Thursday 12 March 2015

A GMM Phylogeny of Wine - ants, plants and biology bants in Pierola, Barcelona

So, quick spoiler, I wrote this a while back, so apologies for the peculiar structure of the report - I hope you still like it!

So I find myself once more in the somewhat familiar surroundings of Zaventam airport, Brussels. Destination: Barcelona - 3rd time in under a year, lucky sod that I am! This time I do not travel alone - as Batman had Robin, Laurel had Hardy, and George W Bush had a decorative pot plant, my informative and plucky young sidekick for this tour to El Hostalets de Pierola in the absence of Zebo was Masters student Hester Hanegraef. Hester will be studying in the same lab on the same material as I, in a slightly less rigorous nature, and so this was a perfect opportunity for her and I to learn more about the techniques we can use on our specimens to test evolutionary hypotheses and, more importantly, paella-eating ability. We were joined in secret by my new mini-mascot, Dice. He will crop up throughout my PhD, so keep an eye out!

The course is organised by Dr. Sole Estaban as part of Transmitting Science, a company that has been established to provide detailed scientific experience and expertise in a wide variety of fields ranging from fundamentals of biomechanics to illustrative drawing. This was my second course, and focused on the use of Geometric Morphometrics in Phylogeny ('family tree') and the various ways that phylogenetic methods could be implemented to extract biological meaning from shape data. The course was run by Prof. Chris Klingenburg (University of Manchester), a renowned name in the field of morphometrics, whose intuitive knowledge of the program MorphoJ would be invaluable to us lesser mortals as we struggle with making sense of our data. Mind you, he should know all about it, he wrote the program...
School time at Pierola. Prof. Chris Klingenburg walking us through the processes with MorphoJ. Mini-mascot Dice the Diceros watches on as I manipulate a rhinoceros scapula on Landmark Editor. 

Overall, I must say that the course was a resounding success. With a low attendance (n=9) this gave everyone a great opportunity to interact with all other participants during the workshop, and with Chris whenever anything went drastically wrong! With attendees from Brazil, USA,  UK, South Africa and Northern Europe, this course was a testament to the success of the Transmitting Science franchise. It must be said that I wrote a lot down without necessarily always understanding every bit of it, but the knowledge I gained from the analyses I ran has set me up with brand new ideas for where my project can go. So if anyone has a repository of fossil horse feet they fancy lending me for purely scientific purposes, that would be swell!

As always, the academic and extra-curricular activities are equally as important during a course such as this. Aside from a wealth of morphometric and phylogenetic knowledge, this week we discovered:
1. When you have the worlds largest repository of leaves for an endemic group of plants, morphometrics is the way to keep masters students busy...
2. Music is wine, barriers are burritos, p-values mean nothing and everything, weasels are dimorphic, the "secret stash" is basically in the kitchen, icecream is a sandwich, PhD students look at pictures not numbers, gravity always wins, and at the end of the day garlic makes everything better...
3. Fleas bite you in straight lines. Mosquitos dont give a s**t. Ants LOVE aioli, and favour apple and butifarra in equal measure (suggesting that, with 95% certainty and a p-value of <0.05, the ants are from Catalonia)...
4. Vegetarianism is rife, as long as the parameters for being a vegetarian include: "will eat fish"...
Fantastic vineyard visit on the way back to Barcelona at the end of the course. Beautiful weather and top quality grape-juice!

It must be said I had another really rewarding experience in Barcelona, coupled with some delightful wine-tasting in the Catalan hills, and look forward to returning some day soon. My thanks extend to Chris, Sole and all the Transmitting Science staff, and special thanks to the Catalan people for making us so welcome.

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