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26 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
against publishing negative results, but
they’re important, she adds. “If the data
don’t reject the null hypothesis [that gloss-
iness doesn’t help camouflage the animals],
that’s very interesting.”
The next questions for Seago are phy-
logenetic. Mapping out which beetles
are glossy and which aren’t could help
resolve whether specularity has a pur-
pose: evidence that it has evolved multi-
ple times could suggest the trait is adap-
tive. Other research suggests glossiness
may enhance warning signals, and Frank-
lin says she has ideas of further aspects
to investigate, from cuticle strength to
cooling effects to how other animals,
from predators to potential mates, inter-
pret gloss. For Seago, this research gives
her a jumping-off point too, she says.
“I’ll be citing that paper in subsequent
research in iridescence in scarab beetles.”
—Connor LynchMicrobial
Mapping
One morning, just before dawn, Masumi
Stadler got into the back of a seaplane
headed north from Quebec’s Gulf of St.
Lawrence, chasing the Romaine River
upstream. As the plane flew along, the ris-
ing sun illuminated the pristine Canadian
wilderness beneath her, bathing the river
in a rosy pink glow, she recalls four years
later. But Stadler wasn’t there to watch the
sunrise. The plane was packed with special-
ized scientific equipment for sampling the
water and soil along the river, and she and
her colleagues had gotten an early start to
make up for lost time after bad weather had
kept them from getting out to their remote
field sites earlier.
Stadler is a doctoral student at the Uni-
versity of Quebec in Montreal who works
in a lab that studies the Earth’s carbon cycle
and, in particular, the smallest players in
it. “Microbes are a big part of the carbon
cycle,” Stadler says: they are important natu-
ral recyclers, digesting and degrading dead
organic matter into carbon dioxide andBACTERIAL BASIN: Scientists collected huge
volumes of data to help map microbial diversity
along the Romaine River in Quebec.