2015 was the best year ever for Marmorkrebs research

Back at the close of 2010, I made a prediction: that 2015 would see fourteen papers published on Marmorkrebs. How did I do? Here’s this blog’s traditional annual publication graph:

Coming into this last week of the year, I was worried, but a last minute publication helped me shame Nostradamus.

Being an academic, I must now add the caveats and qualifiers about my nailing it.

For this annual graph, I normally count peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters published during the year. But this year, there were a few new wrinkles. There were a bunch of book chapters in Freshwater Crayfish: A Global Overview that were published this year, but the book consistently gives its publication date as 2016 throughout. So I left those out, meaning we have a good head start on 2016 publications. I also left out a pre-print that came out later as a paper (no double dipping!) and some conference abstracts.

Not only were there more Marmorkrebs papers than ever, there was several notable ones.

We had two independent confirmations that Marmorkrebs were triploid organisms (one published, one in press), with one of the highest chromosome counts in the animal kingdom.

There was the first Marmorkrebs paper from a Japanese lab, with some interesting research on masculinizing Marmorkrebs.

There were several papers on the spread and risk assessment of Marmorkrebs and their prospects as disease vectors.

And there was the proposal that Marmorkrebs be given a new species name, Procambarus virginalis. I’ll be watching this one with interest to see if the community adopts the suggested new name. This is why I like “Marmorkrebs” as an informal name for these crayfish: it stays intact when formal taxonomic names change!

I’m feeling emboldened by this year’s successful prediction. But back in 2010, I also predicted there will be twenty papers in 2020. One should always revise predictions in the light of new data, however. Now that there are five more data points, the prediction machine (also known as a simple linear fit to the data) estimates that there will be sixteen Marmorkrebs papers published in 2020.

Place your bets, and I’ll meet you here in five years to find out.

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2008 was the best year ever for Marmorkrebs research
2009 was tied for the best year ever in Marmorkrebs research
2010 was the best year ever for Marmorkrebs research
2011 was not the best year ever for Marmorkrebs research
2012 was an average year for Marmorkrebs research
2013 was the second best year ever for Marmorkrebs research
2014 was a good year for Marmorkrebs research