Blue Collar Scientist

For years now, nutria have been destroying wetlands in the southern United States.

In case you aren’t familiar with nutria, they are rodents, they live in wetlands and eat plant roots, and they look like this:

The are also reportedly classified by some Catholic dioceses as “fish” for purposes of eating. Like during lent, or something. If you still observe the fish on Friday tradition, maybe you could call up the bishop, savage both Linnean taxonomy and phylogenetics in one symbolic act of antiscience dissent, and try some Nutria Fondue. Or maybe you could do it anyway, without actually having to believe rodents are fish. Really, do it either way - I’m a big proponent of trying new foods.

Anyway, my nominee for worst press release in the history of science comes to my attention via Science Daily. They publish generally slightly reworked press releases, and don’t bother to link back to the originals these days, so it is just possible that Science Daily, and not the originating institution is responsible for this. Either way, someone needs to be sent out to find a new job, because they have no business whatever communicating science to laypeople.

Here’s how it starts.

A 10-pound rodent pest called nutria ravaging southern wetlands in the US, which has been especially damaging to the marshland ecology in the Mississippi Delta following Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, may have finally met its match thanks to molecular science that includes the work of Professor Athula B. Attygalle, an expert in molecular chemistry and mass-spectrometry based at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a team of scientists from Cornell University and University of Iowa.

Ok, that’s not too bad - but that is just one sentence. One really long sentence. There is enough there to grasp the good news - there’s been an advance in nutria control in the southern United States! But that’s not really the motive of the person writing this release. They aren’t crowing about an advance in nutria control. The big accomplishment from their perspective is more like this:

Good news - we’ve managed to cram our names and institutional affiliations into the very first sentence of the press release!!! Whooooohooooo!

It continues:

To get a sense of their [nutria] productivity, 20 nutria brought to Louisiana in the 1930s bred an estimated 20 million animals within two decades, according to a wildlife group in Maryland that tracks nutria data, quoted in a recent report by Louisiana journalist Chris Kirkham.

Was it really too much trouble to just call up this nebulous, unnamed “wildlife group in Maryland” and cut out the middleman called “Louisiana journalist Chris Kirkham?” Where does this sort of thing end? My neighbor told me that her cousin said that her friend from high school told her that his buddy from LA told him that he had heard that….

“Several volatile compounds, including terpenoids, fatty alcohols, fatty acids and some of their esters, were identified from solvent extracts prepared from anal scent glands of nutria, a.k.a. coypu,” said Attygalle.

Oy. Let’s get some media training for Dr. Attygalle. Please. Because this is not a sentence that should ever have actually been spoken by any human being¹. In particular, nobody should be saying “a.k.a.” in a spoken sentence about wildlife. Maybe you would want to say that if you are issuing an APB concerning some cohorts of Bugsy Malone’s, but not when you are talking about nutria, especially not if they’ve already been introduced as the concept at the center of the story.

But this is not the worst of it. I kid you not, but this material is what follows.

Remember, this is from a press release.

Not from the peer-reviewed paper.

From the press release. Which has something to do with nutria control.

The major terpenoid constituents were identified as (E,E)-farnesol and its esters by a comparison of their gas chromatographic retention times, and electron-ionization (EI) and chemical-ionization (CI) mass spectra with those of authentic compounds. EI mass spectra of the four farnesol isomers are very similar, however, the ChemStation (Agilent) and GC–MS Solution (Shimadzu) software algorithms were able to identify the natural compound as the (E,E)-isomer, when a high-quality mass spectral library was compiled from reference samples and used for searching. Similarly, the esters were identified as those of (E,E)-farnesol. In contrast to EI spectra, the CI spectra of the (E,E)- and (E,Z)-isomers are distinctly different from those of the (Z,E)- and (Z,Z)-isomers.

Moreover, the infrared spectrum of the (E,E)-isomer is distinctly different from those of the other three isomers in the 2962–2968 cm - and 2918–2922 cm1 bands, which represent asymmetric CH3 and CH2 stretching vibrations, respectively. Finally, the GC retention indices of farnesol and farnesyl ester isomers determined from authentic samples were used to confirm all identifications.

If you got through all of that, and never at any point felt the slightest glimmer of an inclination to go shoot yourself, or at least go play with your Wii, then congratulations - that’s better than I managed.

Then, the press release takes a sharp - nay, I would describe it as a neck-snapping turn:

For many years, Tabasco sauce magnate E.A. McIlhenny received most of the blame for introducing the rodents from South America to Avery Island in the 1930s.

Tabasco sauce? Ok - that is related to the story after all, but geeze, those are the last words I expected to see here. The release goes on to explain that although this chap has long been blamed, it turned out he wasn’t to blame after all. But then the release says of our Tabasco sauce magnate:

He did eventually set the nutria loose….

Umm - so he’s the guy who was said to have released them, but that turned out to be a myth, but, uhh, he did actually release them after all. Got that?

Historian Shane Barnard continues:

“I’m confident that all the myth has been stripped away”

Really? You are confident of this? Because I’m not at all. The press release leaves me with the impression that Mr. Tabasco Sauce did the deed, and that there’s nothing mythic about it. Unless releasing the nutria was mythic in roughly the same sense as the Pied Piper leading the rats out of Hamelin.

All this Tabasco stuff is a slight diversion in the middle of the press release. It is a little bit of local color in an otherwise Serious Science Story. Which is about nutria control, remember? So based on everything you’ve read so far, what do you think the control method is?

If you are like me, you read all that incomprehensible analytical chemistry stuff quoted up above, and you concluded that the researchers were coming up with a poison. Like maybe some sort of nutria mustard gas, that would allow Bambi and all the other cute, good animals to live, but destroy the nutria like they were in the front lines at Ypres.

If you thought this, you were wrong. Because now, finally, in the very last sentence of the press release, we learn exactly how all this works.

The work of Professor Attygalle and his associates offers an environmentally friendly bait technique intended to lure nutria to traps for transport away from sensitive coastal zones and marshlands.

Ah! Oh my. We’ve finally got the story. They’re gonna trap nutria and move them somewhere. What a relief.

Meanwhile, the PR people are celebrating that they got that name into the first and last sentences of the release. Good going! Champagne for everyone, I’m sure.

I defy anyone to show me a worse science press release than this one.

1. I’ll cut some slack if I find out English is a second language for this speaker. [↩]

The LIGO team recently reported that LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, has failed to detect gravitational waves from a gamma ray burst. Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous phenomenon in the universe since the big bang. The favored hypothesis for the cause of most GRBs is the collapse and merger of two compact, massive objects; but there are many other possible explanations.

On February 1, 2007, the Konus-Wind, Integral, Messenger, and Swift satellites, each carrying gamma ray burst detection instruments, reported a short-duration burst in the direction of one of M31’s spiral arms. The high energy and brief duration of the burst suggested that the GRB was caused by a merger of neutron stars or black holes, and the direction suggested it had occurred in a nearby galaxy. If these hypotheses were true, the event should have led to gravitational waves that LIGO should have easily detected.

But LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, failed to detect gravitational waves at the time of this event. This means that either:

1. the burst actually occurred in a distant galaxy in the same direction as M31;
2. the burst did occur in M31 but was not the result of a compact massive object merger.

Some scientists seem to favor the second explanation. Neil Gehrels, the lead scientist of the SWIFT mission, says “We are still baffled by short GRBs. The LIGO observation gives a tantalizing hint that some short GRBs are caused by soft gamma repeaters. It is an important step forward.”

Some reports seem to suggest that LIGO’s result means that short-duration, high-energy GRBs are never caused by massive compact object mergers. That’s overstating the significance of these results. This represents an important incremental step forward, but it will take many such observations before it becomes clear whether any hypotheses have to be abandoned or upgraded.

Still, this is the first science from a brand new frontier - gravitational waves. We can expect in the coming years that this new discipline will have a big impact on the science of GRBs.