A Lab Notebook

 
paper review
One of the professors at IMCS asked me to review a paper for a journal of which he is an editor. The paper was complete crap. Of course, one has to be somewhat more eloquent in stating as much. Below are my comments on the paper, which at best, can be described as having observed marine snow in the Irish Sea that may have originated from the bottom, yet the authors attempted publication despite the fact that there is very little evidence to support this mundane observation.

Dear Professor,
Overall, this paper needs numerous improvements prior to publication. Although the relationship between the concentration of arabinose in suspended particulate matter and settling velocity may be useful, the data presented here does not make a significant contribution towards further understanding of particle flux from the sea surface.
The paper appears to have been written by estuarine or sediment flocculation scientists who attempt to apply their research towards "marine snow" or planktonically derived oceanic aggregeates. However, a wide body of literature was seemingly overlooked by the authors in their attempt to publish within the realm of another, albeit similar, discipline. For example, the text under review claims (and erroneously cites Alldredge and Silver [1987] as having coined the phrase "marine snow" - in common usage by the 1970's) that phytodetritus flocs are "more widely reported from the open ocean than from the shelf". The only supporting reference for this claim is a previous paper by the author (which does not explore the spatial distribution of marine flocculation studies). Contrary to the dubiously supported statement of the authors, "marine snow" has in fact been primarily studied in coastal environments. Indeed, the authors cite papers by both Alldredge and Engel wherein each conducted the bulk of their research in coastal regions (Alldredge - Santa Barbara Basin and Gulf of California, Engel - Baltic Sea). Furthermore, this faulty assumption of a paucity of coastal data leads to the undermining of one of the authors final conclusions; namely that they have found coastal flocs to be stronger than those previously observed in the open ocean. Unfortunately, the flocs they assumed were observed in the open ocean were primarily observed in coastal regions. Another ill-use of export flux literature was the repeated citation of Smetacek [1985] to support various characteristics of phytoplankton aggregation. However, Smetacek [1987] was self-described as having the intention "to provoke discussion rather than establish consensus". Smetacek [1987] is a text of conjecture on diatom sinking as an evolved life strategy to enhance competitive ability and does not provide first hand data to support statements related to "cell leakage" or "biologically mediated aggregation". In another erroneous citation, the authors attribute Passow et al. [2001] with the determination of glucose as the primary constituent of floc matrices. As the composition of the matrices is central to the marine snow story, and the story of the paper under review, this is an important fact. However, no such data were presented by Passow et al. [2001]. The above three examples of poor scholarship were selected from a handful of noted occurrences within the text. Such behavior is evidence of a lack of understanding of the scientific study of the export of algal aggregate export from the sea surface. If one considers that each of the above authors (Alldredge, Engel, Smetacek, Passow) are considered experts in particle export studies and have each published numerous inter-related papers over the past 20 plus years, such mistakes in scholarship are inexcusable given the proposed context of this paper's research. Without a solid foundation, it is not entirely clear why the research on settling velocity and arabinose concentrations was conducted or how it will benefit the study oceanic particle flux. Another principle argument of the paper is equally as insufficient as the foundation/context of their research. The results of the paper observed a correlation between arabinose (a proxy for phaeocystis photosynthetic activity) and mean particle size. Although arabinose is noted by the authors as not being the agent of aggregation, it is somehow associated with well-aggregated flocs, presumably due to higher turbulence. Without turbulence data from the study sight, this is an unreasonable conclusion, especially since marine aggregates are generally described as fragile and begin to break apart at relatively low levels of turbulence. The parametric relationship between floc viability and turbulence was explored extensively by Alldredge, Kiørboe and Dam in the 1990s, yet was not cited in this context in this paper. As a result of the deficiencies described above the paper does not bring forth a novel contribution to the study of marine particle aggregation.
- posted by alex @ 21:53