Time Travel
When you read this, the 2024 holiday season will be over and the new year duly rung in. But at the time I should be writing a new newsletter for you to read today, the holidays will be in full swing and I will be taking some time off to enjoy them. So before that, I’m writing this note telling you that I won’t be writing the note that I should write next week. Isn’t it cool how reading and writing can play weird games with time?
But I don’t want to completely abandon you. So here’s a repeat of a one of the more popular newsletters from last year (based on replies I got from you guys). And by the way, please keep those replies coming. I love hearing from you.
With no further ado about time travel …
Researchers in Spain were having trouble with their attempts to regenerate oak forests. When they planted seed, they couldn’t get a stand of trees established because mice and other small rodents were scarfing down so many of the acorns. Poison wasn’t a good solution. Among other problems, it killed lots of animals, not just the pesky rodents.
The scent of a predator’s urine — say, that of a coyote or wolf — deters smaller animals. But have you ever tried to collect coyote pee? It’s not easy. But Jorge Castro, an ecologist at the University of Granada, had a clever idea: Why not try human urine? After all, in some ways we are the biggest predator of them all. And we eat meat, so our urine likely has the tell-tale smell of the carnivore. Let’s coat acorns in human pee and see if that deters acorn munchers, he thought.
Collecting human urine was easy. Castro just told the researchers in his lab to pony up. “Let’s go, I need your urine!” he announced. And good employees that they were, they did indeed step up (or sit down, I suppose, if they were female) to pee.
I’ll bet you’re expecting me to tell you that rodents fled in fear of the scent of human urine. But nope. It didn’t work. The rodents sniffed the urine-coated acorns and kept munching.
There’s an important message in all this. Did you hear about this research in the news? Probably not. No one paid it that much attention. It was published in the journal Restoration Ecology. That it was published at all is somewhat unusual. Negative results — when the researchers don’t find what they were looking for, and therefore don’t prove their hypothesis — often go unpublished. This is unfortunate, because as we all know, you can learn a lot from things that don’t work out.
The fact that journals overwhelmingly favor positive results and take a pass on studies with negative results means that when other researchers and reporters like me search the literature, we often get a skewed view of what science has found. That can be especially dangerous in medical research. Let’s say that a few studies show that grape soda is a remedy for epilepsy (I just made that one up — don’t try this at home). Those studies get all the headlines, but the many studies showing no effect whatsoever are ignored or unpublished.
But negative results or not, there is an important takeaway from Castro’s research: If you have mice in your pantry, it won’t do any good to pee on the shelves. Aren’t you glad I brought this study to your attention?
’til next time,
Avery
Image courtesy Tomasz Mikolajczyk via Pixabay