Posted on behalf of Mushy:

At Uni, I was never one for the Thursday afternoon seminar from a guest speaker. As a presentation snob, I resented the often shoddy slides on show, and to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get biochemistry. All in all, this meant that I had no desire to be at about 50 % of the seminars on offer, but as a member of Rent-a-Crowd, that wasn’t an option I had.

After much moping, a friend and I decided to liven up the seminars with a game of Buzzword Bingo. The premise was simple. Each participant bought a ticket upon which a number of buzzwords were printed. Each ticket contained a random selection of 15 buzzwords from a pool of forty. Whenever the buzzword was mentioned, it got crossed off of the player’s ticket. At the end of the seminar, the person with the most correct buzzwords ticked off won the pool of entrance money. As a gesture of altruism – and naiveté – the house kept no money.

It all started as a terribly amusing ruse. The generation of the buzzword pool immediately became something of a problem, though. After selecting pleasantries such as “Thank you”, “honour”, and “pleasure”, adding a couple of colours, and then throwing in a few wildcards such as “lettuce” and “flounder”, we were left with about 20-30 buzzwords which we still had to fill. To make up this shortfall with likely suggestions, this meant that my friend and I actually had to read some of the speaker’s papers before the lecture, and produce candidates from there.

With the buzzword list complete, selling the tickets proved to be the easy part; the easily-bored graduate student will do just about anything to alleviate the tedium of sitting through the most interminable of lectures. Then the strangest thing started happening. Each Thursday, a few more people turned up. When we were in the seminars, the back half of the room – the traditional seating area of the graduate student – was actually paying attention throughout the duration of the lecture. We even encouraged the graduate students to ask questions, as it was well within the rules to try to lead the guest lecturer into saying one of your buzzwords, no matter how contrived the set-up. I was even reading a bit more of the literature!

If we ever got found out (I think that the senior faculty started getting wind of our scheme when we started selling them tickets), I already had my defense arranged. As a noble gesture, my friend and I had done what no threat from the faculty had yet achieved. Attendances were up, and the students were attentive throughout, and asking many – sometimes strangely-worded – questions of the speaker at the conclusion.

The only negative thing was that after a few years of paper-reading and attention-paying, I still don’t understand biochem…

I write from windy Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a port city on the Eastern Cape of the country. It is described by some as “the Detroit of South Africa” for its prowess in the manufacturing sector. It is also an embarkation point for those with a yen to commune with large African mammals. Many of these do their communing through the medium of a large gun.

“And you are here to stop that?” queries my cab driver, as we drive by a billboard outside the airport which advertises the reason I am here: the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology.

The reason this conference is so interesting is that no, the people gathered here from the four corners of the earth are not necessarily interested in stopping that. These scientists do have an agenda, but it is not protecting the lives of individual animals but of whole ecosystems. If hunting dollars can go towards protecting and managing a piece of bio-diverse land, and if the hunting is controlled so that the hunted species are not at overall risk, great. If it keeps land clear from development for the exuberant and beautiful ungulates and felines of Africa, cool.

And there’s lots of money in this kind of hunting. Trophy hunting generates $1 million in revenues for South Africa, according to the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (which’s motto is “Conservation Through Hunting”).

The aesthetics of the average conference-goer and the average hunter are clearly distinguishable variations on the theme of “I’m comfortable with dirt and the outdoors” but they rubbed shoulders on the plane in to PE (as the many call it) with ease. There are lots of reasons why the two groups would get along. They both like nature. They both want to see it preserved.

In fact, yesterday a workshop on “conservation hunting” takes a look at the growing trend and examines case studies of where it is has worked and where it hasn’t. The workshop was led by Lee Foote of the University of Alberta who notes in program that “Unfortunately, neither a theoretical basis nor sufficient critical overview of [conservation hunting] has yet been advanced.”