2020
2020 in review
2020 was quite the year. Hong Kong was reeling after a tumultuous end of 2019. The HKU campus was effectively shut down for weeks following tense protests as we entered 2020 hoping for change. Well...
Classes had begun in Jan and we were pleased to be teaching face to face again following the campus shutdown of 2019. This lasted one week. In Hong Kong we began hearing about the mystery virus and the city/university were not about to take any chances, especially with SARS still fresh in memory. Very quickly masks became essential (not a legal requirement early on... it wasn't necessary because everyone wore them regardless), travel restricted, and quarantine measures instituted. Having myself visited Beijing early in Jan I was ordered by HKU to stay home until 14 days had passed since my return. It was all so rapid. We went from "did you hear about the virus?" to a near campus shutdown in a matter of days.
And so it went in 2020. We're now in the "fourth wave". For much of the year we've had single digit/day case numbers (and many days, zero) but during the various waves we've hovered between 50 and 100 cases/day. This has required a large reorganization of lab activities. While our physical lab never completely shut down, many of us have worked from home much of the year. All travel plans canceled of course. Fung and Vincent started their degrees in Sept 2019 and have not once since had a stable working environment. Anna, Felix and Sharne have (or will very soon!) all submitted their dissertations this year. Anson, Nicole, Portia, and Zheng have all been working on their Final Year Projects in a Final Year like no other. Everyone in the lab has faced extraordinary pressure this year. They've handled it all so impressively.
For me personally, I was grateful to have received two major awards; the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund and HKU's Outstanding Young Researcher Award (the definition of "young" being quite generous!). I also completed my tenure as the Acting Director of the Division of Ecology & Biodiversity and received a GRF grant (with Louise Ashton, Caroline Dingle, and Joe Michalski) to study ecological impacts of light pollution in HK. So this has been, oddly, a very rewarding year for me on a professional level. But never has it been so clear that these accomplishments were possible only thanks to the perseverance of the students and staff in my lab, as well as my colleagues at HKU (esp in Ecology & Biodiversity!).
And so, as I like to do every year now, I want to reflect on a few of the papers to come out of the lab this year. When a paper is published it's easy to forget the story behind the papers and so I attempt to memorialize that a bit and reflect on the process.
It feels strange to do this at the present moment. Back in my home town, L.A. County had over 15,000 new cases yesterday and the health care system appears to be on the verge of breaking. Others in the lab (everywhere) are dealing directly and deeply with the impacts of COVID19, in all sorts of unimaginably terrible ways. But for me personally, I like the distraction that comes from working and so this how I cope with the dread and despair of 2020. Also, the biodiversity crisis continues... and as bad as COVID19 is... important conservation work must persist. And I'm super proud of the students and staff in my group for doing such fantastic work. So here we go:
Exotic animal cafes - emerging biodiversity threat?
Sharne (far right of the photo) had visited Japan some years ago and noticed something odd... lots of otter cafes (e.g. top right of the photo). Given that the pet trade is a major threat to the survival of Asian otters (the focus of her PhD thesis), Sharne investigated and searched online for more concrete numbers. She published a small paper showing the rise of otter cafes in Japan. But the issue didn't go away.
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Caroline Dingle (left in the group photo) and myself had noticed similar concerning trends all across Asia. Visiting Palawan for example in Jan 2020, troubling signs are posted at the airport warning not to buy otters (photo left). We also noticed it wasn't just otters but lots of animals were potentially affected by this trade. So, the three of us hatched a plan to collect all the data we could on the diversity within animal cafes in Asia. John Allcock joined the effort to assist with the hard work of actually collecting and interpreting the data.
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We uncovered a surprising diversity of animals in the cafes, 252 mammal, bird and reptile species. And about half of those species were threatened! This suggests that exotic animal cafes could potentially be a major driver for demand of threatened species. But as we thought about it and looked into these results, we realized that we know so little in fact about how these cafes are affecting biodiversity. Many of the cafes are trying raise awareness of conservation issues (or certainly this is what they are claiming to do... and why should we think otherwise?). On the other hand, in addition to the direct demand of species driven by the cafes, we have concerns that there could be even larger indirect increases in demand with visitors being inspired to buy their own exotic animals after cafe visits. This is an issue that clearly needs further exploration. Hopefully the data and framework we presented will aid in the management of these cafes and the trade involved.
See paper in Conservation Letters
Sacred groves and serpent-gods
Some years ago I participated in a number of discussions with the Faith and Science group at HKU. Recognizing themes similar to ones in conversations I had had with Felix many times, I encouraged him to join some of the seminars and chats. The timing was good because I also began to see that Felix was developing a more active research interest in more social and philosophical angles in conservation. And we began discussing possibilities along these lines.
In early 2018, the Faith and Science group had a request for proposals that compelled Felix and I to think more clearly about we could do in this area (deadlines can be great in this way). In my conservation biology course, I had been teaching about sacred groves in India for years, as a unique type of "protected area". Felix also had an interest in sacred groves. I was also thinking about India a lot because I was planning to go for the first time in the summer for the Biology of Butterflies conference. And so, we put together a proposal to study snakes and sacred groves. We were very fortunate to have received the grant and planning had begun... but the final critical piece didn't come until late in the summer of 2018, just a few months before Felix began his fieldwork!
The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation held its annual meeting in Kuching, Malaysia in July 2018. It was there that Felix saw talks by graduate students in Palatty Allesh Sinu's (from the Central University of Kerala) lab who were also doing research on sacred groves! Very rapidly we struck up a collaboration; Sinu's support and guidance was absolutely essential.
Felix's field work was conducted in late 2018 with U. Prashanth Ballullaya and Ramesh Roshnath. Visiting ten sacred groves across Kerala and Karnataka and interviewing 300 people, we found that encounters with snakes in sacred groves very rarely resulted in harm coming to those snakes - while outside sacred groves such an outcome was not uncommon (23% implied that harm may come to snakes under these circumstances). In fact, the relationship between snakes, people and sacred groves is quite complex and comprises important religious, ecological, and public health considerations... snake envenomation is a major health problem. Felix's research on these topics shows the importance of considering these angles and how sacred groves feature into the story of human-snake coexistence and conservation.
See paper in People and Nature and coverage of the work in Mongabay
How might activity time patterns affect mammal vulnerability to climate change?
While Felix was collecting sacred grove data in India (Oct 2018), I was in Chile on a Universitas 21 fellowship. I was very excited to crunch some numbers and do some modeling with Francisco Bozinovi and Enrico Rezende at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago. I was (and still am!) thinking a lot about nocturnality at the time, and in the middle of work on the topic supported by a GRF grant. My vague plan was to analyze insect thermal tolerance data. But when I arrived in Santiago, Enrico and I had long chats (sometimes exceptionally long... but always fun and enlightening) and he very quickly convinced me, somehow, to turn my attention to endothermy. Pancho (Francisco) cheerfully assisted as I dove into mammal thermal biology.
In my first month in Chile I did little else but read papers and run R scripts. Much to Marie's frustration at times, I would spend all night trying to debug scripts or wrap my head around mammal ecophysiology. It was glorious! I felt like I was in grad school again, exploring ideas and trying to tackle coding problems on my own. Marie and I didnt see much of the country that first month. But we made up for it in our second month and visited some of the most incredible landscapes and wildlife I've ever seen.
Our modeling results showed that warming will likely have very different consequences for nocturnal and diurnal mammals. For example, nocturnal rodents have lower thermal conductance than diurnal species. And nocturnal mammals generally tend to be smaller than diurnal mammals. These traits have important energetic consequences such that under climate change, diurnal and nocturnal species are likely to differentially experience warming impacts. For example, our projections suggest that larger small nocturnal mammals may have increased climatic suitability globally under climate change while smaller nocturnal small mammals are projected to have decreased climatic suitability.
See paper in The American Naturalist
Concluding thoughts…
One of the reasons I enjoy reflecting on papers coming out each year is that it's sometimes easy to forget how much time everything takes. All three of the papers highlighted here began in 2018. Actually, all three of these developed very quickly relative to most of my research efforts. But still, science can be a very slow process... all the more impressive that a COVID19 vaccine was developed in under a year. Absolutely stunning and mind blowing really. We can also make these kinds of leaps in biodiversity and environmental science and I'm thus optimistic for the diversity life on our planet. And that's why, despite my failed hopes one year ago for a prosperous 2020, I am still hopeful for 2021. Hope to see you soon (and preferably not over Zoom).
