Co-Authorship on my First Scientific Journal Article
Apparently it takes a REALLY long time to get articles published in the Journal of Ecology, a publication of the Ecological Society of America.
Whatever.
Mine is FINALLY out in February 2009, Volume 90, No. 2: pp 419 - 429.
Cryptic seedling herbivory by nocturnal introduced generalists impacts survival, performance of native and exotic plants
I totally understand if you're bored already.
If you're a LITTLE curious, here's a brief synopsis of my research results.
- Slugs, snails and earwigs are generalist herbivores - they eat just about any kind of plant.
- Slugs have strong preferences about flavor (who knew?) and the will eat the tasty plants first.
- The grey garden slugs we see all over the place are introduced - they originally came from Europe.
- The plants we worry about preserving are usually natives, which have not had time to evolve defenses against foreign slugs (like the ability to produce chemicals which make the plants taste bad).
- Result? - Introduced slugs eat more native plants than introduced ones because they are tastier.
Seriously - that's all there is to it.
If for some odd reason you are REALLY interested, I can email you the whole article. Don't bother buying it at $20 - just ask me.