How fishing cats Prionailurus viverrinus Bennett, 1833 fish: describing a felid’s strategy to hunt aquatic prey

The fishing cat’s persistence in a ‘semi-aquatic niche’ suggests the evolution of a successful hunting strategy. We describe it for the first time by analysing 197 camera-trap video-clips, collected from a participatory-science initiative, within an ethogram framework. The cats spent ∼52% of the time sitting and waiting for prey (fishes) to come nearer and took limited attempts to hunt (3.89%) in deeper waters (in which the upper portions of the cat’s body were submerged), where its hunting success was found to be 42.86%. In shallow waters, it adopted a predominantly active mode of hunting (∼96%) to flush out prey.

Reflections on Teaching and Learning Chemistry Through Youth Participatory Science

This chapter captures a panel discussion from the 2019 conference of Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS, http://seedsweb.org) in Norfolk, Virginia. The panel included two high school students, three high school chemistry teachers, a community organizer, an administrator for a large urban school district, and a university-based science educator. These panelists, the authors of this chapter, had been collaborating on an initiative to support youth participatory science (YPS) projects in high school chemistry classes. We share this lightly edited transcript of our conversation as a way to communicate perspectives about the opportunities and challenges of YPS from viewpoints across these constituency groups. Our conversation is organized around three questions for reflection: (1) What are some of the challenges and possibilities when it comes to engaging with YPS in science classes? (2) How has engaging in YPS exposed both insights and oversights of scientific ways of knowing? (3) In YPS, what are the relationships between learning science and engaging in political and community issues?

Long-term trends in the occupancy of ants revealed through use of multi-sourced datasets

We combined participatory science data and museum records to understand long-term changes in occupancy for 29 ant species in Denmark over 119 years. Bayesian occupancy modelling indicated change in occupancy for 15 species: five increased, four declined and six showed fluctuating trends. We consider how trends may have been influenced by life-history and habitat changes. Our results build on an emerging picture that biodiversity change in insects is more complex than implied by the simple insect decline narrative.

Interface of Human/Wildlife Interactions: An Example of a Bold Coyote (Canis latrans) in Atlanta, GA, USA

There is arguably no other North American species that better illustrates the complexities of the human-wildlife interface than the coyote. In this study, a melanistic coyote in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia was exhibiting unusually bold behaviors that included encounters with humans, domestic dogs, and attempts to enter homes. After tracking this coyote (nicknamed Carmine) across a highly urbanized landscape with participatory science, including at least 80 publicly reported sightings, he was captured and relocated to a wildlife sanctuary. Genome-wide analyses revealed 92.8% coyote ancestry, 1.7% gray wolf ancestry, and 5.5% domestic dog ancestry. The dog alleles in Carmine’s genome were estimated to have been acquired by his ancestors 14–29 years ago. Despite his bold behavior, Carmine did not carry any mutations known to shape hypersociability in canines. He did, however, carry a single copy of the dominant mutation responsible for his melanistic coat color. This detailed study of Carmine dispels common assumptions about the reticent coyote personality and the origins of behavior. His unusual bold behavior created a higher level of human-coyote interaction. He now serves as a public ambassador for human-wildlife coexistence, urging the global community to reconsider mythologies about wildlife and promote coexistence with them in landscapes significantly altered by human activity in our rapidly changing world.

Using Sapelli in the Field: Methods and Data for an Inclusive Citizen Science

The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper provides the methodological framework for implementing and using Sapelli in the field. Specifically, we present the role of Sapelli within the framework of an “Extreme Citizen Science” (ECS) methodology that is based on participatory design. This approach enables Sapelli’s users to decide, with the help of professional scientists, which challenges they wish to address, what data to collect, how best to collect and analyse it, and how to use it to address the problems identified. The process depends on the consent of participants and that the project is shaped by their decisions. We argue that leaving ample space for co-design, local leadership and keeping Sapelli deployment open-ended is crucial to give all people, and in particular non-literate people who we have found are often the most ecologically literate, access to the power of the scientific process to document and represent their concerns to outsiders in a way that all can understand, and to develop advocacy strategies that address the problems they identify.

Participatory Approaches in Research, Technology and Innovation (RTI) Policy and their Potential Impact

The present article reviews various concepts of participatory science and research and discusses their potential to exhibit impact on the relationship between science and society. Starting with an overview of rationales, concepts and challenges, different forms and intensities of participatory approaches in research and innovation are discussed. We then look at the situation in Austria and sort selected Austrian funding programmes and initiatives into a diagram according to the intensity of participation as well as the social groups involved in each case. Finally, we try to gain more precise indications of the impact of participatory programmes on the relationship between science and society. Many questions remain unanswered, as precise analyses and evaluation results are usually lacking. While different surveys provide insights into society’s level of information on a general level, interest, involvement and attitude towards science and research, approaches for impact assessment are fragmented and remain on the surface. We therefore propose to develop an analytical framework based on existing approaches and to include collaboratively developed indicators in it.

One more avenue for whale-watching contributions to science: the study of cetacean-cephalopod interactions

Cephalopods are the primary source of food for several species of odontocetes. The unstable nature of this trophic resource is likely to affect the ecology of their cetacean predators, and this can be reflected on their conservation status but also on the tourist activities which target the observation of these animals. However, the study of the cetacean-cephalopod interaction is limited by the heavy logistics and expense of dedicated scientific campaigns. Fortunately, this gap can be filled by coupling modern molecular tools with indirect sampling methods. In this note we test if whale watching activities, which represent an intense observation effort worldwide, could be a source of material for studies of cetacean-cephalopod interactions. All contacted companies welcomed the invitation and received the sampling kit. Nine samples were collected, most of them in close association with sperm whales. All samples were determined as the seven-arm octopus Haliphron atlanticus (Octopoda, Alloposidae). We conclude that, although the Azores may have particularly favorable conditions for participatory science, similar programs can be replicated elsewhere