Welcome to our blog series, Research Highlights! On the second Monday of each month, we debut newly published fisheries research by our women of fisheries colleagues. If you have research you would like to highlight and share with our readers, submit a nomination form!

This Month’s Research Highlight:
Lyons, Kady, Dovi Kacev, and Christopher G. Mull. 2021. An inconvenient tooth: Evaluating female choice in multiple paternity using an evolutionarily and ecologically important vertebrate clade. Marine Ecology 30:1574-1593.

According to the Science Council, a scientist is someone who systematically gathers and uses research and evidence, to make hypotheses and test them, to gain and share understanding and knowledge. Implied in this definition is a sense of objectivity, that our inferences and conclusions are based on the objective interpretation of the evidence we gather from testing our ideas. But are we really immune to our own biases?

In this month’s research highlight, we focus on a recently published study about shark mating. Specifically, it involves polyandry, or multiple paternity, in which elasmobranchs will mate with multiple partners resulting in females carrying pups with DNA from different males in the same litter. What has been assumed in previous studies is something known as “convenience polyandry” in which females passively allow multiple males to mate with them, not taking into account the role that females may be playing to ensure their own reproductive success. “Which made no sense to us considering how much females invest into the production of young,” said Dr. Kady Lyons, Georgia Aquarium Research Scientist and lead author of the study.

This type of research is nothing new to Dr. Lyons. For years, she has been studying multiple paternity in elasmobranchs, a group of cartilaginous fishes that include sharks, skates and rays. They make a good study group for this kind of research, given their diverse reproductive adaptations and strategies and their lack of parental care of their young after birth. Through their research, Dr. Lyons and her colleagues were increasingly baffled by a question that kept surfacing. What if females were actively involved in this mating process? And why hasn’t this been considered before? It makes sense. If females are investing so much of their resources into producing babies, some even giving birth to live young, they would certainly want to play an active role into which males were allowed to fertilize their eggs. 

Dr. Lyons and her coauthors look to history for an answer. “Historically, sexual conflict has only been considered through the male lens, possibly because a majority of past literature in this taxon and others has been written by men.” They further contend, “The context in which many multiple paternity studies take place and the implicit biases that influence our interpretations of data may also be important to consider, especially in patriarchal Western culture.” Is it possible that implicit bias, specifically cultural and gender bias in this case, can influence our scientific inferences? Are scientists immune to the effects of bias and if not, how can we go about checking our biases at the laboratory door, so to speak?

Dr. Lyons suggests that we commit to staying open to new perspectives, challenging the paradigm, and continuing to test ideas even those “previously established.” We must acknowledge our own limitations and biases, because although we are scientists, we are all human and see through our own narrow lenses. So, invite different voices to the table and get the conversations started. Move science forward.      

I will leave you with these thoughts by Dr. Lyons, “I think this paper is in line with what seems like a feminist wave in science, or at least a call to action for people to actively think about this and be aware of our implicit biases. This is not the first paper to point this out and it won’t be the last. We have already gotten some push back because typically older white men want to argue that “science is not subjective”, but that simply isn’t true. We are fallible human beings and we bring those biases to the table whether we like it or not. We hope this paper continues to spark conversation and encourages people to think about other perspectives, not just the ones that have precedent, especially considering female voices were not really present or incorporated into that “precedent”.”

• 

• 

• 

As a parting (and more personal) note, I have a habit of reading the acknowledgments of scientific papers. I am interested in the side details of a study, from the noted contributions of others to funding sources. But every once in a while, I find a real gem. Dr. Lyons and her co-authors dedicated the manuscript to “the notorious R.B.G., a champion of female choice.” As a follow-up to that, I asked Dr. Lyons if she had a personal inspiration in her career, a woman in science or ally, she would like to acknowledge. “I would like to give a shout out to my PhD advisor, Dr. Katherine Wynne-Edwards who has been an outstanding role model for bad-a** women in science, as well as my mom who encouraged me and my sister to do whatever we wanted and not let our gender hold us back.” And then my mind turned to “R. Shark” and “Tallulah” who are also listed “for inspiration and vibes.” It turns out “Tallulah” is the largest (and also female) manta in the Georgia Aquarium’s Ocean Voyager habitat, and “R. Shark” alludes to a certain reggae-themed shark video series which inspired their color scheme for the graphs in their paper. Scientists like Dr. Lyons and her colleagues are not only pathmakers in the field of shark research, but they also aren’t afraid to interject their own personality into their work. I, for one, am thankful they’re keeping it real and interesting. 

The full manuscript can be found and downloaded here:
https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15844