First publication~!

Oh yes, finally my first publication.
It comes in my last month as a Ph.D. student. Cute.

I used to think that I would have at least three, four publications by the time I graduate. Well, currently I only have two papers accepted (including the one above).
If the editors weren't so demanding for one of my other behavioural studies, I might have one more accepted. Hehe...that poor behavioral paper was rejected by one...two..three journals, though the third journal expressed interest and encouraged me to resubmit with some additional data. I really wanted to publish in the first journal (Proc. of the Royal Soc. B) but they said my data were preliminary. *Yeah right, I replicated my results over two years, and it's still considered preliminary*. The second journal rejected for what reason...hmm, forgot lah. Pretty glad that the second journal rejected though, because I found out about the third journal after that and would prefer the latter anyway.

Oh well, after four years of doing some pretty independent research, writing grants, presenting at conferences and writing papers, my experience is that doing science is more or less the following:
1. Observe something(s)
2. Wonder if there is a pattern, ask the Questions
3. Design experiments, recognize the strength and weaknesses of each
4. Conduct the experiments, smiling all the time because what else can you do?
5. Taste failure, blame it on your assistants/collaborator
6. Critical analysis, try again
7. Fail again, blame your assistants/collaborator again, contemplate changing the research team
8. Try again, after undergrad plead innocence
9. Repeat #4-$8
9.(secret stage). Manipulate data on password protected file. 
10. Finally, Success! 
11. Share success with others, get criticized, but remember to smile because no matter what they say, they don't know your biggest secret...(#9 secret stage), so it's all good.
12. Step back, look at your awesome data and plan on packaging it into a nifty story
13. Present story in (easy mode) conference, or (hardcore mode) publication
14. Conference-> you are the best presenter ever, but audience look like they were watching Avatar for the 27th time. Only one question was asked, and it was something slightly better than "what did you do again?"
15. Paper-> you are the best writer ever, and the first draft is already journal-quality. Six rejections and four revisions later, you no longer recognize your paper but it gets accepted with praises.
16. Somewhere in between, if you run out of money or suddenly you just want to indulge in self-inflicted torture, you stick a knife into your head and decide to write a research grant to get more 1)money, 2)recognition, 3)motivation, 4)pain. You are always successful in obtaining at least one of those four, guess which one?


HAhahahaha...this post very funny lah. Of course please don't take my above points seriously...it's a mix of truth and parody. I will write a more accurate and honest post about my Ph.D. experience later, after I have really graduated.

Here's a picture of a female of the assassin bug (Zelus renardii) Abdullah and I studied in this first publication. She's just laid some eggs which look like a stack of beer bottles, no? Hahaha. The insect stuck to her hindleg was a Geocoris pallens adult that we fed to her. Geocoris pallens is actually the protagonist of my whole Ph.D. story, unfortunately this post isn't about Geocoris, so he/she remains a fodder in this case.

 And here's a video of the behavior we observed and study in the paper. When Mama finished laying the eggs, she applies a layer of sticky substance on the exterior of the egg cases. This behavior has been observed in other assassin bugs too. When the baby assassin bugs are born, they crawl out of their egg cases and then return to the eggs to gather the sticky substance. With their forelegs, the newly hatched assassin bugs apply the sticky substance to their bodies. We were interested in why do the babies do that? As in, are there any benefits to applying the sticky substance?

Short answer: Yes. Having the sticky substance improves the juvenile assassin bugs' success of catching prey (flies in this case), and also helped them resist higher windspeed (interpreted as improving grip on the substrate).

For the simplicity of the study and the fun I had while designing and conducting the experiments, this is arguably my favourite research projects so far.