A Spanish investigation into the sexual life of anchovies wins an IG Nobel, the parody of the Swedish awards
An investigation led by Spanish scientists on the sexual life of anchovies has won one of the Nobel Ig awards this year, the parody of the prestigious Swedish contest.. These alternative awards are organized by the American academic journal Annals of Improbable Research and are sponsored by students at Harvard University.. The Spanish work, published in the journal Nature Geoscience in 2022 and carried out with data collected on the coast of Bueu (Pontevedra), demonstrated that marine life can influence ocean turbulence.
The Ig Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded for 33 years, seek to make people “laugh and then think” and have the support of numerous scientists from different countries, some of whom are real Nobel winners.
The study on the sexual activity of anchovies has won in the physics category and includes researchers from the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo, the Institute of Marine Research (IIM-CSIC), the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO, CSIC), the University of Southampton and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.
In a statement released by the University of Vigo, the main researcher of the Remedios project, Beatriz Mouriño, from CIM-UVigo, highlighted that “the entire team is very happy, because the award is due to the fact that the study generates interest beyond the specialized scientific community” and considers that it is “a wonderful opportunity to spread it further and reach more people.
Although he recognizes that at first these awards were controversial, they have evolved and today they are widely recognized as a scientific communication tool and, in fact, last year they received an award from an Austrian institution for their work in favor of scientific communication.. Furthermore, remember, these awards are supported by institutions such as Harvard, MIT or Imperial College and are awarded by Nobel Prize winners, in the case of researchers who, after having been awarded the IG Nobel, years later ended up winning the Nobel Prize in their discipline.. For Mouriño, “appealing to laughter and humor is a very successful strategy to bring science closer to citizens, to society in general.”
To carry out their research, they used an acoustic echo sounder installed on the Ramón Margalef oceanographic vessel of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO), which recorded echoes concurrent with increases in turbulence attributable to aggregations of small pelagic fish and plankton sampling.
The team that participated in the award-winning study
As the researchers explain, their discovery occurred “completely by chance” within the framework of the Remedios project, which aimed to study how turbulence affects marine life.. But serendipity meant they ended up “demonstrating that marine life can influence ocean turbulence, which in turn influences marine life.”
Other winners
These alternative Nobel Prizes have more categories than the authentic Nobel Prizes, as there are prizes in chemistry and geology, literature, mechanical engineering, public health, communication, medicine, nutrition, physics and psychology..
This year's winners also include a Japanese team that created chopsticks capable of modifying the salty taste of food through electrical stimuli, which won the prize in the nutrition category..
Other research has been recognized on the use of spider corpses as robotic tools, the mental capacity of people who can speak backwards, the effect of alopecia on nose hairs, why many scientists like to lick rocks or a study to determine how many people stop to look up when they see strangers who do the same.