Publish it… they just may read it!

I submitted my first article to a scientific journal as a master’s student. It wasn’t my main thesis but a side project meant to be a short note. The findings were interesting but ancillary to my (and my advisor’s) main area of focus at the time. In retrospect, however, it taught me some very important lessons as a young scientist. We were breeding Sockeye Salmon Oncorhynchus nerka and kokanee (their less adventurous, landlocked cousin) to investigate the genetic vs environmental basis of various traits like color, body shape, and gill raker number. This was just as the scientific community was realizing that different stocks of the same salmon species were genetically unique, leading to several Endangered Species Act listings and massive recovery efforts (yes….it was the 1990s, when that thing called the World Wide Web was just being released!). We were working in shared incubator space at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Anxious to speed up early development so we could take our measurements on juvenile and adult fish, when space unexpectedly opened up in a nearby high-temperature incubator, we jumped at the chance to move our embryos to warmer water. It was only a few weeks though before we got bumped back to our original, low-temperature incubators…the biological equivalent of a quick dip in the hot tub. We thought nothing of it at the time—it seemed like one of many minor tactical decisions that get made over the course of any research project.