On Monday I asked you to help me get a better sense of the science reader–how the science reader gets a science fix, what the science reader values, and what the science reader expects from the future. Thanks to everyone who responded–both directly to the survey questions and indirectly in the comments. Not surprisingly, commenters revealed to me some shortcomings of the survey itself–most glaringly, leaving podcasts, radio, and public libraries off the list of venues where you get your science fix. Despite these shortcomings, I still ended up thinking the survey was very useful. The picture it paints is pretty clear, and, in some ways, surprising.

And, of course, you generously donated your time and thoughts. I am no professional market analyst, but I’ve had a delightful time poring over the survey, as well as the comments of those who did not feel satisfied by the choices I offered. It wrecked a number of assumptions I had carried into the survey, and makes me think differently about where science writing is headed from here.

Here’s what I see in the results. (If you want to make your own interpretations in the comment thread, you can download the raw numbers in the survey report (pdf).)

First off, it’s clear that most of you no longer get science from print newspapers.

My first question was, “Where do you get your science fix, and how often?” I offered some formats; the choices for each ranged from avidly down to never. Of those who responded, 58% said they rarely or never read newspapers in print. A grand total of 17 of you–2%–said you read them avidly, and 7% said you read them occasionally. The rest said you read science in print newspapers only occasionally (22%).

Print magazines fared (somewhat) better in the survey. 31% responded rarely or never. 55% said you read science in newspapers occasionally or frequently.

News web sites and blogs scored big. 27% read news sites avidly for science, and 40% read them frequently. Only 1% said never.

Blogs did even better, with 50% responding with avidly and 36% frequently.

This does not mean that you love all things digital. Few of you get your science fix on TV more than occasionally; 23% said you never do so. I can’t report on podcasts, radio, and audio books, because I left them off the survey [d'oh!].

But the biggest surprise to me was ebooks. I assumed you were already riding the ebook wave. Nope. 64% of you said you never read them. Less than 2% said you read them avidly.

By contrast, you love old-fashioned paper books. Only 9% of you said you never bought science books.  67% of you said you bought three or more a year. About half of you subscribe to one or more print magazines for science.

I then asked about your digital habits in particular.

Most of you (67%) still use a computer for your digital fix. Only 15% use an Iphone. Only 5% use a Kindle–about the same number of you who are waiting for an Ipad to change the laws of physics.

You also proved to have a lot of stamina while reading on line. 62% of you said you click through long features to get to the end.

Ebooks have not yet cast their spell on you. 59% of you said you buy no ebooks a year because you’re waiting for them to get better; 19% said you don’t buy them because you just don’t like ebooks.

I rephrased the questions, asking about how you felt about ebooks: 70% of you said that ebooks were an interesting concept but not yet worth buying an ereader for. Another 7% said you can’t stand them. Only 3% of you have abandoned old books for the ebook future we’ve all been hearing about.

The last few questions of the survey dealt with getting stuff for free versus paying. And here’s where things got  interesting in a glass-half-empty-or-half-full kind of way. 40% of you said you would no longer pay for reading about science, because you can get so much for free. Only 20% of you said you’d pay to get past paywalls.

Then I described a couple possible pieces of science writing. In one case, I described an anthology of articles nicely designed in an ebook. Only 18% of you said you would not be willing to pay for that. 29% of you said you’d pay $10. 68% of you said you’d pay a price $4 or higher.

I also asked how much you’d pay for a hybrid article, with a short summary for free and an in-depth version for a payment. 63% of you said you would be willing to pay for such an article. 21% were willing to pay a buck, and 7% would pay two bucks, the highest price I put on the question.

The science reader that emerges from this survey is very comfortable online, getting a science fix from blogs and news sites. (And judging from the comments, a fair number listen to podcasts and radio, too.) But the science reader also reads a lot of books. Books made of paper, that is, not electronic ink. That pattern may change if e-readers get better, but probably not anytime soon.

The typical science reader will not be dropping a lot of money to get past paywalls. Some readers won’t pay anything online at all, but an appreciable fraction will pay for ebooks and individual articles–if they’re interesting.

It goes without saying that this survey is utterly unscientific and downright peculiar. But if it does reflect broader trends, it means that there are opportunities for small-scale, money-making experiments in new kinds of digital genres–including ones carried out by individual writers.

The comments are well worth checking out. A couple readers challenged my approach as being hopelessly twentieth-century, demonstrating my unwillingness to accept that information is too cheap to meter now. I’ve been skeptical about the alternatives, but Morgan Wirthlin made a passionate argument to turn away from ebooks and follow the lead of musicians:

I think you should consider taking your next microcosm (an /excellent/ book, by the way) and trying this model. Maybe you offer 2,000 copies of the “signature edition” on your website, which is just the normal book with your personal signature inside the cover, priced at maybe 10% above list price. Then offer 500 “subscriber editions,” which include a personalized memo and a big poster of one Carl Buell’s excellent illustrations to this hypothetical book. Finally, 50 extra special $100 “Zimmerfan editions” are sent to your most diehard readers ahead of the publication date, and include the poster, a hand-written letter of thanks, a polaroid you took, and a fossil (or even just a cool rock) you found outside. Etc., etc. It may sound ridiculous, but these are the sorts of things that people crave in the digital age. I can absolutely guarantee that you would sell out of all of these editions, and part of the reason is that your readers absolutely /want/ to support *you,* but they don’t want to feel cheated paying for something that they know they could get for free. An ‘art object’ with a personalized, cottage-industry touch is something that you cannot get for free.

And Scott Sigler, who started a novel-writing career by podcasting each chapter of his manuscripts, had this to say in my skepticism about podcasts:

Carl, podcasts DO generate revenue via advertising. I run an ad on most podcasts at scottsigler.com, and on my archived audiobooks (the back list) I have up at podiobooks.com. It took several years to generate a large enough audience, but now that I have it, I give away content for free and make money with advertising. This is nothing new — same model radio and TV have used for decades.

It’s all about the eyeballs (or earballs, whatever). If you create solid, free science podcast content, and that content resonates with an audience allowing you to consistently generate large numbers, you can earn revenue with advertising. Yes, you can still drive traffic to a site, and urge your listeners to buy print products, but the podcast itself becomes the primary revenue generator.

I’m inspired to go off to do some scheming. Meanwhile, what do you think of these results?

Their pregnancy seems bizarre because it is rare. In most species that keep their young inside a parent, the job goes to the mother. But there is a deep symmetry to these two ways of reproducing. That’s a general rule when it comes to evolution: time and again, biologists find the same underlying principles driving the evolution of both the familiar and the bizarre.

The specifics of an animal’s sex life have their ultimate origin in the time and effort each sex have to put into reproducing. Very often, there’s a wild imbalance between the sexes. Just take a look at a human sperm and egg. One’s tiny and one’s big. Women may produce a few hundred viable eggs in a lifetime. Men make hundreds of new sperm a second.

The imbalance between the sexes means that they face different limits to how many offspring they can have. Females are not limited by a scarce supply of sperm. It would be possible, in theory, for every woman on Earth to have children fathered by a single man. Instead, what limits the reproductive success of females in many species is how many eggs they can successfully produce and rear to adulthood. Individuals that do better at that job will spread their genes over the generations. This selection drives females to put even more effort into rearing their young. Eggs can become enormous, for example–take the Kiwi bird, whose eggs can equal a quarter of the mother’s weight. Females typically put more effort into finding shelters for their young. In a number of species as varied as cockroaches and humans, females carry their young inside their body, where they can feed them and protect them at the same time.

For males, the limits to reproductive success are usually very different. They don’t have to worry about nurturing their sperm, since they’re so cheap to make. Instead, in many species, they are limited by the number of females they can mate with. The fact that females spend so much time provisioning their young makes this limit even more intense. And so in many species, males compete with one another for the opportunity to mate with females. In some cases, they fight over territory where the females will show up in search of food. In other cases, they show off to females with fancy songs or feathers. In the end, some males manage to mate with more females and have more offspring.

This arrangement gives females in some species the chance to be choosy about their mates. In many species, females will tend to mate with some males over others–in some species of fireflies, for example, the females prefer males with faster flashes over ones that flash slowly. But females face a quandary in making their choice. If they have the prospect of mating with one particular male today, who’s to say that they might not find a more attractive male tomorrow? If they fertilize their eggs with the sperm of today’s male, they won’t have the chance to upgrade later. And sometimes males make this quandary even worse, by guarding them so they can’t mate with other males.

So females in many species have evolved some elaborate systems to keep their options open. Female ducks, for example, have lots of little pouches along their reproductive tract where they may be able to store sperm from different males, selecting the sperm they want to use to fertilize their eggs. Hens will squeeze out the sperm from a previous mating if they see an attractive rooster.

Darwin first recognized what he dubbed sexual selection, and in the past couple decades scientists have expanded the theory and used it to make sense of the specific details of the sex lives of particular species. Sexual selection theory is not based on some mystical essence of being male or female, however. It simply takes into consideration the costs and benefits that each sex faces in a given species. Under some conditions, the benefit that males get from competing for lots of females may be offset by the need that their young have for care. In these cases, males that help provide for their offspring after they’re born may fare better than males that don’t.

As a result, there are some species in which both males and females provide care. And there are also some cases in which the common pattern is entirely reversed: the male does most of the work.

Such is the case with seahorses and their close relatives, pipefishes and seadragons. In all of these species males undergo a sort of pregnancy. When they mate, the female transfers unfertilized eggs to the male. The male stores the eggs, sometimes inside a fleshy pouch, where he fertilizes them with his sperm. While sperm in other animals may be heroic swimmers that can travel a female’s reproductive tract, the sperm of these fish barely move at all.

The eggs then develop in the male. The eggs get some of their energy from the yolk their mother provided them, but the males help out too. The pouch of some species of seahorses and their relatives changes shape, taking on a very complex anatomy. Each fish embryo ends up in intimate contact with the father’s blood supply, so that he can give them nutrients. Eventually the baby fish wiggle out of dad and are ready for life on their own.

So now think about how this system can drive the evolution of the fish. The females still produce the eggs, but they don’t have to put the time and effort into rearing them. Sexual selection theory suggests that they would be better off looking for lots of males to take their eggs. And with all those females swimming around in search of males, they’re going to face some fierce competition.

Adam Jones of Texas A & M University and his colleagues have studied Gulf Pipefish to see whether this in fact occurs. (The picture above is of a male [left] and female Gulf Pipefish.) In one experiment, they found that most females failed to find any mates at all, while a small proportion of the females managed to mate with four males. Most of the males in that experiment, on the other hand, mated once. The pattern, in other words, is flipped from what you’d normally expect.

Because males can’t mate and run, they are not limited by the number of females they can fertilize. As a result, there’s less of a benefit to making lots of sperm. And that explains the remarkably scant supply of sperm these fish produce. Instead of making millions of sperm every day, a male seahorse’s testes may carry just 150 sperm in total.

The competition of females opens up the opportunity for males to be picky, rather than the females. And Jones and other scientists have found that, indeed, the females that mate the most have certain traits in common. They tend to be bigger than other females, and they have fancier fins and brighter color patterns. It’s no surprise, then, that female Gulf Pipefish females are bigger than males.

But why do the males go for the big flashy females? Today in Nature, Jones and his colleagues have published an experiment that offers some answers. Big females transfer more eggs into the pouches of males than small females. And the bigger the female, the more likely each egg was to survive. By being picky, males can have more kids.

But the reversal does not stop there. Jones and his colleagues wondered if males controlled the amount of investment they put into rearing eggs from different females. They had males mate one female, and then another. They discovered that the survival of the second brood depended on the first. If the first brood came from a big female, fewer of the eggs from the second brood survived. The opposite also held true. Jones and his colleagues concluded that the males are likely giving more resources to the eggs from big females, leaving less for small females they might later encounter. And they do end up mating with smaller females, they give the eggs fewer resources, so that they’re in a better position should they encounter a big female next time around.

I had left seahorses and their kin out of the sex chapter in The Tangled Bank, but when it comes time to update it, they will definitely be making a cameo appearance. Their mirror-image sex life has turned out to be just too amazing to ignore.

“Post-copulatory sexual selection and sexual conflict in the evolution of male pregnancy.” Kimberly A. Paczolt1 & Adam G. Jones. Nature, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature08861

[Image: Nick Ratterman, Texas A & M]

P.S. I know, I know–why are podcasts and public libraries not in the survey? I don’t know why I blanked on them. Register complaints in the comment thread.

This one, talking about the secret life of plants, carnivorous and otherwise on WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show.

My brother Ben will be on On Point today (Tuesday) at 11 am, talking about taking over as the language maven at the Times. Then, at 1 pm, I’ll be talking on the Colin McEnroe show on WNPR about my article on carnivorous plants in National Geographic. You can listen live or get a podcast after the show on the show page.

This was a particularly interesting story to write coming after a piece I wrote for the Times last year about normal limb development.  Now thalidomide is revealing a new player in the limb development game, a protein that no one knew about when I wrote my 2009 article. In science, very often the only way to understand how something works is to see what happens when it goes wrong.

PS: On Google Books, you can see a 1962 issue of Life with some stunning pictures from the Thalidomide years.

[Image: Science Museum (Thalidomide is currently legal for sale for leprosy and other diseases)]

[As of 3/17 2 pm, the poll is closed. Thanks to everyone who responded. Results to be posted soon!]

[Update, 2 pm: Thanks for the big turn-out for my survey below. If you have trouble accessing it to enter your information, try again later today. I am hammering out some kinks right now. And I'll crunch the numbers once the responses start to taper off.]

We writers, in case you didn’t know, are scratching our heads about what exactly to do next. It’s hard to figure out, because there are so many things we could do, at least in theory. If we wanted, we could write a novel in tweets, record an epic poem as a podcast, or transform a history of inorganic chemistry into an Ipad app. In fact, I’m sure that someone, somewhere, is doing all these things and more–but not all at once. Each writer has to figure out how best to use the twenty-four hours in a day.

It makes sense for writers to choose work that makes the most of their particular talents. And for writers who depend on writing to pay the mortgage, it also makes sense to write things that have a chance of being read, and perhaps (dare to dream) earn their creators some money. Ten years ago, the course for a writer wasn’t easy, but at least it had some clearly marked sign posts. You could try to break into newspapers or magazines with pitch letters and clip files. You could try to get a contract with a publishing house and write a book. Today, of course, people read in other ways as well. They read blogs, Facebook posts, Kindle editions, discussion threads, and on and on. The sign posts have been moved, turned upside down, or taken down altogether.

The writer is left to wander across a confusing landscape. This morning, for example, the Pew Research Center released a report on the foraging habits of the online reader that Gawker summed up fairly well: “Paywalls are anathema. Nobody clicks on ads. The value of news is zero dollars and zero cents.” But wait! Yesterday Business Week reported that ebooks are selling like hotcakes on the Iphone.

One thing is clear: it’s no time to sit in the monastery and continue to illuminate vellum scrolls. It’s time to try new things. Recently, for example, the novelist John Edgar Wideman skipped past traditional publishers to self-publish an e-book over at Lulu. It’s too early to know the outcome of that experiment; for actual results, one can follow the blogging of novelist JA Konrath, who is chronicling his experiences over the past year  publishing short stories and rejected novels as ebooks. It’s working out well for him, and promises to get even better.

I suspect that the fate of different writers will depend, in part, on the nature of their readers. As a result, I think the Pew’s report has a fatal flaw to it: it’s based on the old-fashioned notion that readers form a homogenous swarm. If you call a few thousand phone numbers at random, you will get a meaningful picture of people’s reading habits. But if there’s anything we know for sure, it’s that the country does not sit down in front of the TV and watch Walter Cronkite en masse. The motivations of the reader matter. Some people love to read about sports online, to the point that they will pay to roll around in baseball stats like a happy pig in mud (and no disrespect intended towards baseball fans or pigs). A lot of people will not spend that money. They’ll glance at scores on Yahoo News and move on.

So this is where you, dear reader, come in. Clearly, the simple fact that you are reading this blog means that you are…well, let’s call you exceptional, shall we? You may not be a baseball nut, but you are interested in science. Right now, you’re reading a post on a blog hosted by a fine magazine and financially supported by advertising and paid subscriptions. I want to get to know the science reader in 2010 better–how you get your science fix, where you expect to be getting it, what you hope for the future, and how writers may or may not be able to supply that fix and make a living at the same time.

While the science reader may be a bit mysterious to me, I know that readers of the Loom are willing to share their opinions. Last year a bunch of readers of the Loom took part in a survey about the cover of my latest book that ended up improving it greatly. So I’m going to impose on you again to participate in a slightly scientific, extremely idiosyncratic poll. While I have built this survey for selfish reasons, I hope they’ll be of interest to other people–both other writers and readers. Once the voting tapers off, I will write a post reviewing the results and giving you my homespun analysis. If you click the link below, a window will open up with my questions.

While Polldaddy does a great job of programming surveys and such, there well may be a few bugs. Please let me know if you find any. And don’t forget–use the comment thread if the survey isn’t describing your reading habits well. Many thanks. (And thanks in particular to Scott Sigler for some brainstorming.)

[Image by the incomparable Berenice Abbott, via Flickr]

“The tattoo is courtesy of the always-brilliant Jon Nott of Guildford, Surrey (U.K.).”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Here’s a live blog from this morning’s hearings at the Texas State Board of Education. (Emphasis mine.)

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

Incidentally, Thomas Jefferson was arguably America’s first paleontologist. Which certainly didn’t help his case in Texas.

Hi, all, I’m with the National Public Radio-syndicated science show ‘Radiolab,’ that has a large national and international following (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/). Mr. Zimmer appeared on our show last season, in the ‘Parasites’ episode.

I’m in search of people who have tattoos of extinct species of plant or animal, ideally people in the greater New York City area. We’re trying to gauge the feasibility of doing a video piece on this subject for Radiolab. Please let us know via radiolab@wnyc.org if you are itching to share your extinct species tattoo story with our funky radio show!

Perhaps we’ll be calling it VideoLab soon?

Update: Be sure to send a copy to me, too, for the Tattoo Emporium.