Another year is over, and 2021 seemed still more full and stressful than 2020! So here are some reflections on my year from an academic perspective.
The first of January 2021 saw me starting a new job: PI on a three-year German Research Foundation (DFG) funded PostDoc project in Michael Hofreiter’s group at the University of Potsdam. Ella and I had moved to Potsdam just two months earlier to prepare for the position. It was exciting to be joining a new group, and working on a passion-project that involved learning new methods to broaden my repertoire. I quickly got to know some of my lab mates, but getting fully integrated was challenging, because from day one, meetings were held over zoom.
The Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin has part of its scientific collections on display in one of the most remarkable rooms in any natural history museum I have ever visited.
The Potsdam project is in the DFG Priority Programme SPP-1991 on ‘Taxon-OMICS’. The project is called ‘FrogCap for the Taxonomic Gap: Harnessing Hybrid Enrichment for Next-Generation Taxonomy’. The goal is to integrate new methods, especially FrogCap, the hybrid enrichment bait set developed by Carl Hutter, to get genomic data from type material of cophyline frog species in order to clarify old names and enable taxonomic revisions and descriptions of new species. Over the following months, I started work in the lab with Michaela Preick, and started collecting material from different museums across Europe. I got a Visiting Researcher contract set up with the Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in Berlin to facilitate my work there.
In May, I also received the CETAF E-SCoRe award for Excellence in Scientific Collections-based Research, for a portfolio of work I submitted in January. It was a great pleasure to present my work to the members of the CETAF committee.
In the meantime, something very unexpected happened: in December 2020 I had applied for a dream job, a position as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor and Curator in Vertebrate Zoology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark (NHMD) and University of Copenhagen. In March, after the application had been long since forgotten, I got back feedback on it—unexpectedly positive feedback! Days later, I was invited for an interview. Two weeks later I found myself in a zoom call with eight people from the museum and university, from my office in our Potsdam flat. A week after that I was invited to Copenhagen, and three days later Ella and I found ourselves on a plane heading to an in-person interview and tour of the museum. Finally, on the 7th of May, I was offered and accepted the job.
So in August, ten months after moving to Potsdam, eight months into my new PostDoc, and one month after I had finally received permanent residence in Germany, Ella and I dropped everything and moved to Denmark. We’re still recovering from the whiplash.
This was a huge change. Denmark may share a border with Germany, and the language may share many features, but the culture is very different, and getting into the Danish system is slow and, at times, frustrating. The job, however, made the whole ordeal worthwhile. The NHMD is extremely old, with some material dating back to the mid-17th century. The herpetological collection, which I am now curator of, is modest at just around 60,000 specimens, but it is species-rich, and has been worked on by many noted herpetologists over the years. I am so excited to have it in my care. My collections manager, Daniel Klingberg Johansson, is also absolutely fantastic, and I am looking forward to developing and growing the collection over the coming years!
The herpetological collections of the NHMD; now my responsibility!
My first day at work was unforgettable: every now and then a whale will strand on Denmark’s coastline, and as the country’s national museum, it comes to us. The 1st of September was a whale day. A beaked whale had beached a few days earlier, and been brought to the museum to be dissected. I took some choice photographs, and by luck, one of the ones I posted on twitter went viral, putting me on news websites and television on my first day!
This is what it looks like when you remove the inter-digital flesh from a whale’s flipper. Amazing to see how well the pentadactyl limb is retained! pic.twitter.com/GPu602wXz5
— Dr Mark D. Scherz (@MarkScherz) September 1, 2021
Natasha (left) and Laura (middle) and me in our office during one of the early intensive gallery planning meetings.
The NHMD had made four new hires at the same time: Natasha de Vere came in as an Associate Professor and Curator of Botany, Laura Cotton came in as an Assistant Professor and Curator of Palaeontology, and Kim Steenstrup Pedersen came in as Professor of Computer Vision and Digital Natural History, and Curator of Digital Collections. Two weeks after starting, Natasha, Laura, and I were brought on as the three curators (Natasha as lead curator, Laura and myself as assistant curators) for a new permanent gallery on Biodiversity in the new NHMD buildings being constructed. We found ourselves having long meetings twice a week working towards very tight deadlines, but the work was fun and totally different from anything I had done before. That work is ongoing, and will be for the next few years!
I was also invited to give a talk at the Science Gala of the University of Copenhagen. I talked there about tiny chameleons (on which more below), and the whole feeling of the evening was amazing.
Meanwhile, my project in Potsdam had to continue. Once I knew that I would be moving to Copenhagen, I needed to either take the grant with me or hire a replacement onto my position so that it could continue in Potsdam. The latter was by far the better option, but finding a replacement would be difficult and time consuming. Here, I got really lucky: by chance, a PostDoc at the MfN named Alice Petzold had reached out to me to talk about herps early in 2021. She was interested in museomics, herpetology, and learning bioinformatics, and just as I got the news that I would be moving, she was looking for a new PostDoc. So I brought her onto the project as my replacement—and I could not have made a better choice! Working with her over the past few months has been absolutely great, and I am looking forward to the next two years of having her on the project. I also took on a Bachelor’s student, Clara Keusgen, who is working on different aspects of the project, partially for her Bachelor’s project, partially as an assistant—another really promising student who it is great to have on board.
While things were moving and shaking in my academic positions, I also launched two big passion projects in outreach: Firstly, I embarked on an epic journey to tweet through all of the frogs of Madagascar, one species per day, in chronological order of their description, under the hashtags #MadagascarFrogs and #FrogOfTheDay. This was prompted by us exceeding 365 frog species known from Madagascar in 2020. This wound up being one of the most challenging commitments I have ever made, consuming a total of over 300 hours of my year, but I am incredibly proud that I managed to not miss a single species/day all year. The project will continue a little into 2022 as well, as we now have 376 described frog species known from Madagascar.
In 2020, Madagascar surpassed 365 described frog species, so EVERY DAY in 2021 I am tweeting about a different #FrogOfTheDay from Madagascar! To make it easier to follow along on our tour of the #MadagascarFrogs, I will QT each species into this thread. pic.twitter.com/slUNKAFdse
— Dr Mark D. Scherz (@MarkScherz) January 31, 2021
Secondly, Katharina Ruthsatz, Miguel Vences, and I embarked on a project to bring anatomical dissection instructions to YouTube, on a channel called AnatomyInsights. In August we published a paper announcing the project, which is aimed at Bachelor’s level students, and is meant to be both a companion to traditional dissection, and a potential study guide for students. We are currently releasing videos on a monthly schedule, and Katharina’s work on the channel’s instagram is particularly worth checking out!
On the publication front, I coauthored 13 peer-reviewed papers in 2021. I was lucky to be involved in two papers that swept the media in early the year; first our publication of the discovery of neon-green fluorescence in the web-footed gecko, Pachydactylus rangei, and then the description of Brookesia nana, the world’s smallest reptile (probably). These were huge highlights of the year.
Taxonomically, 2021 saw the publication of the new species of ground gecko, Paroedura rennerae, and revalidation of P. guibeae, a taxonomic overhaul of the narrow-mouthed frogs of the Scaphiophryne calcarata species complex with revalidation of S. obscura, the new blindsnake Madatyphlops eudelini from Mayotte, and the new leaf-litter frog species Gephyromantis (Duboimantis) pedronoi, and redefinition of G. (D.) plicifer and G. (D.) sculpturatus. I was also among the coauthors of a new phylogeny of Lygodactylus day geckos, which revealed a surprisingly great undescribed diversity. Outside of Madagascar, I was involved in the description of the new genus Nanohyla for a clade of small frogs formerly included in Microhyla, and in a response to a paper purporting to accelerate the description of species by omitting all of the useful parts of species description. We also published a short note describing the reproduction of a newly discovered Stumpffia species in Ambohitantely Special Reserve in central Madagascar.
I am particularly proud of a paper I coauthored with Catherine Strong and Michael Caldwell, which discusses the evolution of microstomy in snakes, and the fact that this is not a single ‘state’ but has been arrived at through numerous convergent routes in different lineages of snakes. I have seldom been involved in a paper that was so well written, and almost all the credit for that goes to Catherine, who has just moved to Harvard to pursue her PhD.
Finally, several researchers from the Priority Programme 1991 Taxon-OMICS, led by Miguel Vences, came together to develop and publish a new toolkit to facilitate groundwork in taxonomy called iTaxoTools. In its first year of development, this toolkit already has a huge set of easy-to-use tools, including a genetic distance-calculator, coordinate corrector, DNA file format converter, concatenation tool, DNA-based diagnosis tool, morphological measurement comparison tool, and so the list goes on… The paper announcing the project was published in Megataxa. The project itself is hosted on GitHub, and all tools are open source. I myself have already integrated several of the tools into my day-to-day taxonomic routines.
As always, most of the papers I worked on in 2021 are not out yet. In particular, I spent a lot of time working on papers from my last postdocs, chapters for an upcoming book (currently in proof, hopefully published in 2022), and several major monographs (some coming in 2022, some probably 2023). I am ending the year with three papers in review and three in revision; not as many as this time last year, but considering how difficult and full the year has been, I am quite pleased with how it has gone.
For previous years in review, click here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
Always proud of you! Glad to read in one place some of what you’ve stuffed into this year. Well done!
Astounding, your disciplined and insightful work, in cooperation with equally dedicated and intelligent colleagues! My compliments, Mark!