2023
More than most years, 2023 has been something of a roller coaster of ups and downs for the lab. But focusing on the ups…
With Louise Ashton, Caroline Dingle, and Mike Boyle, we kicked off a new field course this year in Danum Valley Borneo. Taking HKU students to the forest was a wonderful experience. We caught lots of butterflies and moths and had a great time. Fortunately, we’ll be returning to Danum next year (and hopefully many years to follow).
I attended the Biology of Butterflies this year in Prague with Emily Jones and Yuet Fung Ling. And Portia Wong and I went to Portland for this year’s Ecological Society of America meeting. It was a strong year for conferences and we had a lot of opportunities to connect with different sets of friends and colleagues. Even Leung was awarded the Faculty of Science’s Excellent Teaching Assistant Award 2022-23 for her widespread contributions to teaching across Ecology & Biodiversity - a very well-deserved award.
In Sept of 2023 I started a sabbatical. I spent two months based at UCLA before moving to the University of Cambridge in November on a Doris-Zimmern Fellowship to Hughes Hall. I’m currently writing this from Cambridge as I still have about a month left of my sabbatical. My travels across the US and UK over the latter part of this year have been a lot of fun, filled with insights, and provided time for me to refresh and redirect my mind and focus. I hope that in 2024 the fruits of some of these activities will emerge.
As I do every year, I find it helpful to review some of the papers from the lab published over the past year and discuss some of the stories behind them:
Tracking the source of pangolins from illegal trade – from Asia to Africa
Tracey undergoes sample preparation on seized white-bellied pangolin scales. Also, a pangolin.
This study began several years ago. I’m not entirely sure when the whole thing began, but I know it started as a discussion between Tom Smith (at UCLA) and myself. The basic idea was relatively simple. Through Tom’s connections in Africa and mine in Asia, we could build a strong enough collaborative team to get the samples necessary for a genomic analysis of seizures of pangolin scales. With such data we might be able to find the geographic source of pangolin scales shipped out to Asian markets.
In 2017 we acquired some funding to do just this. And then… we ran into obstacles. So many obstacles. Because pangolins are listed under Appendix I of CITES, shipping samples across international borders requires lots of permits and lots of time. It took us much longer than we anticipated to build the georeferenced database of pangolin samples from Africa, about three years in total. But we did get it done thanks to a large international team of collaborators who were willing to put the time in and establish this unique database. It was also around 2017 that Jen Tinsman (then at UCLA) stepped in to take the lead. Jen orchestrated the large number of collaborators from across the world and ensured that we were on task and doing things in a coordinated way.
While the African database was being constructed, our team at HKU was hard at work acquiring pangolin scales from seizures – Caroline Dingle, Shuang Xing, and Tracey Prigge were running the ground work. Once we actually had the scales in the lab, Tracey was joined by Taneisha Barrett and the two of them managed to extract DNA from more than 600 samples.
Finally, in 2021-2022, all of the pieces came together. When we saw the first maps, I remember being stunned at how well it all worked. There it was, after all this time, clear signals of geographic origin from these scales that up until that point had little to tell us. We learned a lot from all of the genomic data. But for me, a couple findings really stick out. First, there is very little correspondence between the source of the scales as determined by the genomics and the source as determined by seizure records. Second, we found dynamic changes in the trade over time with most scales being sourced in West Africa early in the period of study (in 2012) and shifting towards Central Africa by 2018. Overall, the research highlights the potential of genomic approaches like this in revealing wildlife trade patterns over space and time.
See paper in Science.
Strategy for enhancing Lepidoptera conservation in the tropics
Michel loves the chicken and mushroom pie from Starbucks.
Michel Dongmo and I have enjoyed several seasons of field work together working on butterflies in Cameroon. Inevitably, after a long day of work in the field or lab, we would end up reflecting on a range of topics over beers at day’s end. And even more inevitably, our conversation would often turn toward the difficulties of conducting ecological and conservation research in Central Africa. Once Michel came to Hong Kong for his postdoc, the frequency of these conversations increased until one day I told Michel – “why don’t you write a paper about it”. And so, he did!
Some months later, the first draft Michel sent to me was a review on the butterfly research he could find in Central Africa. It was an intensely boring paper. I told him to start from scratch. What I wanted to see in the written word, was Michel’s very opiniated view on the state of science and conservation in the region. Basically, I dared him to put it all down.
And Michel delivered! His perspective piece does in fact provide an important background for the state of Lepidoptera science in Central Africa. He then uses this to illuminate what needs to happen to address the current shortfalls. In brief, we need to acknowledge and tackle as much as we can the four issues of cash (socioeconomics), conflicts, corruption and collections/collaborations. These realities complicate the already difficult work of conservation for Central African insect conservationists. Scientists can’t do a whole lot about most of these (though the issues are important to recognize), but we certainly can do more on collections/collaborations. More funding needs to be directed to the Afrotropics and local researchers need much better support than they currently receive. And museum collections need to be developed in the region for science to develop – we need to avoid the export of all these valuable specimens to overseas institutions.
In the end, I’m very proud of the small role I played in this paper… basically compelling Michel to put down his beer and put pen to paper. The perspective captures his unique voice in insect conservation and I hope it will pave the way for improved support for the great diversity of Lepidoptera in Central Africa – and also for the scientific and local communities there as well.
See paper in Biological Conservation.
Ecological uniqueness and controlling for environmental availability
Toby plays pool.
In October of 2023 I travelled to the University of Toronto Scarborough to visit Toby Tsang and his current supervisor Marc Cadotte. The timing was fortuitous in that just a few months prior Toby had a paper accepted on ecological uniqueness and environmental availability – this was led by Toby and done in collaboration with me, Marc, and Lauren Ponisio. Actually, for the background of this paper I can just paste an email he sent me in Sept 2022 about it:
“I was developing an analysis for the beta diversity part of the bee project, and I was trying to analyze different types of variables (continuous, factor, ordinal etc..). However, I found most of the current approaches do not work well for a highly structured dataset, thus I have to come up with something new. Because the proposed analysis is kind of complicated, I think it might be better if I write a new manuscript about it.”
And so, he did! Toby’s paper flew through peer review as it was clearly evident to the reviewers that Toby’s approach had good utility. Basically, if you want to analyze ecological uniqueness of communities and relationships to environmental drivers… but do not have even sampling across environmental conditions (e.g., if the environmental conditions are heterogeneous and variable across space) then Toby has the right tool for you. (stay tuned for more about the “bee project” by the way)
See paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Conclusions
I’ll conclude on a few brief personal notes…
In early 2023 the lab was shaken by the news of Joey Tsz Chun So’s passing. Joey worked as a research assistant in the lab in 2021 and contributed to a range of projects. She was so very talented in the field and I’m grateful to have been able to spend time chasing moths and geckos with her.
In late 2023, during my sabbatical in Los Angeles, I was able to spend time with my niece who turns one year old this month. I’m definitely enjoying being an uncle. We spent a lot of time dancing, singing, and reading together. She’s one hell of a baby.
Finally, it’s really nice that I had the privilege to take some time and work “overseas” like this during my sabbatical. Huge thanks to everyone who’s taken care of everything while I’ve been away. I’m really looking forward to returning home to Hong Kong relatively soon. I miss the doofy cats, my walks on Lamma, and the buzz of the city. I even miss the construction noise on campus at HKU (well… maybe just a little).
The major lesson I’ve learned this year is that I do need to spend more time chasing bugs and lizards. And I need to spend more time playing guitar and dancing to only the best tunes. I’m lucky to have many friends, colleagues, and family all over the world - so I’m going to do these things with them. Have a great 2024 everyone.
Pickle lounging.
