Deep thoughts and silliness

A few months ago one of my former post-docs mentioned that he had been thinking about ecological networks. One common type of network is a bipartite network, for example a plant-frugivore network, where members of one group (e.g. frugivores) may interact with members of the other (e.g. plants). my post.doc was worrying a bit about how to analyse this sort of data, because the current methods don’t look great (they use methods designed for networks that are completely known, whereas ours have a lot of missing data).

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One day, a few years ago, I was drinking with some fellow biologists in “Seminar Room A” opposite the Natural History Museum in Helsinki. The Sibelius Academy is next door to the museum, so we shared the bar with musicians. Once of the musicians came up to us with a plastic bag, and gave it to us saying that they thought we’d know what to do with it. In the bag was a dead gull.
Well, the other biologists knew what to do with it: it had a band on it so they took that off its leg, and dumped the body. The band was sent to the local banding centre, so they would know that the bird had died. And another datum was added to the store of human knowledge.

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