tarde venientibus ossa

First, he said, you write the methods. You’ve been doing the methods for months, you know what goes there. You know what questions you’re trying to answer and how you went about answering them.

Now that you’ve done that, write the results. Do your analysis. Take some time to bask in having done that and chew it over.

Next: the introduction. What information do you need to set up the conclusion? Do you need to write the six worst sentences known to man as a draft conclusion so you can go back that up in the introduction? Do that.

Write that conclusion. Tie things up, you’ve done amazing. It’s looking good! Unfortunately. The hardest part is yet to come:

The abstract. An unholy melange of introduction, results, and conclusion. The thing that 90% of readers are going to stop after reading. The ultimate test of your ability to communicate your science. Thank goodness you have all this prep work done and aren’t trying to create it out of nothing! Thank goodness you didn’t try to write it first because it was the first thing on the page!

A really important article about the stranding of “Timmy” that happened in Germany.

Pushing an exhausted and sick whale back into the ocean again and again only prolongs that animal’s suffering and potentially even worsens it.

Strandings are rarely just misadventure - the whale or dolphin is usually sick or too weak to fight against the ocean currents. They may also be extremely dehydrated from lack of food because they haven’t got any energy.

Yet time and time again we see people blocking a whale from stranding or members of the general public dragging the whale back into the ocean by their tail. And getting very upset when they’re asked to put their ego aside and call the professional marine mammal rescue teams instead of making a viral video posing themselves as a big hero.

I know people want to help. But it’s endlessly frustrating to get a text to respond to a whale stranding as someone who is trained, only to find out someone’s just pushed the whale back into the ocean without any assessment.

It’s likely that whale is going to re-strand somewhere else - often a quieter more secluded area that’s harder to get to. Or they just give up and drown.

C. californici was a species of louse that- as far as we know- exclusively parasitized California condors. Very little is known about their ecology because when the last California condors were brought in to the LA Zoo and the San Diego Wildlife Park for a captive breeding program, they were treated with a pesticide intended to kill the lice. This was done to ensure the condors remained healthy-- despite the fact that we don't really know whether C. californici posed any serious health risks or indeed was harmful to the condors at all. And we never will.

I say all this not to denigrate the work of those involved in the condor breeding program, or the continuing conservation program. I'm sharing this because we decided that one species' survival was worth the extinction of another. Or perhaps we didn't even care enough to make that decision, since C. californici was so poorly studied prior to its extinction that it may have only been an afterthought.