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Kids, go outside… or maybe not?

My family is lucky enough to live in a city that is surrounded by vast tracts of wilderness. We’re also lucky to live in a city that has seen fit to preserve at least some of that wilderness within the urban boundaries. While Prince George has a long way to go in terms of truly being a green city (ahem… let’s at least start with a municipal recycling program instead of just talking about it), people here tend to love the nature that surrounds them. In fact, I would guess that many of the residents here – both longtime citizens and more recent arrivals – a big drawing point to life in central BC was the beauty of nature that surrounds us here. The city is surrounded by lakes. We’re at the junction of two rivers. Jasper National Park is just down the road. There is an awesome inland rainforest just to the east of us. And that’s just skimming the surface of what’s available to residents here.

Did I mention that we’re lucky?

I assume that many of you who read this blog (all six of you, not including my mom), enjoy spending time in nature too, wherever you may live. So think back to your own childhood for a moment. Did that love of nature emerge because you sat in the basement all day playing Atari? Or did you spend a lot of time out-of-doors, both with and without your parents or other relatives? I suspect that it’s safe to bet on the latter in most cases. Basement dwelling does not generally create lifelong naturalists.

However, today I get the impression that our municipal leaders would prefer that kids not get outside; or rather, if they do get outside, it’s only under strictly controlled conditions.

Why do I say this? It turns out that someone in town, whose kids obviously enjoy playing outside in the yard, decided that a prudent and completely unobtrusive thing to do would be to post a small sign obtained from the British Columbia Automobile Association on their own front lawn to remind passing motorists that there were kids in the area. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to me, both as a father of two boys and as a driver.

The city of Prince George, however, thought otherwise, and the family was sent a bylaw warning to remove their sign or face a fine. That, in itself, is well off the mark. But the part that really irked me was a comment from the city manager of transportation operations in response to a media inquiry:

“Parents should encourage their children to play in playgrounds as playing near the street is not the safest place to play.”

The thing that bugs me about this comment is its deeper implication that spontaneous play in a child’s own yard is not safe and that the only places that kids should be are in a playground (highly supervised, of course) or, presumably, in their house. This comment leaves the impression that, in the mind of our city officials, a yard is inherently unsafe.

This is not surprising, of course, since the notion of the “unsafe outdoors” is likely one of the main reasons that parents don’t let their kids play outside as much as they used to. But is keeping kids indoors most of the time and then shuttling them back and forth to tightly-monitored playground- or soccer-type situations really any safer in the long run? Is it really safer for them to learn to be sedentary as kids and head off into a sedentary adulthood, as modeled by their parents? Are the indoors really safer anyhow, in terms of overall household accidents? Does attempting to remove all dangers from kids teach them how to monitor, assess, and avoid real dangers when they inevitably encounter them? Is it safe for the local and global environment to be raising a generation of kids who don’t know anything about their local natural spaces because they never get out into them – and who thus have a mainly academic (if that) knowledge of nature?

So, to the good leaders of our fine city I say this:

Please take a serious look at our city’s bylaws and their enforcement and think about what they mean for parents who want their kids to spend time outdoors. You have done a great job in creating and maintaining natural spaces throughout our city, and for that I truly applaud you. But if we want the next generation to appreciate and work to protect those spaces – and to care about our environment in general – we need to find ways to encourage parents and kids to walk and play in the local environment. Messages that such play is somehow unsafe, combined with overzealous enforcement of bylaws that have the effect of stifling such childhood activity, need to be carefully reconsidered.

(On a side note: A great book on this very topic is Richard Louv‘s “Last Child in the Woods.” I highly recommend it to anyone who cares for children and who cares about their welfare and the welfare of our planet in general.)

(Another note – added 5-VII-13: I just noticed that the Nature Conservancy of Canada has a great little article in the Globe and Mail about a children spending time in nature. You can get it here.)

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Would I? You bet!

If you’re at all interested in the natural world and how we record it and learn about it, be sure to read a recent great post from Chris Buddle entitled “Labels tell stories: natural history and ecology from dead spiders in vials.”

Chris’ big question, about helping to digitize the spider collection at the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes is this:

(W)ould YOU help database if you could go on-line and see these kinds of images? Does it grab your attention? Even if 20-30 people agreed to database 75 or so specimens, each, the Salticidae would be done! (and, of course, someone would have to take images, and edit them beforehand).

My answer is a resounding “yes!”

In his post, Chris mentions Notes from Nature, where you can transcribe information from insect, plant and (soon) bird specimens. I’ve been having fun with that work for awhile now, and I have had some fun with labels as well.

So, to back up Chris’ contention that there are interesting stories to be found on labels, how about this label that I transcribed a few weeks ago as a start…

 What’s the story here that I thought was interesting? Well, you can see on the bottom label that the determination was done in 1975 (26 years after initial collection) by John T. Huber. John is a noted entomologist with the Canadian Forest service, some of whose work was recently in the news with the discovery of a tiny, tiny, tiny insect. John identified this little cuckoo wasp in 1975 and I did the much easier task of transcribing the label in 2013. So two currently active Canadian entomologist Hubers have pored over this Elampus marginatus specimen separated in time by 38 years.

So, again, yes, I would be very interested in working on Canadian specimens as well, because I like stories.

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Happy birthday, PeerJ

A quick post to note PeerJ‘s first birthday.

PeerJ is a biological open access journal – backed by an excellent publishing team, an advisory board replete with luminaries, and a diverse editorial board – that also happens to come with some interesting twists that are bound to change the scientific publishing paradigm.

First, instead of paying an open access publishing fee for each paper that is accepted, authors each pay a lifetime membership fee (paid memberships start at US$99). If you and your co-authors have a membership, you can publish in PeerJ. In order to keep up your membership, you need to regularly participate in journal activities such as editing, reviewing, or commenting on articles. In other words, with one membership you can publish open access articles in PeerJ for life.

That, in itself, is a twist that makes PeerJ unique.

The second twist – and the one that I’d like to briefly focus on here – is PeerJ PrePrints.

A preprint is a not-yet-peer-reviewed version of a manuscript that is placed on a public server for early dissemination to the rest of the scientific community. Preprints serve to provide early access by other researchers to data, results, and interpretations. They allow for pre-review discussion and criticism of the ideas that, if taken to heart by the authors, serve to strengthen the manuscript for eventual peer review and publication. And, when uploaded to a recognized preprint service, preprints set a date-stamped precedent for the ideas that they contain. To great extent, a preprint is simply a conference presentation or poster in formal manuscript form with broader access and better DOI-based citation/recognition.

Physicists, astronomers, computer scientists, and mathematicians (to name a few) have dealt in preprints for many years now. For some reason, the biological sciences have languished behind in this regard. But things are changing. Rapidly.

And PeerJ has played a major role in that change over the past year.

As of this post, there are 29 PeerJ PrePrints at the journal site, some of which are in their V.2 or V.3 forms (yes, you can update your preprint as you receive comments, etc.). That list is bound to grow in the coming years.

Keep an eye on PeerJ. It’s going places. I’m hoping that my lab will soon submit a few preprints and journal articles, and I hope that you are considering it as well.

NOTE #1: While the world of biological academic publishing is changing in regard to preprints, there are still some hold-out journals which either have ambiguous policies or which flat-out reject papers that have been published as preprints. You can use these tools – here and here – to make decisions regarding preprinting of your upcoming manuscript.

NOTE #2: At the membership link, you’ll have noticed that there is a free membership that allows you to submit one public PeerJ Preprint per year. So it’s a great way to try out the system without spending a single dime.

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Fear and loathing

Over the past few weeks, Prince George and other parts of British Columbia have seen a massive outbreak of tent caterpillars. And that, of course, means that people have been talking about insects. A lot. In fact almost everyone in town has become, at least for a short while, an amateur entomologist. In some cases, I have heard some pretty interesting observations from people. There have also been a few fascinating forays into applied economic entomology as well – my favorite being the lady who filled her Shop Vac half full of soapy water and used it to suck the caterpillars off of her shrubs.

Of course, an infestation of this size has unpleasant aspects. My wife and kids did not like going out in the backyard during the peak of the outbreak. And I don’t blame them, as I wasn’t too keen on it either. A short walk through our yard would leave us draped in zillions of invisible strands of caterpillar silk with a few of the creatures crawling up our necks. And even a simple task like coiling the garden hose would leave your hands covered in squished caterpillar goo. So, I fully understand not fully appreciating these creatures when they occur in vast numbers. Beyond making parts of our city look like autumn is already here, they have been just a general nuisance.

That said, I do not understand today’s editorial in the local newspaper. The editor spent a lot of column space writing about insects, pulling out some interesting and salient facts. Yes, insect biodiversity is astounding. Yes, some of them would likely survive even if an apocalyptic natural event wiped out all of human life. Yes, as implied, we share a more recent common ancestor with other vertebrates than we do with insects. All valid points.

Then these bits:

“Our hatred of caterpillars and other bugs also has a basis in evolution.”

and

“We’re right to fear and hate them as much as we do.”

Really?

Since the muse for the editorial seems to be the swarms of tent caterpillars in town, let’s start with some reasons not to “fear and hate” them.

First, although they cause a great deal of visible damage, they are unlikely to kill many trees at all. So on the “fear and hate” side of the ledger we are left with temporary cosmetic damage and a bit of hassle in the yard for a few weeks. On the other hand, they do have benefits. This article nicely summarizes many of them. For instance:

  • they are a natural part of a functioning forest ecosystem.
  • their removal of canopy leaves allows light to the forest floor, giving some plants down there a leg (or limb?) up.
  • caterpillars and the moths that they become provide food for other organisms.
  • caterpillar poop gives a burst of nutrients to the forest floor.
  • all of these things, over time and many cycles, make a forest what it is.

In other words, if there weren’t periodic outbreaks of defoliators, our forests would be much different from what we enjoy today both in terms of the forest structure and the plants and animals that live there.

But, even if you don’t believe me that the benefit side of the ledger is much more substantial than the detriment side for tent caterpillars, perhaps you’ll agree with me on some easier-to-prove examples:

If this recent caterpillar outbreak has shown us anything, it is that people are fascinated by insects – and by nature in general.

To give the editor the benefit of the doubt, as pointed out by a colleague of mine:

And perhaps that’s true; perhaps the editor meant “respect.” But, one way or the other, I would prefer more coverage of the wonders of nature and more encouragement for people to get outside and to see what’s really going on out there, than demonization of vast segments of the natural world with careless words – even if the intent of those words is mainly to amuse. If we want people to care about the global environment, it’s not wise to begin with making them think that they have reason to hate the local fauna and flora.

Rather show people why it’s so awesome out there, and they’ll begin to understand why we are all so intimately connected with those very insects that are buzzing around our yards and jogging paths.

And in time that will turn more people from being armchair environmentalists (at best) to being actual hands-in-the-soil and boots-on-the-ground naturalists who have a stake in real conservation.