Australian Society for Limnology
and
New Zealand Limnological Society
joint congress


(42nd Annual ASL Congress) 1 - 5th December, 2003

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Please Note that the Minutes of the 42nd AGM of the Australian Society for Limnology, held on 3 December 2003 at Warrnambool, will be included in the March 2004 edition of the ASL newsletter.

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THE COVETED 2003 ASL DOOR PRIZE REPORT

Good evening and welcome to what might just be the 20th annual ASL Door Prize award.  For new members of the Society, the Door Prize is awarded at each ASL Congress to the person, thing, species, event or act that makes the Congress memorable into the future.  You may not be able to remember many of the talks from years past (….. sometimes, I can’t even remember the talks from this morning), but you will always remember the winner of the Door Prize.

Nominations are gathered by a large and anonymous anarchical collective and assessed against strict rules.

Luckily, there is no actual physical prize, the door being last seen in a tip somewhere in South Australia.  This is good as it saves the embarrassment of forgetting to bring the prize to the conference each year.  Of course, that would never happen to the more prestigious awards such as the ASL medal, would it Margaret Hart?

Speaking of ASL Models, the sight of Andrew Boulton actually wearing shoes at the opening ceremony this year caused a great deal of confusion among the collective.  This was either an evil, but flawed, clone of the real Andrew who had been inserted into the ASL matrix by a rival society for some unknown evil purpose, or the honour of appearing on Macca’s radio show had gone to his head and he thought he was just a regular Aussie bloke.

Rhonda Sinclair promised never to talk to me again if she was nominated this year.  As tempting an offer as this is …… it is one that I will have to decline.  The list of good nominees this year meant that, despite her best efforts, Rhonda couldn’t be included in the nominations this year (Go on! Edit that out!)

And the nominees are:

As usual, Microsoft Corporation has been nominated in the “Technological Advances” section for this years new PowerPoint function, called the “Get on with it” function.  With this function activated, the computer monitors the progress of the talk and at the first sign of any potentially time wasting hesitation, automatically moves forward to the next slide, while disabling the previous slide button.  This wonderful function made sure that Max Finlayson and Barry Hart couldn’t get off the track and were made to finish their talks in the allotted time.  We have written to Microsoft and asked them to develop a Jacob John function, but not even Bill Gates could solve that one.

The “Innovations in Catering” nomination this year goes to the crowd (a bit reluctant to actually call them caterers) who brought you lunch on the first day.  Lunch was made efficient by the brilliant combination of a sickly sweet pastry base filled with savoury toppings.  In this way, you could eat both the main course and dessert at the same time – thus leaving more time for talks.

The “Is it me or does John Howard seem to be everywhere” nomination goes to Mike Grace.  A few years ago, the nominee in this category got the gong for having his name on no less than 3 papers.  Mike has taken this to new heights, being author or co-author on no less than 9 presentations this year.

The “Leadership in Community Consultation” nomination was clearly won by Paul Boon, for managing to include the most number of derogatory stereotypes in a single 12 minute presentation.  Well, what would you expect from an academic.  Academics are the sorts of people who spend as much time as they can in their ivory tower away from the real world and who think that things like measuring the amount of oxygen consumption in mud in the bottom of swamps is a valid way of passing the time.

The “we have to nominate the conference organizers each year, but can’t let them win ‘cause they have done a fantastic job on the conference” nomination is given this year for the attempt at crowd control.  At previous ASL conferences, the organizers have tried to quell riotous and fun behaviour by appealing to out civilized human nature (that failed), by restricting the official supply of alcohol (that failed) and even by having the congress in the middle of Tasmania in the middle of winter assuming our metabolic rate would decline to levels of torpor (that failed).  This year, the organizers tried ….. FEAR!

·           If you smoke in your room, the fire alarm goes off and it will cost you $400.

·           If you get up to any mischief with a can of deodorant (not sure just what they had in mind there), the fire alarm goes off and it will cost you $400.

·           If you use candles or incense in one of those black magic late night orgy things, the fire alarm goes off and it will cost you $400.

·           Even if you think about having fun, the fire alarm will know and go off and it will cost you $400.

By keeping us in a state of fear and anxiety, Belinda and her co-organisers hoped to keep us under control.

Well, if I was the conference organizers, I would be afraid.  The first night, we had the ambulance service here.  The second night we had the fire service here.  Tonight (the night of the dinner), we go for the trifecta!  ASL rules, KO.

Some miscellaneous nominations:

·           To the Dean of Science at Deakin for not seeming to know that there was a bunch of limnologists hiding in his campus;

·           For Dave Crook and his magic mushroom otolith pictures;

·           For Luke Shelley … for a lot of things actually … he will do well in this award one day – but not this year.

This year, the Door Prize came down to two contenders, who were difficult to separate.

To be injured at an ASL Congress is taken as an occupational hazard.  To be injured enough to get the paramedics with morphine is well beyond the call of duty.  Unfortunately not good enough to will this year, Dave Robinson fills a commendable second place.  And Dave, the Collective and, I think, all of ASL wish you the best for a full and speedy recovery.

But the winner this year is in a slightly different vein to the normal Door Prize.  This year, the winner gets the award for a positive achievement.  This year’s award goes to a talk that was memorable in a good way.

It’s not often at an ASL talk that you can’t predict what is coming next.  You can generally guess what you are going to see and hear.  In an ecology talk, there will be a MDS plot where all the points seem to overlap, but the stats tells you the groups are significantly different.  You will see a scatterplot with a cloud of points all over the place with a dodgy looking line of best fit that is always significant.  And you know you will have to listen to 1 minute of introduction and 10 minutes justifying the statistical design, leaving only 1 minute for results and analysis.

It is rare not to know what is coming up.  But this year’s winner changed all that.  Science from the edge, or edgy science, is a commodity that has been missing from ASL for quite a while.  There hasn’t been a lot in recent times that is so different as to make you sit up in the chair and take complete notice.  During the winners talk this year, I glanced around the room and most of the audience had this look on their face, not far from kids at a Wiggles concert.  An enthralled look, not knowing quite what was coming next, but eagerly waiting for it.

I am referring to Jacqueline Giles talk on “Aquatic musicians and their Hallelujah Chorus”.  What Jacqueline has done is make underwater recordings in a number of West Australian wetlands.  From these recordings, she was able to isolate the sounds made by individual animals or species in the wetland.  Not even knowing what the species was in most cases (giving them names associated with their sounds), she played a series of magical sounds from the wetlands.

This has real potential.  A new non-destructive sampling method.  Simply record the wetland or stream of river and a sound analysis will tell you what is there.  One day we might not talk about mesh size, but the frequency range and response of our sampling gear.  It will open up a whole new world for taxonomists as they try to come up with names of species based on their sound – Chironomus sexpistoli for a fast aggressive sounding species; Smith morrisseyi for a slow boring species; Johnny farnhami, Berosus beatlenopsis ….. you get the idea.

I’ve never heard the noise that a corixid makes, or the rhythmic drumming of a long-necked tortoise.  For that memorable experience, I am pleased to award the 2003 ASL Door Prize to Jacqueline Giles.

The one, the only……

Tim Doeg