Back in the day, I used to be a researcher, an academic plugging away to add just a few sand grains of evidence to the mountain of human knowledge.

It was a fun time.

The research process was to set a question that you had the means to investigate, gather data ideally through some sort of experimental design, analyse the numbers, compile your description of the outcomes and then send it all out to a fellow scientist who edits a peer-reviewed journal.

This last bit was essential. Publication in an erudite tome was and is the core currency of academia and it is serious business. The frequency and quality of your publications generate kudos and, for youngsters at least, determines your likelihood of future employment.

Turns out that, for me, publication became an addictive process. I set targets for the number — 30 by 30 and no less that five per year — and later to improve on the quality of this output. Peer-reviewed journals are ranked on their perceived importance so if your work ended up in the higher ranking ones it was more kudos and looked better on your resume.

However, the best bit was the freedom to investigate almost any topic you thought might get published. So we had a crack at everything from the burrowing behaviour of millipedes and the size of woodlouse eggs as a measure of maternal investment, to a hypothesis that mound-building termites engineered the landscape of the Okavango Delta.

Crazy stuff.

We even published on the sex life of male Alloporus uncinatus that, it turns out, struggle with sperm competition.

Here is what the unfortunate critter looks like.

Of course, publication is not quite what it sounds like. Most of these gems of research description were not read by anyone. Sometimes a truly dedicated PhD student in Algeria or Uzbekistan would politely request a copy of a paper that we would send by return post, never knowing if they ever read it.

Today, with the advent of electronic copy, database searches, Google scholar, and fatnastic archiving tools like Mendeley, many more people can find and gain access to almost any obscure grain of knowledge. A few extra reads are logged even of the old material. But, truthfully, there are more views of the train timetable than the average peer-reviewed publication. It is sad, but true.

So with this recollection firmly lodged, I thought I might bore you and excite me with an occasional series of posts here on the Alloporus blog — yes, the very same — to summarise in plain language some of the publications from my past.

Chances are that to get more reads than the originals, all I need is a click bait title.

Stay tuned.