Walkabout Wednesday: vampire aphids

Does red meat trigger immune reactions, what is the value of a postdoc, and vampire aphids. No kidding.

My Health

Nothing new here. Really. Blog post or two in the offing. 

Your Education

This article on the value of a postdoc prompted a fair bit of discussion on my Facebook feed this week. Then I saw this infographic which concludes that < 8% of starting PhDs in Biomedicine will end up in faculty positions. 8%! I wonder how those numbers stack up for Ecology/Wildlife/Fisheries PhDs? I bet they are similar, or maybe even worse. I'm thinking of all the PhD students I've served as advisor or committee member ... 4 that are currently faculty members somewhere out of 14 that have been finished long enough to judge their final career. Let's see, exact binomial test of H0: p=0.08 gives p = 0.02, so I can safely say students associated with me in some way for their PhD have a greater chance of becoming a faculty member than the average biomedical student. I think I'll put that in my annual report. 

If I include math students it goes to 6 out of 16 ... yep, both of 'em. Should have done a math degree.

Our Environment

A bit outside my usual interests, but this article on vampire aphids reminded me that for every mutualism I bet there's a partner taking advantage of it. Nature red in tooth and claw!