Coronavirus forecast

I’ve made a shiny app that gives a ten-day forecast, by country, on likely numbers of coronavirus cases. The app is designed to give people a sense of how fast this epidemic is progressing, as well as one of the key uncertainties; the true number of cases. At last update (23 March 2020), it is …

Tired of the profiteering in academic publishing? Vote with your feet.

Are you an academic? Want to do less, and make your research accessible to all? Read on. Academic publishing companies make vast profits by selling access to scientific research papers. The industry had around 23 billion US dollars in revenue in 2017, and the profit margins are outrageous. Researchers do the work, other researchers (as …

Picking pairs for climate change

Let’s start with a doomed species. The white lemuroid possum is a spectacular creature that lives in the high altitude rainforest of Australia. As climate change progresses, the cool conditions this possum thrives on will retreat uphill, and eventually disappear. And with the demise of these cool conditions, so too this astonishing creature. Already, scientists …

Genetic back burning to halt invasions

Rather than cut and paste, here’s a link to a quick article explaining the idea. Read it and then read on… How on earth did we ever come up with this idea?  Well, it happened at a low moment.  Reid Tingley, Darren Southwell, and myself were camping our way across the 400km strip of country between Port …

Quolls v Toads

The northern quoll is a really cool marsupial predator.  They’re also in trouble.  Like many Australian predators, they’re quite partial to snacking on the odd frog, and, when toads arrive, they make the mistake of thinking toads might make a good repast.  Bad move.  Toads carry a suite of defensive toxins to which Australian predators …

Evolution makes invasions unpredictable

Pop quiz: what have cancer and cane toads got in common? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. They’re both examples of a spreading population. In the case of toads its a population of… well, toads. In the case of cancer, it’s a population of cells. But in both cases, the population spreads by …

Evolution of immune systems during invasion

It goes without saying, perhaps, that your immune system is important to you. Without it, you’d rapidly be consumed by bacteria and fungus, and in the short while it took for these to kill you, viruses would be raging out of control, and worms would be having a field day. Your immune system is important. …

The evolution of virulence during range shift

All these fascinating results showing that things on expanding range edges evolve in certain ways got me thinking.  When pathogens spread through novel host populations (think Ebola, currently spreading; or West Nile Virus, recently spreading) then they are in the same situation as an invasive species such as toads.  That is, we should expect evolution to …

Stopping the toad invasion

Cane toads are really good invaders.  They move astonishing distances, and they breed like maniacs.  A female toad can lay thousands of eggs at a go, and while many of these won’t survive, it’s clear that this reproductive potential means that toad populations can grow very fast indeed. So what chance do we ever have …

Snakes and Toads

You may or may not have gathered by now, but I care about snakes.  In fact, it could be argued that I misspent my youth chasing them.  In these adolescent ophidiophilic quests, it soon became apparent that a) snakes are much harder to find than popular mythology suggests, and b) if you want to find …