A coauthor posted our new paper to reddit, where the comment thread blew right the hell up. I and the poster answered some of the comments and questions, but there were far too many to even read all of them. It also got some traction on Twitter and on Facebook:
There’s also a short article by Fiona MacDonald at ScienceAlert, which was reposted word-for-word without attribution (stolen, in other words) by True Viral News. Every ecosystem has its parasites. Inevitably, there was some pushback along with the wows, some thoughtful and some, well…
I particularly enjoyed being accused of playing God by co-culturing algae with ciliates:
don’t be daft, taking a year to introduce a predator…to see what happens is irresponsible if you have no idea of the long term consequences of that interference…irresponsible even if you have an idea of the God complex willingly
— Hope (@Hoping4agirl) February 23, 2019
Most of the reddit comments were actually pretty good, and I answered some of them. On the other hand…
BA Political Science, University of Central Florida 1993; MS Biology, University of Central Florida 2003; PhD Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona 2009; Postdoc University of British Columbia 2010-2012; Postdoc University of Montana 2012-2014. How about you?
I saw it on Facebook, I believe Insufferably Intolerant Science Nerd posted about it? Well done everyone!!
I saw it on the World News page. I spent some time trying to convince someone that the fact that multicellarity had been induced to evolve in yeast did not mean that it “had been done before” and therefore uninteresting.
I suppose interesting is in the eye of the beholder. I’m just happy that some people do find it interesting!