not really any such thing as an informal
seminar. You’re judged every time you speak.
-Steven Morgan
Set deadlines (with emphasis on the plural).
Write at least two pages every day. Maybe some
days you’ll just throw them out, but usually that
will get you beyond writer’s block and on to the
good stuff.
-Tom Tomich
Treasure your exceptions.
This is a multigenerational term from Genetics
which can be equally applied to any field.
Following up on the single finding that we did not
expect can often lead to new discoveries.
-Bernie May
Just because a man has a Ph.D. after his name
doesn’t mean he isn’t a horse’s ass.
Cherish your freedom as a graduate student. If
you get a tenure-track job you’ll never be this free
again.
Your oral exam is like testifying in court. Anything
you volunteer can be used against you.
Beware of validation by frequency of citation.
Always go back to the original source [in the
literature]. Never assume a secondary source got it
right. They often don’t. And that’s all-too-often selfserving!
Weedy vegetation is 1000% more interesting than
climax.
-Art Shapiro
It’s not just about hypothesis testing, it’s about
determining relative importance.
Never let anyone sell you short.
Always have a 5-minute talk that you can use to
convince anyone that your research is important.
I’ll always be your PhD advisor (as in, you can never
call me your former PhD advisor).
-Susan Harrison
Don’t use me as a role model!
- transmitted by one of my “mentors” as they were
barely squeaking through the tenure process. I
didn’t get many pearls of wisdom but I distinctly
remember this one.
-Anonymous
I didn’t get many pearls of wisdom from my advisor,
other than specific comments on my research.
However, I can tell you a pearl I wish I had gotten
from my advisor:
Write up your thesis as you go along. Don’t wait
until the last year to write all your papers. That
way, 1) you have more publications when you finish
and are more competitive for post-docs, and 2) the
final writing up year is not nearly so onerous.
-Sharon Strauss
If you’re doing it right, everything is more
complicated than it looks.

Sex, Drugs, and
Cocoa Puffs:
A low culture
manifesto
by Chuck Klosterman
I learned about this book while trolling on Amazon.
com one day, presumably shopping for Christmas
gifts. The title and front cover caught my eye.
They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but this
platitude must have never been meant for actual
books, right? While the cover hooked me, the first
few pages reeled me in. In the first essay in this
collection, Klosterman discusses how he will never
have a satisfying relationship because all women
born between 1965 and 1978 are in love with
John Cusack.* If Klosterman is going to discuss
the philosophical merit of John Cusack movies,
I’m in – I had to buy the book. The Davis library
doesn’t have it, which I will generously attribute to
the book’s poppiness, and not to the quality of the
library.
The essays are intelligent and funny analyses of
the pop culture of a certain generation (see dates
above). There are essays about the video game
The Sims, how The Real World changed everyday
Americans, how the author can make any life
decision by asking “What would the Boston Celtics
do?”, why alt-country music is meaningless, and
the artistic merits of the evangelical end of days
Left Behind book series. Klosterman discusses the
significance of these things on our daily lives in
ways I doubt you have thought of (and if you have,
let’s be friends, and you can entertain me).
The San Francisco Chronicle called Klosterman
“The reigning Kasparov of pop culture witsmatching”
and I think that about sums it up. I
love this book. Reading it is like talking to your
weirdest, smartest friend – the one who likes to
make social analyses out of everything. It was
definitely worth the $11.20. I think I’ll read it
again.
*I would argue that the Klosterman is probably
underestimating Cusack’s range, and the date
should probably be pushed up to (ahem) 1979, at
least.
The Lovely Bones
By Alice Sebold
A friend of mine forced this book on me and told
me I had to read it. The one thing I knew about it
– that it was about a murdered girl – kept it near
the bottom of my book pile for over a year. It
sounded like a downer. Turns out, it really isn’t.
I got desperate for fiction a few weeks ago and
finished it in within a week. Ms. Sebold created a
book that’s hard to put down.
So it’s about a murdered girl. She dies in the
beginning of the book and narrates the rest
from her heaven. Don’t worry, it doesn’t get all
touchy-feely, Tuesdays with Morrie. She watches
how her family deals with the loss and how they
finally start to move on. It seems like it could be a
realistic portrayal of how a family might deal with
something like this. She also learns a lot about her
killer and his past – so as you read you find out
what happened, while waiting for the police and
family to find enough clues to piece it together.
I don’t really think I can express why this book was
good and why you might enjoy it. Its description
just sounds so terrible. Just hear me when I say
that it wasn’t depressing, and I read it exclusively
for a week while the other ten books I’m in the
middle of just sat on the nightstand gathering dust.
Want to see more review by Liz? Send her some
suggestions (eamoffitt@ucdavis.edu) or submit your
own

Paddling the
Putah Creek
Reserve
by Tom Rambo
yay spring
It was raining lightly, 60 degrees, and very calm
when I got on the water at around 7:15 this morning.
The overcast made the light very flat and with
the clean air the turning fall colors and clouds
reflecting on the glassy water were beautifully
clear and vibrant. My paddle was highlighted
by the screeching of ospreys flying overhead as I
passed by, a great blue heron lifting off just ahead
of my boat, and the chattering of belted kingfishers
alarmed at my presence.
There is one little drop, a breached weir, about 18
inches or so on the creek that I always run. This is
where a few weeks ago I tore loose an old patch
on the stern of my boat when I hit bottom because
the fall water was so low. This morning there was
an Asian gentleman fishing at this drop and when
I went over it the loose patch snagged his line as I
continued stroking down river. It didn’t take long
before I realized the resistance I was feeling just
might be his pole and reel dragging behind me, and
it was so. I pulled over and was able to easily free
his line and carefully hauled in the reel and pole,
which I hiked back upstream, uncertain as to what
kind of reception I would receive. Fishermen and
kayakers often have differing perspectives on which
of their activities should have the right of way on
rivers, but I felt it was important to do the right
thing regardless. I don’t think he really knew what
had transpired, as the pole had been unattended
when I passed by. To my relief, the incredulous
fisherman was very excited to recover his pole and
reel and expressed that with emotions and the only
words of English I think he knew, repeating “thank
you! thank you!” So began my day.
Ed note: This happened around Nov. 21, 2007.