From Giant Stride To Journal

August 2019

Nothing quite compares to the feeling of seeing your research finally published in a scientific journal. Not only because the work can now be accessed by others for their research and/or conservation efforts, but because that paper often represents years of planning, field work and data collection, months in front of a computer, and the development of more versions of a single document than you could believe is possible!

My collaborators and I at the Seychelles Manta Ray Project (SMRP) recently published a study about reef manta ray movements in Seychelles, which took over 6 years to complete. The aim of the study was to use acoustic tags to monitor the movements of reef mantas around the remote islands of D’Arros Island and St. Joseph Atoll. To do this, work began for the SMRP team months before they took their first giant stride into the water. The team had to gain all required permits and permissions for the research from government authorities, plan out each field trip months in advance and meticulously check that everything was packed and ready for transport. There are no shops in the middle of the Western Indian Ocean, so anything that was forgotten could not be bought later!

With just one month to spend in the field each year, and flights getting cancelled and rescheduled frequently, the pressure was on to make sure that all tags were deployed. Come rain, wind or shine, the SMRP Team were out on the water as much as possible, and we were able to successfully deploy all our tags in November 2013 and 2016. This in itself is a small victory! Wildlife expeditions do occasionally come back empty handed after unexpected problems or just the animals not co-operating.

Then, came the wait….

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Acoustic tags work by attaching a small sound emitting device to the manta. Whenever the manta swims passed a listening station (known as acoustic receivers) it logs that that manta was present there. By setting up a lot of these listening stations around your study site, you slowly build a good picture of where the tagged mantas are spending their time. Location data could only be retrieved from the listening stations every six months, and the team needed years of data. Slowly but surely, however, the time passed, and by the end of October 2017 – after 8 receiver downloads – the dataset was ready.

What followed next represents the less glamourous side of being a marine biologist. With over 160,000 rows of data to process, I spent months at my computer analysing the collected manta movement data. This process included checking the quality of the data for each tag, using multiple analysis techniques to answer different research questions, and aligning the movement data with environmental variables collected using other technologies and stored in different formats. Some of this work was quick to complete, while other aspects took (many) weeks to get right!

Once all of the analyses, maps, tables and figures were ready, it was finally time to start telling the story. Compiling and condensing years of data across numerous variables, and displayed in multiple formats into a single succinct research paper is a gruelling process. Over the coming months, the draft of the manuscript was prepared and circulated among collaborators, each of which providing suggestions on how the work could be improved. By version number 12, the team was happy with the final product and it was time to submit it to a journal for consideration for publication!

Now, two things can happen when you submit a manuscript to a journal. It can either be rejected by the editor (typically because the scope of the study does not suit the requirements of the journal), or, it can be sent out to a number of external reviewers, who provide their own feedback on the work, give recommendations on what should be changed, added or removed, and then make a suggestion as to whether it should be published or not. Fortunately for the SMRP Team, our manuscript was sent out to review. We were one step closer!

In the coming six months, the manuscript would circulate through an additional two rounds of external reviews, until finally, in May of 2019, it was accepted for publication! The last remaining task (yes, the process continues!) was to check the proofs of the paper prior to publication. The team had made it to the final step. After six long years of perseverance from our dedicated team, the proofs were approved, and it was time…