Human Organizational Behaviour Impeding Science: Annual Assessments, Scientists and Folly

The pendulum swings. I read with great amusement last week that some of the biggest employers in Britain are dropping annual assessments of employees. Somebody, somewhere, has actually had the guts to say that the king has no clothes and that much valuable time and effort has gone into something that anybody with even a couple of neurons firing would recognise as utterly futile.

The first stage of the adoption of annual assessments in the UK research councils came in the early 1970s with what were called Annual Confidential Reports. All working scientists knew that they were unnecessary, none more so than Richard Keynes FRS, then Director of Babraham. He told the old Agricultural Research Council so and asked what would happen if he refused to implement the directive. ‘You will be sacked’, came the reply from what was then the Personnel Department, then based in offices in Great Portland Street. His successor, Sir Barry Cross FRS got it right; to him it was always the Anti-Personnel Department because it actually damaged science and scientists by wasting time on pointless paper exercises and devising procedures that were actually damaging science. But these were the proximate villains; the ultimate villains were the civil servants and politicians who saw this sort of nonsense as behaving like successful big businesses. Nobody took any notice of Sir Edward Bullard’s published* statement:

A research establishment is not, however, just another large organization employing several thousand people; it is not like a factory or a railway or a regiment or a warship. Its purposes are less clearly defined and its effectiveness much harder to assess.

I  now though would add ‘financial institution’ to Bullard’s list since that is where everybody now seems to work.

Scientist working in small groups know on a day-to-day, and often an hour-to-hour, basis know how their staff are performing. Moreover, they can do something about any problems without having it all formalised in an annual process. The sad thing about the annual appraisal process was that it was sold to gullible junior staff as a magic bullet to redress any perceived grievance, or to seek promotion, by the parasitic public-sector trade union officials who claimed such measures as a ‘right’ they had fought government-funded employers to obtain.

The whole time-consuming process, as a number of us consistently argued over the years, decreased scientific productivity and had a deleterious effect on morale. Other than occupying time and effort, there was no effect in improving the quality of the science or in how people were treated; it did and does though decrease the output of science and therefore the bang for bucks. That major employers in other fields now see how useless it really is; can we afford to see it continue in science for any longer?

More widely, in all sorts of organisations, is this the first sign that the growth of the ‘human resources’ anti-personnel industry is eventually being checked? Perhaps one of my definitions of a good organisation—no human resources department—is not just a pipe dream. 

*In The Organization of Research Establishments, edited by Cockroft, J, Cambridge University Press. 1965

Island Conservation in French Polynesia: A Major Project Completed

I was delighted to be able to help when Island Conservation asked to use my video footage of the critically endangered Polynesian Ground-Dove (Alopecoenas erythropterus, previously Gallicolumba erythropterus) which I took in 2009 on a rat-freed islet of the huge atoll of Rangiroa in the Tuamotus of French Polynesia (see my post of 31 October 2012). Island Conservation along with BirdLife International and MANU (Société d'Ornithologie de Polynésie) have been making heroic efforts to clear islands of invasive species. Rats tagging along with the spread of Polynesians across the Pacific devastated the bird populations. The partners in this enterprise have just complete a massive operation aimed at eradicating rats from six islands of the Acteon group and Gambier archipelago of French Polynesia.

The Acteon and Gambier islands of French Polynesia

The logistics of operating with support vessels and helicopters in remote places are challenging to say the least, as the press release notes:

Delivering this incredibly important result for native wildlife required a herculean logistical commitment and a team of 31 personnel hailing from three continents and six countries. The successful shipment of hundreds of tonnes of equipment, and donated supplies from key partners Bell Laboratories and Tomcat, to these remote islands (including a helicopter); and the ability to overcome adverse weather, intestinal maladies and sleep deprivation, was some testimony to the three years of planning and preparation!

Using island restoration methods proven on over 400 islands around the world, the team created much-needed safe habitat for the resident and Critically Endangered Polynesian Ground-dove, Endangered Tuamotu Sandpiper Prosobonia parvirostris (Titi) and Endangered Polynesian Storm-petrel Nesofregetta fuliginosa, as well as a number of Critically Endangered plant species.

If you are reading this blog please read the press release from the three organisations. They deserve great praise, all our support and financial backing for the major works are conservation they undertake.

My footage was incorporated into a short video and you can read the press release—and see the video—here.

If you want to see the video again it is here:

My footage of the Polynesian Ground-Dove from 2009:

Dr Burgess Barnett and his departure as Curator of Reptiles at London Zoo

This post is the latest in the series on Burgess Barnett (29 January 2014, 30 June 2015).

In London for a day I found time to spend a couple of hours in the Zoo library to see if I could find more information on the departure of Burgess Barnett as Curator of Reptiles in 1937. The minutes of the council of the society provided the information but did not, of course, shed much light on the background to the decisions or reveal in any detail the battles that must have been going on between individuals and factions. Minutes are often an unreliable source because they were and still are so frequently massaged to veil the true picture or the reason for a difficult decision. Even when a minute is challenged by those who were present at a meeting, the tone is always biased towards those in control. It is as well to remember a key commandment of the civil servant: he who controls the agenda and the minutes has his hands on the levers of power*.

Barnett, like so many people before and since, must have been extremely upset about his treatment and his case must have contributed to the notoriety the Society gained over many decades as an unhappy place for officers and officials.

In terms of Council meetings, the Burgess Barnett affair lasted from December 1936 until March 1938. On 16 December 1936 Council endorsed a recommendation of the Garden Committee (i.e. the one responsible for the Zoological Garden or London Zoo) that: there should be two curators only; E.G. Boulenger, should be both Director of the Aquarium (his current post) and Curator of Reptiles (i.e. taking over Barnett’s job in addition to his own; before being Director of the Aquarium he had though been Curator of Reptiles); Burgess Barnett should be an Honorary Research Fellow, subject to annual reappointment.

It would probably be worthwhile reading the minutes of the Garden Committee to see if more can be gleaned about the background. However, knowing that Julian Huxley had been appointed Secretary in 1935, one can see a pattern emerging that led to Huxley’s dismissal in 1942. The question I would ask at this stage, when I suspect the answer is ‘yes’, is: was Huxley changing the management of the zoo in order to free resources for his own ‘popularisation’ as well as more ‘scientific’ foci (the two are not mutually exclusive) for the future of the society? At this time, as Joe Cain points out in his analysis of Huxley’s activities at the Zoo, he appointed two assistant curators (one of whom was James Fisher) but that these two  were not used as curatorial assistants in the Zoo itself but were employed by Huxley to further his various projects to make the Zoo a centre for ‘modern’ biology.

I should point out that the Secretary was the paid chief executive of the Society, akin to the secretary of a golf club or a permanent secretary in the civil service. It is also interesting to note that Huxley was a candidate for election to the Royal Society during 1937 and that he was elected in 1938, a distinction he was apparently more than eager to secure. Council meetings with the non-scientific menagerists like Albert Pam on one side and the comparative anatomist FRSs of the old but still politically powerful school of zoology (including two Lamarckists) on the other, with the ‘modern biology’ grandson of Darwin’s Bulldog as Secretary must have been amusing for a fly on the wall.

Barnett though had an academic champion on Council willing to fight his corner. On 21 April 1937, Professor E.W. MacBride FRS argued that Barnett should be employed in some capacity as adviser on the health of reptiles and amphibians.

There had clearly been moves behind the scenes, as well as a hostile Annual General Meeting of Fellows, because on 19 May 1937, it was agreed that there should be no part-time Curator of Reptiles (clearly a role MacBride had intended for Barnett) and Council confirmed that Boulenger would hold the two posts (but without an increase in pay).

Professor James P. Hill FRS then asked what Barnett should be paid for his duties as anatomist (he was obviously doing some prosectorial/pathological work** on the dead animals from the zoo which were never at this time in short supply) and where did all this fit in with his work on snake venoms (see my post of 29 January 2014)? In response, a sub-committee of Council was set up. It comprised: Professor James P. Hill FRS (Chair), Professor W. Le Gros Clark FRS, Richard H. Burne FRS, Martin A.C. Hinton FRS, Professor E.W. MacBride FRS.

The Sub-Committee

James Peter Hill (1873-1954, elected FRS 1913) was Jodrell Professor of Zoology, University College, London 1906-1921 and then Professor of Embryology and Histology in the Department of Anatomy until 1938. He was well-known for his discoveries in the reproductive biology and embryology of monotremes and marsupials while working in Australia and later for his work on placentation and primate embryology.

Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark (1895-1971, elected FRS 1935) was then Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, remaining so until his retirement in 1962. After service in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War, he was, for three years, Principal Medical Officer for Sarawak where he collected tarsiers and tree-shrews for study. He went to Oxford after being appointed first to the anatomy department at St Bartholomew’s Hospital medical school and then to St Thomas’s. Comparative anatomy of primates, tracing neural connections within the brain that would today fall within the ambit of neuroscience, and the phylogeny of primates, particularly, in later years of the ancestry of Man, were his main areas of interest. Zuckerman wrote a Biographical Memoir for the Royal Society which contained a devastating criticism of his views on orthogenesis and on the hominid line of evolution. He was one of the authors of the paper that exposed the Piltdown hoax.

Richard Higgins Burne (1868-1953, elected FRS 1927) was Physiological Curator at the Royal College of Surgeons  from 1912 until 1934; thereafter he worked as a volunteer at the Natural History Museum on cetaceans. He was a wide-ranging comparative anatomist working on, for example, the lamellibranchs collected during Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the antarctic, fishes and mammals, including animals that died at the Zoo such as rhinoceroses and okapis.

Martin Alister Campbell Hinton (1883-1961, elected FRS 1934) had no formal qualifications or university degree. Starting out as a clerk in barristers’ chambers, he made use of legal hours (short) and vacations (very long—3½ months a year) to pursue his interests in palaeontology. in 1910 he was given the status of Voluntary Worker at the Natural History Museum. He was taken on to the staff of the Museum in 1921, raising to become Keeper of Zoology in 1936; he retired in 1945. A late Lamarckist, he worked on the taxonomy (he was a ‘lumper’) and evolution of rodents and whales; he was also involved in work on rodents as pests. Intriguingly, he has been implicated by some in the Piltdown hoax, most often as a secondary hoaxer.

Ernest William MacBride (1866-1940, elected FRS 1905) was Professor of Zoology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada from 1897 until 1909. In 1914 he was appointed to T.H. Huxley’s old chair of zoology at Imperial College, London; he retired in 1934. Noted for his work on showing how the bilateral symmetry of larval echinoderms turns into the radial symmetry of adults, he was another of the last Lamarckists and a supporter of Paul Kammerer. One might say he was not exactly from the same stable as Julian Huxley.

The Sub-Committee Reports

The next meeting of Council (16 June 1937) received the report that Barnett had been bitten by a venomous snake (see my post of 29 January 2014). He was described as Curator of Reptiles. However, there is a hand correction with a note to the effect that at the time he was bitten he was not Curator of Reptiles. Council also received the report of the sub-committee which recommended that Barnett should be retained for one month on research duties. The question was raised whether he would need a Home Officer licence under the 1876 Act for experiments on animals. It was decided that Barnett should be employed until 30 September 1937 (i.e. for just over three months) at a salary of £600 per annum (Boulenger was on the same pay) to continue his work on snake venom as a potential treatment for epilepsy and that the work should be directed by a sub-committee of the Prosectorial Committee comprising Hill, Burne, Le Gros Clark, E.A Carmichael and the Secretary (Huxley).

E.A. Carmichael

On this sub-committee Hinton and MacBride were no longer involved but E.A Carmichael was. Edward Arnold Carmichael (1896-1978) was Director of the Medical Research Council’s Neurological Research Unit from 1932 until he retired in 1961. He has become famous in recent years on websites for his 1933 paper with H.W. Woollard on referred pain. It was then normal practice for physiologists and physiology students to be the subject of their own experiments whenever possible. Woollard and Carmichael certainly lived up to that ethic and suffered severe pain in the process. They piled weights onto one or the other testis in order to record the degree and location of the pain. One example will suffice here: 650 grm…Severe testicular pain on the right side.

In the minutes there is a curious reference to Barnett’s ‘practice’ as in medical practice. Barnett, Huxley said, regarded his practice as a natural extension of his research. I do not know if he had any sort of conventional medical practice while employed at the Zoo or what premises he was using for these clinical trials of snake venom on epilepsy, other than those he published in collaboration with Macfarlane on blood clotting.

Claims that snake venom could be used to cure epilepsy were not new and Barnett was helping to examine the basis of some of these earlier claims. I wonder if members of the sub-committee were keen to close Barnett’s work down in the light of a report by Isidore Finkelman that appeared in the March 1937 issue of Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine (22, 572-575) entitled, Snake venom (moccasin) in the treatment of epilepsy. The findings were stark: It is concluded that venom therapy not only does not induce a refractory state to convulsive seizures in institutional epileptics but may render them more susceptible to seizures.

On 15 September, Council decided in discussing Barnett’s position that ‘no paid official of the Society should hold a licence for experiments on living animals’ thereby effectively disbarring him from any employment by the Society if he continued in his research. One cannot help wondering if this hardening was a deliberate attempt to get rid of Barnett once and for all rather than as further appeasement of the periodically vociferous anti-vivisection lobby. Joe Cain discussed the attitude of the Society in this regard in his paper on Huxley^†. Although Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell FRS, the Secretary before Huxley, had banned animal experiments on the premises and from the Society’s scientific publications, ZSL employees simply undertook the necessary research elsewhere. This hardening of apparent appeasement by Huxley (who gave up his Home Office licence on appointment to the Zoo) I find difficult to interpret other than as a measure to ensure that Barnett was sent on his way.

At this meeting Council went further:

After the discussion of the proposals of Major [Albert] Pam and Mr Burne, it was agreed that Dr Barnett should receive a special payment of £600^‡ and that he should then cease to have any official connection with the Society.

Done and dusted? Not quite

At the meeting on 20 October, the decision reached on 15 September was confirmed. However, MacBride had it minuted that in his view Dr Burgess Barnett should be re-instated as Curator of Reptiles. On 17 December 1937 MacBride attempted to re-open the case but was told by the President (Lord Onslow) that Standing Orders decreed MacBride must get support for the issue to be included as a main item on the agenda of a subsequent meeting.

MacBride did get the item on the Agenda for the meeting on 15 December and he proposed a motion to reinstate Barnett as Curator of Reptiles. The scientists on Council were split and MacBride was opposed by Le Gros Clark, amongst others, and including the Secretary (Huxley). However, management of the agenda by the official, presumably Huxley, who drew it up is clear. MacBride’s motion was low on the list; Council was running late for their lunch or tea; further discussion and a vote was put off until the next meeting. MacBride had been outmanoeuvred but did manage to insist that for the meeting in March, the item should appear early in the agenda. Relatively highly it appeared in the agenda for the meeting of 16 March 1938. However, MacBride withdrew his motion because in the meantime Barnett had been appointed Superintendent of Rangoon Zoo. Barnett was finished at the Zoo.

Barnett was only in post as Curator of Reptiles for just over four years. The new high-profile, Joan Procter-designed Reptile House by the end of 1936 had no dedicated curator. In fact had the Garden Committee recommendation been enacted in full, the zoo per se would have had just three senior staff: Geoffrey Marr Vevers as Superintendent; David Seth-Smith as Resident Curator of Mammals and Birds; Edward G Boulenger as Director of the Aquarium and Curator of Reptiles. The decision to dismiss L.C. Bushby was reversed so that the post of Curator of Insects was retained. Many questions remain, the role of Dr Geoffrey Marr Vevers, Superintendent, in the deliberations on the management structure of the Zoo, for example.

After his departure, as I showed in my post of 30 June 1025, Burgess Barnett remained on good terms with the Zoo, providing an article on his exploits in South America for the then house publication, Animal and Zoo Magazine (one of Huxley’s initiatives in popularisation), and sending specimens from Burma in 1939. Seth-Smith referred to him warmly as ‘our old friend’ in reporting the arrival of the tortoises in the October 1939 issue of the magazine.

*P. Kellner & Crowther-Hunt, N. Civil Servants. 1980. London: Macdonald.

†Cain, J. 2010. Julian Huxley, General Biology and the London Zoo, 1935-42. Notes and Records of the Royal Society doi:10.1098/rsnr.2010.0067

‡£600 was a year’s salary for a Curator. In present terms it is worth between £57,000 and £116,000; for former if calculated by the change in retail prices; the latter if calculated by the increase in pay. Advertisements in The Times for university positions offer some basis of comparison. In 1937, an Assistant Lectureship in Zoology at University College London paid £250-300; A lecturer at Aberdeen University warranted £400; a Readership in Bacteriology at the Postgraduate Medical School paid £800. I seem to remember being told that Curators at the Zoo were for a long period paid at about the same rate as a Senior Lecturer in a university and the £600 Boulenger and Barnett were paid is at that level.

**Note added 23 March 2018. A Research Fellowhsip for prosectorial work was held by Barnett from 1933 until 1937 (Cave AJR. 1976. The Zoological Society of London 1826-1976 and Beyond. Ed. Zuckerman S. Symposia of the Zoological Society of London 40, 49-66). It is not clear if these additional duties to his Curator of Reptiles post were paid.

Burgess Barnett (1888-1944) in Peru: A Magazine Account

The account I wrote of Dr Burgess Barnett (1888-1944) on 29 January 2014 created a great deal of interest. Those who read it will recall that he spent over ten years up to 1932 working as a medical practitioner for Lobitos Oilfields Ltd, a British company in Peru.

I found the following article by him, describing one of his expeditions from Lobitos, in the March 1939 issue of Animal and Zoo Magazine. For ease of reading, I have used OCR software to extract the text.

The Fox who Rode on a Mule

by Dr Burgess Barnett

Curator of the Rangoon Zoo

The hero of this story is Santiago el Zorro, and, as he cannot read even his own language, I am fairly safe in not altering his name for publication. Santi the Fox, as we will call him, is a Cholo; that is to say he is a Spanish-Indian half-breed with his home between the Andes of North'Peru and the Pacific Ocean.

  When I knew him he earned his bread, with sufficient left over for a rather indeterminate family, as a labourer on an oil well. But the butter to sweeten the bread was come by-through his remarkable knowledge of the wild life around him.

  I used to go to him if I wanted some unusual animal to send to the London Zoo and, were it beast, bird or reptile, he could infallibly lead me to it. If another cholo were ill and had no faith in new-fangled hospital treatment, he would disappear for a day or so and return to sell him whatever remedy native lore prescribed as appropriate. It might be a rare cactus from over the mountains to be made into a lotion for erysipelas, or the bitter roots of a plant like our garden zinnias, to stew into a potion for malaria. More often it would be the " in'ards " of some animal, maybe a grey fox or a skunk, for no one knew better than Santi how to obtain unorthodox "medicines" from the pampa.

I have heard it said of him that Santi was an indifferent workman and a worse husband and father, but I can make excuses for him. His spiritual home, so to speak, was not in his little clap-board house with its earthen floor and packing case furniture. Here he was wont to sit of an evening gossiping and ultimately hiccoughing over home-brewed chicha. The part of him I admired reached its highest development out of doors, during week ends. Then, as soon as he knocked off work, he would take his rifle and his burro—his two most valued possessions—and ride all through the night to the Amotape Mountains, where the country is green. As often as not he would be treasuring only a single cartridge—the limit of his purse. The early hours of Monday morning would see him home again, dirty and bleary-eyed, but happy, with a brocket deer slung over the withers of his little steed.

One day, when a little bother with the police had deprived him of the wherewithal to buy even one cartridge, he came shamefacedly on to my veranda to beg one. Instead of complying, I suggested that I should "make it all right" with his employers and that we should wander off together for a full week in the wild. The old ruffian's weathered face crinkled into a beam of delight and in a few minutes it was arranged.

Santi on his little donkey, and I on a tall, raw-boned mule might have suggested Sancho Panza and Don Quixote as we rode off side by side on our adventure. First we followed a well-worn donkey track across the near-desert, which, a few years ago, had been subjected to heavy rains. The trail was marked by a lane of gaunt, dead algorrobo seedlings which had sprung up from the dung of passing donkeys when the ground had been moist.

In the valleys and gullies there is usually a little vegetation, a few scattered plants with thick, juicy leaves and woody stems, which seem to thrive on the dew which is their only-moisture. It is here that animal life really begins. Beetles with black, ribbed elytra, sand-coloured scorpions, goggle-eyed geckos and two or three other kinds of lizards are the most obvious inhabitants. And there are many others less easily discovered. Wherever there is an inch or so of space between the powdery sand and an overhanging boulder one finds the footprints of mice. The tiny spoor is never seen in the open, and I soon had proof that the mice have to keep to sheltered runs because of the multitude of foxes.

We set "catch-'em-alive" mouse traps in these situations and scarcely a trap was unsprung by morning; but the wood and wire of the traps were usually crunched to pieces by foxes and the mice eaten. In parenthesis, I can recommend a bait of rolled oats and cheese, fried to a stiff paste with bacon fat, with a pinch of salycilic acid to preserve it. It is irresistible to nearly every rodent.

Soon we discovered that there were two species of mice. One was the leaf-eared mouse, with relatively large, conch-like ears, which one imagines must be important to it for picking up the distant padding of foxes, Later, I sent one to the Zoo, the first to be seen there, and it lived in the Rodent House for many years. The other species proved to be new to science—a bigger animal, with the longest tail I ever remember seeing on any mouse. Now, I am afraid, it is lost again to science. The year after some skins and skulls reached the National Museum, a torrent rushed through the only gorge I knew the mice to occupy and swept it bare of every living thing.

By day culebras de sol—sand-coloured, fang-less snakes—are continuously taking toll, and even before sundown owls take up vantage points on hillocks, scanning the ground below for movement. One seriously poisonous snake is found there, as I discovered very nearly to my cost. Thrusting my arm up to the elbow into what I thought was a lizard's hole, I drew out a desert fer-de-lance, which was lying in it —happily head inwards!

Though the proof may not be sufficient for anyone else, that snake convinced me that snakes are not immune to their own venom. Hoping to get it home to the Zoo, I put it, quite uninjured, into a cotton bag which I placed in my saddle-bag. Barely an hour later, when we had made camp for the night, it was stone dead, with its long fangs buried in its own body. Since then, at the Zoo, there has been proof that king cobras can kill each other with their venom, but this is the only case I know of what looks like a reptilian suicide.

Beyond the coastal zone, we climbed to a tableland, a height of some 800 feet, where although the ground is just as dry, a different flora and fauna exist. It is a country of tree cactuses, of a red-barked shrub called palo santo, which yields a sweet, incense-like resin, and of a deciduous tree which feeds a remarkable processional caterpillar.

Santi was full of native beliefs concerning this tree, which he called guattaco. Should its flowers open before the leaf-buds burst, one prophecies that rare phenomenon which, tradition has it, occurs but once in thirty years— rain! When the blossoms colour the bare branches, the natives rush to cover the still thirsty soil with little pits, in each of which they sow a few seeds of maize or water-melons in the hopes of a catch-crop. Or they even plant cotton, and it is recorded that after one deluge they gathered a harvest of cotton for three successive years.

He told me, too, on no account to sleep under a guattaco tree. All the world knew, he said, that the leaves exuded "poisonous airs" which produce boils and blotches on the skin of unwary travellers. Soon afterwards I unwittingly discovered the origin of the belief. Nearly every leaf was acrawl with the processional caterpillars mentioned above. Roughly speaking, they were "woolly bears," and as I was stowing some of them into chip boxes, I realized that the "poisonous airs" were really "poisonous hairs." When a leaf was shaken myriads of little hairs floated away to settle on exposed parts of the skin, where they set up an intensely irritating rash.

We began to cross the tableland on a sweltering afternoon. A carrion hawk rose with a snake in its talons giving vent to a mournful call, "Wah-O, Wah-O.” Santi named it a guarguao. Presently we started a pair of stone curlews, which ran away ahead of us uttering their sharp, staccato cry of alarm, "Keh, keh, keh."

The two native names are pronounced, roughly, warra-wah-o and ivarra-keh-keh. He could not suggest their derivations, but I guessed at some long dead, pre-Inca language in which warra meant a bird, with onomatopoetic suffixes to specify the species.

Two other birds of the district are worth mentioning, for though I failed to get either of them home to the Zoo, they both exhibit habits  worth recording.

Firstly there is a flycatcher of which the male is bright scarlet and black, answering very nearly to the description Darwin gives of a flycatcher on the Galapagos Islands. The nest is built in situations similar to those chosen by chaffinches in England.

The other bird is not unlike a wren and it is known locally by the Spanish name for a nightingale. When I made to explore its nest, Santi called to me to take care not to be stung. He explained that the ruisehores frequently built their nests within a yard or so of new wasps' nests, which hang from the branches like inverted umbrellas. By the time the young birds are hatched, he said, the wasp grubs are of a size to feed them, so that the parents have a regular supply of insect food to hand. Although I cannot claim to have seen the wasp grubs being filched, it is certain that the birds' and wasps' nests are usually to be found close together.

Our week in the wilds finished beyond the tableland in the Amotape Mountains. And on the last day we had a misunderstanding. I mouched away on foot after breakfast, with a camera and a rifle and let Santi go off on his own after deer, arranging that we should meet again at sunset. The shadows of the cactus trees had spread long over the mountain slopes when I returned to within a mile of camp and I had nothing to show for a tiring day except a roll of exposed films.

Suddenly, as I topped a rise I came upon three deer, a fine buck with two does, in a perfect situation for a shot. Thinking, I am afraid, less of our dinner than of displaying my prowess to the experienced old hunter, I promptly dropped the buck. But quickly as an echo a second shot rang and a doe fell. Santi sorrowfully emerged from the bosque and hoisted his quarry on to his shoulders, unutterable reproach in his attitude.

"Too soon, senor," was all he said. He was driving them towards our camp before shooting them to save himself the labour of carrying them there.

I see that the Amotape mountains are now a National Park—the Amotape Hills National Park—set up to protect an area of dry equatorial forest.

In addition, in the October 1939 issue (the first after the start of World War II) of the same magazine, David Seth-Smith in the New from the Zoos section, reported:

Our old friend, Dr. Burgess Barnett, who was formerly curator of reptiles at the London Zoo, and is now in charge of the Rangoon Zoo, has sent us some Burmese tortoises.

More on Mongooses Employed in Britain as Rodent Catchers

After writing the previous post on a mongoose and of these animals being used as mousers in the bakeries of the west of Scotland in the early decades of the 20th Century, I came across this snippet in the December 1938 issue of Animal and Zoo Magazine:

     Mongooses are used in London warehouses to keep down the rats. One big pet shop reports that they sell at least six of these animals every month for this purpose.

The Isle of Bute Mongoose of December 1900

Bute, an island in the north of the Firth of Clyde, is the last place one would expect to see a mongoose. But while looking for something else I came across this report of a mongoose found on the Isle of Bute in 1900 and even more remarkably of their employment in bakeries in Scotland as mousers.

This is an extract from an article by Dr J.A. Gibson, published in 2004.

MONGOOSE Herpestes ichneumon

An old record of a possible Mongoose on the Island of Bute has recently been discovered and reported (Gibson, 2000). Searching the columns of any local newspaper in the hope of discovering some interesting natural history items is a wearisome and usually unrewarding task, but just occasionally one finds something unusual, and in the Buteman for Friday 5th December 1900 I was fortunate enough to discover the undernoted paragraph:

     "That well-known trapper, Mr. Robert Morrison, had the luck to trap on Saturday last, at Plan Farm, south end of Bute, an animal certainly not native of this country. It is believed to be a mongoose, and was caught in a trap set in a rabbit hole".

     So far I have been unable to trace any later reference to this occurrence, but the Mongoose is a fairly distinctive creature and there is no real reason to doubt the identification, even although no confirmatory details were given. At first, it might reasonably be assumed that this occurrence resulted from another introduction, as yet unrecorded, by the Bute family, but the Bute family Archives were very thoroughly searched by the late Marquess and myself when we were endeavouring to obtain as much information as possible about the Wallaby and Beaver introductions, and nowhere in the Archives did we find any indication at all that the Mongoose was ever introduced.

     There is, however, a much more likely explanation. In my 1976 account of the land mammals of the Clyde area (Gibson, 1976a) I reported the old records of an adult Mongoose trapped at Blanefield, West Stirlingshire, on 1st June 1928, and five weeks later a barely half-grown specimen trapped at Duntocher, Dunbartonshire. At that time, the origin of these animals was unknown, but eight years later, by the time of the publication of my separate account of the mammals of Dunbartonshire (Gibson, 1984), my colleague Mr. John Mitchell had discovered that "in the 1920s Mongooses were kept by at least one Dunbartonshire bakery, since their mousing ability was considered to be greatly superior to that of cats" (Mitchell, 1983). Later investigation showed that this practice was more widespread, in several parts of the country, than had previously been realised.

     It seems most likely, therefore, that the 1900 Bute Mongoose was an escape from a local bakery or some other establishment, but it is clearly desirable to draw attention to this occurrence in the hope that some other records may come to light, and needless to say, I shall be most grateful to receive any additional information.

I do not know whether Dr Gibson did receive more information but is I think it more likely that the mongooses brought to Scotland would have been the Indian Grey (Herpestes edwardsii) rather than the Egyptian (Herpestes ichneumon) since the former were commonly imported up to the time quarantine for rabies was introduced for a wide variety of mammals in 1974.

Mongooses were also often brought back by sailors as pets and it is no coincidence that the major animal dealers were located in seaports like London, Liverpool and Glasgow. The Indian Grey (and, I read, the Egyptian) become extremely tame very quickly. I had one for several years that was completely trustworthy when being handled; its delight in life was being given an egg. Usually it would remove the shell from one end before licking out the contents. Less frequently it would throw the egg down onto the ground until the shell shattered and the contents could be licked up.

Indian Grey Mongooses introduced into the West Indies and Hawaii have had a devastating effect on the native wildlife. I wonder if the mongooses kept in bakeries ever bred. Mongooses had the reputation of needing to be be kept warm in Britain, so it is perhaps unlikely that they would breed, or even survive for very long, when feral in the cold, damp winters of the West of Scotland.

Another possible source of a escaped mongoose on Bute could have been the Royal Aquarium in Rothesay. They advertised  a menagerie in addition to aquatic exhibits.

But there is nothing to beat seeing mongooses in the wild, from seeing them walking in pairs along the footpaths in a hotel grounds in Goa to their pottering about the forest in Gir Forest.

View image | gettyimages.com

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Gibson, JA. 2004. Supplementary notes on Bute vertebrates - mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, freshwater fishes. Transactions of the Buteshire Natural History Society 26, 99-107.

Animal Cells: Size Matters

A recent short review^† in Science drew attention to a question that must have been the subject over the years of many a discussion in lab coffee rooms, during those long minutes hanging around between taking samples, or even while staring down a microscope where the phenomenon is so evident: why and how do particular cell types maintain a particular size?

Such conversations I recall ranged from the utilitarian (‘for student practicals always get sections from x* the cells are much bigger) to the theoretical, with the latter being based on the scaling of volume and surface area, and the length of diffusion pathways. Some even recall being asked at university entrance interviews in the 1950s and early 1960s the question: Why are protozoa not bigger?

For those of us who have tried to unravel what happens to the cell population in the mammary gland during pregnancy, lactation and involution, the question of what controls the size of cells has always been at the back of our minds.

Miriam Ginzberg, Ran Kafri and Marc Kirschner, echo the famous J.B.S Haldane essay, ‘On being the right size’ , in the title of their review, ‘On being the right (cell) size’. In their own words, they set out what they tried to achieve:

Different animal cell types have distinctive and characteristic sizes. How a particular cell size is specified by differentiation programs and physiology remains one of the fundamental unknowns in cell biology. In this Review, we explore the evidence that individual cells autonomously sense and specify their own size. We discuss possible mechanisms by which size-sensing and size-specification may take place. Last, we explore the physiological implications of size control: Why is it important that particular cell types maintain a particular size? We develop these questions through examination of the current literature and pose the questions that we anticipate will guide this field in the upcoming years.

It is very easy to find examples of differences in cell size. I turned and pulled down the first book I could find with anything on histology in it. It was the Chester Jones classic monograph, The Adrenal Cortex^‡ and I soon found note of a difference in cell size:

Zona reticularis…The cells themselves are smaller than those of the rest of the cortex… And here are his micrographs that illustrate the difference:

Photomicrographs taken at the same magnification of
cells of three zones of the adrenal cortex of the adult
female rat. Rearranged from Plate I of Chester Jones's
The Adrenal Cortex (1957)

I will not deal with the observations and evidence they considered but conclude with the questions the authors ask:

How is the mean cell size established for each lineage? How do cells adapt to external stimuli to change the set point for their size? How does each cell measure its size and assess its deviation from the mean? By what mechanism do proliferating cells alter their rates of growth or passage through the cell cycle to prevent the natural accumulation of size variability? How do size changes affect cell function, and do certain cells function best at a given size? What role does cell size play in pathology and senescence?

The final question is raised because malignant cancer cells are larger and more variable in size than normal cells.

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†M. B. Ginzberg et al., Science 348, 1245075 (2015). DOI: 10.1126/science.1245075

*I do not remember the species!

‡Chester Jones, I. 1957. The Adrenal Cortex. Cambridge University Press