Question: have dicoverd enything new lately

Thomas Doherty-Bone answered on 19 Nov 2013:

This depends on what you mean by recently.

For recent experiments, preliminary results suggest that invasive decapods (crabs, crayfish) breakdown leaf litter in water faster than the native. This is still preliminary and a journal reviewer has yet to tell me if my methods were right or wrong (yes, we get peer-reviewed, or “it didn’t happen”). An for field experiments, it appears that leaf litter breakdown and overall ecosystem productivity seems to be the same for invaded vs uninvaded ecosystems, but the results need more thorough analysis and interpretation – early days still.

I have helped describe a new species of frog and several new species of earthworm from Cameroon. There are more to come, watch this space.

If not discovering new species to science, I have also found species in countries where we didn’t know they existed. I have also confirmed that one frog restricted to one lake does not occur in other nearby lakes, helping to focus conservation efforts.

This year, I have co-authored a series of scientific papers on a disease that makes amphibians go extinct, called amphibian chytrid fungus. One paper was the discovery that this pathogen infects caecilian amphibians, a type of “legless newt” (but still very far removed from a newt) that lives in the soil in the tropics. They are very weird creatures. But now we know this disease affects these animals, so we can prepare for the worst. Another discovery was that while this same disease is thought to be indigenous to Africa, it has never been recorded to West Africa (Africa west of Nigeria). So this means the frogs living there could be naive to this pathogen and could decline if it gets inadvertently introduced.

But, I discover things for myself that are not new to science a lot of the time. When setting up my pond experiments, when I had only water in there for a month, the water went cloudy, which means it was full of phyoplankton (microscopic plants). I added about a litre of water sourced from many different ponds, lakes, streams, rivers. A week later, the water was clear. This was because the small zooplankton (tiny, microscopic animals) had eaten up the plankton. Pretty neat to see with my own eyes, but still fundamental to water quality management.