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Mar. 8th, 2005 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bobcatmoranI'm guessing a good chunk of LJ users have posted this already, but the UK and US covers for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince have been released. You can see them at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org. I'm just waiting for people to make way too much out of the cover of the UK adult version.
Completely switching subjects, for my senior capstone, I'm writing about a fairly recently discovered behavioral quirk of spotted salamanders. Geez, you actually want to hear about my Paper of Unusual Size? *shrug* Okay.
Anyway, for years and years nobody really knew much about spotted salamanders (which I'm just going to refer to as "salamanders" hereafter because it's easier to type, and I'm lazy like that). It was known that they went to breeding ponds every spring, mated, and then went back to somewhere else on land. Lots of research was done on the larvae, because they stayed in the breeding ponds until they grew up, but practically nothing was known about the adult life cycle. Then it was discovered that the salamanders were fossorial, which does not mean that they're dead, but rather that they live underground.
So the salamanders are hiding underground most of the time. Fair enough. The question is, how are they getting there? The salamanders are so not physically equipped to be digging their own little tunnels and burrows. About twenty years ago, someone found out that they're actually using tunnels dug by small mammals. So that's what my paper's about. Research done so far on that phenomenon, what's still unknown, and how the unknowns can be answered.
One of the main reasons the salamanders stay underground is so they don't dry out. Being a good scientist, I tracked down an article from the 1960s on salmander dessication (drying out) so I would have something to cite for that part of my paper. The article looked at the rates at which salamanders dehydrated. Basically, the author looked at several species and sizes of salamanders to see how long it took them to lose 15% of their body weight due to dehydration. That's not exactly the nicest thing to do to the salamanders, but he seemed to be fairly humane for that part of the experiment, letting the salamanders coil up in a water-saving position, and as soon as they had hit the 15% point, letting them rehydrate back to normal.
However, the author actually killed several animals in the experiment. Part of the results consisted of reporting on average how much of their body weight the different species of salamanders could lose due to dehydration before they died. That just strikes me as appallingly inhumane. As a particularly morbid side note, the author noted that the dead salamanders lost water at the same rate as living salamanders in the same environment, and apparently someone had done something similar with frogs and found the same thing, which makes it even worse, that this has been done more than once.
I actually had a bit of a hard time focusing on what the author was trying to say because I was just sitting there, staring at the paper, flabbergasted at the fact that this experiment had killed off so many of the test animals. I know that wasn't the point of the experiment — the point was to look at rate of dehydration, not death rate due to dehydration. Seeing how dehydrated the animals could get before they died does nothing to help determine the rate of water loss.
It looks to me like he might have gotten the data he needed and then was like, "Well, I have all these salamanders I don't need any more. I wonder how much of their body weight they can lose due to dessication before they die?" The whole thing was just so sick and wrong. He wasn't focusing on his original purpose. He was just doing something for the sake of knowledge's sake.
I think that's why I hate Shou Tucker's character in Fullmetal Alchemist so much. It's just so easy sometimes as a scientist, particuarly as a biologist, to go ahead and do something ethically sketchy in pursuit of knowledge, and there's huge grey areas out there. Is it all right to trap animals to take a census of an area? Is it all right to inject lab rats with a chemical which will make their leg hypersensitive to any touch if it can lead to a drug to lessen chronic pain? If an animal is marked for tracking purposes, will the tracking device make it harder for them to get around? Methods change all the time because someone's discovered that a certain type of trap fills up with water when it rains, drowning anything in it, or that a bird with a certain colored leg band won't be able to find a mate (or, conversely, that the females find males with orange leg bands very attractive — true story).
I'm not saying that if a scientist doesn't pay attention, they'll end up going so far as to do something as extreme as transmute together their dog and daughter, but I think it is so important to keep sight of your goal and keep asking, "Is this related to my hypothesis? Is there a better, more ethical way I could be doing this?"
Completely switching subjects, for my senior capstone, I'm writing about a fairly recently discovered behavioral quirk of spotted salamanders. Geez, you actually want to hear about my Paper of Unusual Size? *shrug* Okay.
Anyway, for years and years nobody really knew much about spotted salamanders (which I'm just going to refer to as "salamanders" hereafter because it's easier to type, and I'm lazy like that). It was known that they went to breeding ponds every spring, mated, and then went back to somewhere else on land. Lots of research was done on the larvae, because they stayed in the breeding ponds until they grew up, but practically nothing was known about the adult life cycle. Then it was discovered that the salamanders were fossorial, which does not mean that they're dead, but rather that they live underground.
So the salamanders are hiding underground most of the time. Fair enough. The question is, how are they getting there? The salamanders are so not physically equipped to be digging their own little tunnels and burrows. About twenty years ago, someone found out that they're actually using tunnels dug by small mammals. So that's what my paper's about. Research done so far on that phenomenon, what's still unknown, and how the unknowns can be answered.
One of the main reasons the salamanders stay underground is so they don't dry out. Being a good scientist, I tracked down an article from the 1960s on salmander dessication (drying out) so I would have something to cite for that part of my paper. The article looked at the rates at which salamanders dehydrated. Basically, the author looked at several species and sizes of salamanders to see how long it took them to lose 15% of their body weight due to dehydration. That's not exactly the nicest thing to do to the salamanders, but he seemed to be fairly humane for that part of the experiment, letting the salamanders coil up in a water-saving position, and as soon as they had hit the 15% point, letting them rehydrate back to normal.
However, the author actually killed several animals in the experiment. Part of the results consisted of reporting on average how much of their body weight the different species of salamanders could lose due to dehydration before they died. That just strikes me as appallingly inhumane. As a particularly morbid side note, the author noted that the dead salamanders lost water at the same rate as living salamanders in the same environment, and apparently someone had done something similar with frogs and found the same thing, which makes it even worse, that this has been done more than once.
I actually had a bit of a hard time focusing on what the author was trying to say because I was just sitting there, staring at the paper, flabbergasted at the fact that this experiment had killed off so many of the test animals. I know that wasn't the point of the experiment — the point was to look at rate of dehydration, not death rate due to dehydration. Seeing how dehydrated the animals could get before they died does nothing to help determine the rate of water loss.
It looks to me like he might have gotten the data he needed and then was like, "Well, I have all these salamanders I don't need any more. I wonder how much of their body weight they can lose due to dessication before they die?" The whole thing was just so sick and wrong. He wasn't focusing on his original purpose. He was just doing something for the sake of knowledge's sake.
I think that's why I hate Shou Tucker's character in Fullmetal Alchemist so much. It's just so easy sometimes as a scientist, particuarly as a biologist, to go ahead and do something ethically sketchy in pursuit of knowledge, and there's huge grey areas out there. Is it all right to trap animals to take a census of an area? Is it all right to inject lab rats with a chemical which will make their leg hypersensitive to any touch if it can lead to a drug to lessen chronic pain? If an animal is marked for tracking purposes, will the tracking device make it harder for them to get around? Methods change all the time because someone's discovered that a certain type of trap fills up with water when it rains, drowning anything in it, or that a bird with a certain colored leg band won't be able to find a mate (or, conversely, that the females find males with orange leg bands very attractive — true story).
I'm not saying that if a scientist doesn't pay attention, they'll end up going so far as to do something as extreme as transmute together their dog and daughter, but I think it is so important to keep sight of your goal and keep asking, "Is this related to my hypothesis? Is there a better, more ethical way I could be doing this?"
