Thanksgiving Reading List

Last November, Binghamton Unversity-SUNY’s WHRW station shared this message as part of their program ‘Broadcasting World Literature’: “Today, since it’s Thanksgiving week, I thought it would be good to start off with a reading or just do a reading of a native scholar’s take on giving thanks.” Daimys Garcia explains before she begins reading from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Brading Sweetgrass,“It’s important to remember that Thanksgiving has history that’s rooted in genocide, colonization, and oppression of native peoples on this land so I thought it’d be great to read a piece by a native scholar who is thinking about thanksgiving not as the holiday but in the act of giving thanks.”

Garcia’s reading of the chapter ‘Allegiance to Gratitude’ is so beautiful — I cannot recommend listening to this episode of 'Broadcasting World Literature' enough. I echo Garcia’s sentiments that in Thanksgiving week, and Native American Heritage Month, we remember the history of this landscape, the indigenous people who were here and live here still, and the food that we’ve done our best to re-brand as thoroughly Americanized. 

Whether your preparations for Thanksgiving break involve long lists of ingredients for baking marathons, hamstring stretches for turkey trots, or stacks of lab reports for grade-a-thons, somehow we have arrived in late November. I pulled together a list of on-theme academic papers to keep your cocktail hour anecdotes accurate and your sidebars over the side dishes peer-reviewed.

Here is a totally non-thorough, mostly-ecological literature review of turkeys (and the extinct poultry you might expect on a more or less accurate Thanksgiving spread), cranberries, sweet potatoes, and…ptarmigan. But — before you dig into this feast of a reading list, remember Rule 7: Respect working hours, public holidays, and vacations. This is from the recent PLoS Computational Biology paper, Ten simple rules towards healthier research labs. “Working rules commonly in place in labs around the world often mean that academics work all day long, on weekends, and even during holidays,” the author, Dr. Fernando Maestre, writes. “The stress associated with this excessive work without a life outside the lab is one of the main reasons behind the increase in mental problems in academia, particularly among early career researchers and young PIs.”

You, my friend, are ahead of the game. Relaxing with a little blog reading before Thanksgiving and making excellent life choices. Well done! 

First, Americans check out turkeys on Wikipedia in November in alarming numbers. Dr. John Mittermeier and coauthors report that “pageviews for wild turkey Meleagris gallopavo show a seasonal peak in the spring and a sharp peak during the Thanksgiving holiday in the US.” This idea — that Americans are reading up on Thanksgiving turkeys year after year — was part of the inspiration behind Mittermeier’s PLOS Biology paper A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation.

If you aren’t convinced of the cultural relevance of turkeys, or question how much Americans love to look up turkeys on the internet, consider the fact that a recent PNAS paper, Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds, had to treat google searches of turkeys as an outlier. In the Methods, they report, “After assembling estimates of relative interest for all 622 species, we normalized values so that bald eagle, the second most popular search topic, was assigned a value of 100, and all other taxa were assigned values proportionally. Wild turkey was the focus of more interest than bald eagle, but we considered the species an outlier (i.e., it received more than an order of magnitude more searches than bald eagle) and did not include it in our core analyses.” 

This turkey obsession is interesting in part because it begs the question, what are we learning from Wikipedia? I recently found this tidbit on the Wikipedia page for heath hens (Tympanuchus cupido cupido) “Heath hens were extremely common in their habitat during Colonial times, but being a gallinaceous bird, they were hunted by settlers extensively for food. In fact, many have speculated that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving dinner featured heath hens and not wild turkey.” Here’s the deal though: heath hens were about two pounds. The last population of heath hens lived (& died) on Martha’s Vineyard. I as wrote last month, I have a long-buried ecological connection to Cape Cod and its offshore islands, so while most college kids bring the emotional baggage of Pysch 101 to the Thanksgiving table, I was the know-it-all who threw down random historical ecological nuggets such as, it is unlikely that heath hens or their grassland habitats were as common in early colonial Massachusetts as some historical sources would have you believe. The story that servants refused to eat them multiple times a week is probably apocryphal. You see, I had read Interpreting and conserving the openland habitats of coastal New England: insights from landscape history in Forest Ecology and Management and — this was likely more influential since I was legitimately bad at reading papers until late in grad school — taken a seminar with the author Dr. David Foster. The paleoecological evidence does not support extensive openland vegetation in coastal New England until after European arrival. The landscape was mostly forest, and according to the preeminent expert on heath hens (here Foster and Motzkin throw in a wonderful citation from a 1928 Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History, definitely going in my #ToReadPile), the birds actually preferred, “open sandy woods and scrub oak barrens rather than grassland.” I love roping my family into this kind of argument and I am a lot of fun at parties. 

But back to turkeys — I found two more great turkey papers when I searched through my records in Papers (my reference software of choice). I was a bit confused when the results included a 1943 paper in The Condor titled, “Birds Observed between Point Barrow and Herschel Island on the Arctic Coast of Alaska.” It turns out that the author, Dr. Joseph S. Dixon, was comparing male ptarmigans to turkeys: “Ptarmigan were a most important food item after a winter of fresh meat starvation. By May 13, 1914, at Humphrey Point, the males were in full breeding plumage. They cackled and strutted about like diminutive turkey gobblers. From far and near their calls were heard over the snowy plain between the sea coast and the foothills.” 

If you want to go on a fascinating deep dive into the history of turkey husbandry before European settlers arrived to kick off a genocide, barely survive a winter, and two hundred years later get a national holiday declared during the Civil War, I recommend Dr. Erin Kennedy Thornton’s 2012 PLoS ONE paper Earliest Mexican Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in the Maya Region: Implications for Pre-Hispanic Animal Trade and the Timing of Turkey Domestication. Thornton and her coauthors leverage archaeological, zooarchaeological, and ancient DNA evidence to confirm that Mayans in present-day Guatamala were raising domesticated turkeys. These turkey remains were discovered well south of the natural geographic range of the Mexican turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, which is the wild progenitor of what we know today the turkey on the Wikipedia page we check out every November — indicating that northern Mesoamerica and Maya cultural regions were engaged in animal trade as early as 300 BC–AD 100. They write, “prior information on Preclassic exchange comes primarily from non-perishable goods such as obsidian and ceramics so the non-local turkeys at El Mirador also expand our understanding of the types of goods that were exchanged long distances during this early period of Maya history.” Traveling long distances for turkey dinner is not a new idea. Mayan culture was holding it down well before the Spanish arrived and they didn’t even need to refer to a Wikipedia page each fall to get it done. 

If you are looking for a paper to pair with your ancient turkeys, consider Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. In this 2013 PNAS paper, Dr. Caroline Roullier and her coauthors assessed genetic diversity in modern and herbarium samples of sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and confirmed that well before Columbus' time, Polynesian and South American peoples were sharing sweet potatoes. I love the subsection, “Did Genes and Names Disperse Together?” and the idea that linguistics is a kind of sleeper science — that names can keep information even while recombined genotypes and colonialism obscure the data. This is another powerful story of culture and food enduring; the spread on our dinner table for a celebration of settler colonialism can also be a story of resistance and resilience. 

Don’t forget the cranberry sauce! It’s mountain cranberry actually, since I’m an alpine ecologist. Mountain cranberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea, is the berry behind the beloved Ikea treat, lingonberry preserves. According to a 2017 study in Biological Conservation by McDonough MacKenzie et al. (yes, that's me), volunteers struggle to identify mountain cranberry in a citizen science project recording flowering phenology above treeline. If you want to brush up on your plant ID skills before you hit the dinner table this year, check out the supplementary materials from Lessons from Citizen Science: Assessing volunteer-collected plant phenology data with Mountain Watch — it’s a page of photos of alpine plant species and their look-alikes. Honestly, if you have a laminator lying around this could be a really beautiful Thanksgiving placemat*. Do you think google scholar counts placemats towards your h-index? 

One last Thanksgiving resource. If you are struggling with how to talk to your family about climate change, Katharine Hayhoe has a webinar for you. Seriously, let's talk about climate change. This is tougher than checking out the wikipedia page for turkeys, but definitely a more meaningful discussion than the twenty-two-year-old at the table trying to school you about a heath hen you have never heard of and never claimed to be at the first thanksgiving anyway. Man, I am so much fun at parties. 

References:

Dixon, J. S. (1943). Birds Observed between Point Barrow and Herschel Island on the Arctic Coast of Alaska. The Condor, 45(2), 49–57. http://doi.org/10.2307/1364377

Foster, D. R., & Motzkin, G. (2003). Interpreting and conserving the openland habitats of coastal New England: insights from landscape history. Forest Ecology and Management, 185(1-2), 127–150. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-1127(03)00251-2

Garcia, Daimys, "Episode 9: Rethinking Thanksgiving: A Reading of "Allegiance to Gratitude" by Robin Wall Kimmerer" (2018). Broadcasting World Literature. https://orb.binghamton.edu/broadcasting_world_literature/9

Maestre, F. T. (2019). Ten simple rules towards healthier research labs. PLOS Computational Biology, 15(4), e1006914–8. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006914

McDonough MacKenzie, Caitlin, Georgia Murray, Richard Primack, and Doug Weihrauch. 2017. Lessons from Citizen Science: Assessing volunteer-collected plant phenology data with Mountain Watch. Biological Conservation, 208, 121-126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.07.027

Mittermeier, J. C., Roll, U., Matthews, T. J., & Grenyer, R. (2019). A season for all things: Phenological imprints in Wikipedia usage and their relevance to conservation. PLOS Biology, 17(3), e3000146–12. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000146

Roullier, C., Benoit, L., the, D. M. P. O., 2013. Historical collections reveal patterns of diffusion of sweet potato in Oceania obscured by modern plant movements and recombination. PNAS. http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.77148

Schuetz, J. G., & Johnston, A. (2019). Characterizing the cultural niches of North American birds. PNAS, 205, 201820670–6. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820670116

Thornton, E. K., Emery, K. F., Steadman, D. W., Speller, C., Matheny, R., & Yang, D. (2012). Earliest Mexican Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) in the Maya Region: Implications for Pre-Hispanic Animal Trade and the Timing of Turkey Domestication. PloS One, 7(8), e42630–8. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0042630 

*In putting together this post, I found an error in my supplementary materials! If you can find this mistake on your placemat, send me an email and I'll reward you with a Plant Love Stories sticker!

Reading & Listening to Cape Cod

Cape Cod does not appear on my CV. I study alpine plant ecology — my postdoc research is literally founded on carrying heavy things to high lakes — and the hooked peninsula of the Cape, curling into Nantucket Sound and pointing back towards Boston Harbor, is mostly beach and salt marsh and very light on high ground. 

When I’m on the Atlantic coast, I am in Acadia National Park. I grew up in central Massachusetts, where by law I think every baby shower must include a hardcover copy of Make Way For Ducklings and every childhood needs one bad sunburn from a Cape Cod beach (mine was Hyannis Port). But while I haven’t thought much about the landscape of the Cape in years (haven’t visited since 2014), this past week two journalism projects brought me back and reminded me of the Cape’s outsized influence on my own career in ecology. 

First, the Cape was recently featured in a short documentary and intensely immersive online news story. Reporters from The Boston Globe spent several months this summer researching the effects of climate change on Cape Cod. They interviewed scientists, fishermen, locals, and business owners, and followed the stories of salt marshes, beach erosion, nor’easters, and changing fisheries. Nestor Ramos’ story, “At the Edge of a Warming World,” is a stunning and thorough look at climate change across the Cape, from Bourne to Provincetown. I’m teaching a course on the science of climate change for non-science majors and I rearranged my syllabus after The Boston Globe published this story. That is how much I love these pieces — five weeks into teaching a revamped course, just as I had settled into the semester, I threw out completed lesson plans so that I could devote a whole class to “At the Edge of a Warming World”. The documentary and the immersive video-and-photography online experience of Ramos’ story are only available to The Boston Globe subscribers, but you can read the story at the Pulitzer Center website — it’s part of the Center’s Connected Coastlines Initiative supporting reporting on climate change in coastal communities. 

Early in “At the Edge of a Warming World” you are introduced to Liam’s, a clam shack that stood on Nauset beach since the 1950’s, and the March 2018 Nor’easter that wiped away 80 feet of beach and damaged the understructure beneath the restaurant. The building, once set way back from the ocean, barely survived the storm and the town tore it down later in the spring. Several students in my class shared their memories of Liam’s. There was this sense that a lost clam shack suddenly brought five weeks of reading and figures from the Fourth National Climate Assessment into focus. Climate change became intensely personal. The documentary is full of these moving interviews and powerful images from the Cape. I’ve never been to Liam’s, but I felt a similar nostalgia watching the ornithologists banding whimbrels in Wellfleet salt marshes.

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but it is the first place I tried field biology. Wellfleet is a part of that geography. I can’t even remember the actual field lab assignment, but in the summer of 2000 I stood ankle-deep in cordgrass and I’ve been a field biologist ever since. 

Cape Cod is not on my CV, but I’m beginning to think it should be. My first field course was a summer marine biology program in high school with field trips to Cape Cod and the Maine coast. Looking back, the Maine coast obviously looms large — I’m currently a Second Century Stewardship Fellow at Acadia National Park. But the Cape Cod trip was foundational. I remember reading about the dance of ice sheets, morraines, and outwash plains in the USGS booklet Geologic History of Cape Cod and it was my first inkling that geology was ephemeral, that kettle hole ponds might hold clues to unravel the history of a place. 

I loved that summer course, but at the time it was hard for me to untangle my interest in field science from the general feeling of satisfaction that two of my best friends and I had engineered a way to spend the summer together, mostly outdoors, while our parents thought we were being “productive.” None of us became marine biologists. We stayed in touch with our teacher though, and in March he emailed me to say that he had a current student working on an independent project on shark, seal, and human interactions in the Cape Cod waters. This student was writing an op-ed for the Cape Cod Times, and would I mind reading it over and offering feedback? This is how I learned about the proposed seal cull, a scheme to reduce the food supply (and thus the local populations) of great white sharks. By "simply" re-writing the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seal cull would supposedly reduce shark attacks on the Cape. (The op-ed was published in April, by the way, and I think Emma did a great job!) 

I had mostly forgotten about those spring emails and Emma’s op-ed until I began listening to Outside/In’s episode “Cold, Dark, and Sharky.” Again, I had the feeling that I possessed Cape-specific expertise that I hadn't fully appreciated, only this time it was about sharks, seal culls, and the author of Jaws. Outside/In is a podcast produced by NHPR and the Cape Cod episode dropped the day before The Boston Globe published “At the Edge of a Warming World”, but I didn’t start listening until the day I taught the Globe’s documentary short in class. When I started playing "Cold, Dark, and Sharky" on my walk back to the T after teaching I couldn’t believe the serendipitous connection — I had just spent a week re-writing my syllabus and crafting a lesson plan around climate change on Cape Cod and now I was basking in the glow of a well-taught class and listening to a new extremely well-produced story about Cape Cod. 

I have another ecological connection to the Cape. My senior year of college, I took a two-semester biology seminar called Biological Conservation on Cape Cod and the Islands. The seminar was taught by a postdoc (I haven't read this PNAS paper, but I agree that postdocs are stellar mentors). I enrolled because my major (Environmental Science and Public Policy) was biology-adjacent, my friend wanted to take it and I’d already bailed on a different seminar with her*, and there would be field trips.

This seminar taught me how to read a scientific paper (laying the foundation for #365papers, one Wednesday night meeting at a time), how to core a tree, prep the core, and measure the rings with meticulous, old school — we’re talking dissecting scope and ruler-style — precision. I learned about paleoecology and palynology and the glacial geology lessons that I’d first encountered in my high school marine biology lesson slowly resurfaced. It took another decade, but eventually I did become a paleoecologist. But first, I’d reunite with the postdoc who taught that seminar; he became a professor at Emerson College. He hired me as an affiliated faculty to teach Climate Change in 2014 while I worked on my dissertation. I returned to teach Climate Change again this fall, adding Cape Cod to the syllabus.

Looking back, it appears that Cape Cod is the landscape that circuitously led me to Emerson — and perhaps my entire career? — in the first place. Reading “At the Edge of a Warming World” and listening to “Cold, Dark, and Sharky” back-to-back has been an incredible experience. There are few more nostalgia-inducing moments than teaching your first field sites to the next generation of students. But, to be able to teach with science journalism that is so deep, so well-researched, and so beautifully produced is a whole new level of nostalgia. All the emotions associated with your place are heightened and replayed in hi-fi.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took the landscape of the Cape and the thorny, tangled relationships between people and nature in this place, and brought it all to life. I found myself remembering an esker where I ate a half-stale muffin from the bottom of my backpack, the tourist trap in Provincetown where I got a henna tattoo of the sun on my shoulder, the bakery where we stopped on the way to the ferry to core dwarf beech trees, the low light in the New Bedford whaling museum and the bright sand dunes outside.

When I tell my origin story about how I became an ecologist, I usually talk about hiking in New Hampshire, or the childhood trip when my grandparents took me to Acadia**. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Cape Cod in those conversations. Clearly, I need to fact check my own origin story. I’m too completely in the choir to be the target audience for either “At the Edge of a Warming World” or “Cold, Dark, and Sharky”. In other words, I wasn’t surprised by the reporting; I was already familiar with most of the science in both stories. I had heard that you could earn a dollar per nose during the seal bounty days, understood that the waters around Cape Cod are warming faster than 99% of the rest of the ocean, knew that climate change made Nor’easters more powerful. But, I recognize that I am a weird case — the occasional academic Cape Cod enthusiast who has apparently forgotten, or maybe just never appreciated, the instrumental role of the Cape landscape in her scientific training. The power of the storytelling was so apparent when my students talked about their reactions to “At the Edge of a Warming World”.

The Boston Globe and Outside/In took these semi-familiar landscapes and crafted these stories that allowed me to see the Cape again from new perspectives. To have your original field site professionally science communicated back to you — twice! — is a really wonderful and jarring experience. I already appreciated the hard work of science communication in general, but these two stories impressed me in super-specific, place-based, deeply authentic ways. Read and listen to them — and support your own local science journalists. They may just help you re-write your CV. 

*I very much regret bailing on the other seminar — it was taught by Amitav Ghosh, and the Ibis Trilogy later became my three favorite books. My friend took both seminars; I totally could have double-seminar-ed too. Sorry, Rachel! You were right! 

**The summer after my grandparents took me to Acadia, they rented a house in Hyannis for week and what I'm learning from writing this post is that my grandmother spent my childhood picking out future field sites for me.

Looking Closer at Look at Your Fish

“In science, I concluded, even in fields as apparently apolitical as ichthyology and glaciology, the story always involves more than a fish in a tin pan or lines etched on bedrock. Culture, history, and beliefs about humans determine, now as in the nineteenth century, who exactly is invited into the science laboratory to “look and look again” at the fish in the pan, and who exactly has the leisure and means to take a trip to Maine.”— Marion K. McInnes, “Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine” 

Less than a week after I published a blog post that referenced Louis Agassiz and the Look-at-Your-Fish-school-of-natural-history-instruction, I stumbled upon an essay that upended my perception of Agassiz, glaciers, and the apocryphal fish. “Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine” flashed on my radar via my google scholar alert for Acadia National Park and Dr. Marion McInnes pulled me down a history of science rabbit hole to face my own field site and writing in an unforgiving mirror. 

McInnes weaves together the geologic history of Mount Desert Island, Maine, Agassiz’s well-founded theories on glaciers, and his illegitimate theories on race in an astounding piece that’s part archival detective story, part cultural criticism. This essay is engaging and thought-provoking and scathing. I did not escape unscathed. Because, here’s the thing: I elided Agassiz’s racism when I quoted Look at Your Fish. I knew better — I read Chrisoph Irmscher’s 2013 biography Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science and half-remembered Agassiz’s spurious writing on superior and inferior races even as I was typing up pithy takes on his pedagogical style. 

Both McInnes’ essay and Irmscher’s Agassiz biography cover the breadth of Agassiz’s career as a scientist and teacher. In the mid-19th century, Agassiz leveraged his position as a public intellectual to expound on race: his writing and lectures added scientific credence to the idea of the white superiority. He was an abolitionist and a champion of glaciers over the biblical Noah’s flood as a geologic force. He also rejected Darwin and believed in a theory of multiple creations, which included separate creations for different human races, the “newest” and best model being white Europeans like himself. My personal brand is loving 19th century naturalists, and my historical ecology research makes it clear that all my favs are problematic. This essay reinforces the important point that glossing over these problems, especially if they were cultural norms, is itself problematic. 

McInnes’ essay centers on her quest to find the Agassiz Outcrop, a site that, at the outset, she believes is a National Historic Landmark in Maine celebrating an outcrop of 510 million-year-old Ellsworth Schist bedrock bearing glacial striations and Agassiz’s name. Except she discovers that the Agassiz Outcrop is unmarked, half-hidden beside a parking lot, and its status has actually been inflated by a mistake on Maine.gov — it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, added in 2003, but it is not a capital ‘L’ Landmark. Ellsworth is on the mainland side of the bridge to Mount Desert Island; it’s where I do my grocery shopping on my way to my field housing each spring and boasts the Home Depot where I’ve spent thousands of dollars of grant money on corner gutter pieces, zip ties, cloth weed barrier, and various other field ecology supplies.

As I read McInnes’ essay, I could picture most of the geological formations she references — the pink granite, the glacial erratics — but I had never heard of the Agassiz Outcrop. Then, I saw her photo and I immediately recognized the parking lot.

I’m a pretty curious person with a stubborn streak in research projects, but I’m not sure I would have followed the threads that McInnes plucks from here; I think I might have let the project die in that parking lot of underwhelming landmark status and disappointment. I am genuinely amazed by what McInnes has crafted from the ashes* of the Agassiz Outcrop anecdote, and her dedication to unwinding the story of Agassiz, this outcrop, and the cultural moments they connect. As she writes in her introduction, “when I started this project I thought I was taking a trip back to the Palaeozoic and pre-Cambrian Eras, but in fact I landed squarely in the nineteenth century.” 

Among my favorite moments in this essay is when McInnes reads Agassiz’s ‘Glacial Phenoma of Maine’ from a bound copy of the year-end edition of Atlantic Monthly in her college library: “When I took down volume XIX to look for Agassiz’s articles on Maine, the leather spine tore along the seam; red dust coated my fingers and stained my clothes. All the better: this was the volume published in 1867, here in my hands, and not on a sterile computer screen.” A more recent paper on Maine glaciology looms large too: Smith and Borns’ “Louis Agassiz, the Great Deluge, and Early Maine Geology” published in Northeastern Naturalist nineteen years ago. Smith and Borns turn out to be the catalyst behind the Agassiz Outcrop’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places; it was their recommendation that landed the site this honor. But McInnes is more interested in what Smith and Borns’ left out of their writing on Agassiz: race. 

“In their article for Northeastern Naturalist in 2000, Smith and Borns sidestep the issue of Agassiz’s racism; they simply do not refer to his views on race at all. One might argue that they wrote this piece, after all, for an audience interested in geology, not social history…Yet this reasoning does not suffice. In the last section of their article, Smith and Borns consider Agassiz’s legacy outside of his contributions to glacial theory; they highlight his contributions to science education, his skill as a mentor of future brilliant scientists, and his support of women…I can understand their quandary as writers, and I continue to appreciate the research Smith and Borns have done on nineteenth-century geologists, including Agassiz, who studied bedrock in Maine. But if Agassiz’s enlightened views of women are relevant to the case they make for his being ‘one of the world’s preeminent natural historians,’ then so are his views on race.” 

Here, McInnes cuts through a thousand thorny arguments with incredible clarity. Why did I feel so guilty reading this after publishing a blog post that conveniently forgot to mention Agassiz’s racism? I think McInnes nails this sin of omission. In her writing on stripping memorials of problematic namesakes she plucks a perfect metaphor from the google map view of the road that passes by the Agassiz Outcrop: a ‘FILL WANTED’ sign. “This alternative, it seems to me, calls for research and interpretive work rather than erasure of the past. We want and need the full story of science history: we need to fill in what has been left out of geology textbook chapters on Agassiz’s Ice Age Theory; and “FILL” could usefully be added to the signage in the galleries of what once was the Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology.” 

I cannot recommend this essay enough. When I teach Field Natural History, I will assign it in tandem with Look At Your Fish; the two pieces are now inseparable in my mind.

It is amazing how this improbable connection came together: an essay written by a Professor Emerita of English at DePauw University, published in the latest issue of Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal that I’d never heard of before. This is, by all accounts, a paper I should never have read. But, the practice of reading a paper a day can be expansive and magical; it can allow for opportunities to read broadly and cast a wide net, or an interdisciplinary Acadia-sized-net. For these reasons, I’m just sort of charmed that my off-again on-again dedication to #365papers became a conduit for the universe to reach out and smack me for letting Agassiz’s racism slide unchecked in the year of our goddess 2019. I will do better. 

*terrible wordplay here — Ellsworth Schist is not igneous rock. 

Reference:

McInnes, Marion K. 2019. Looking for Louis Agassiz: A Story of Rocks and Race in Maine. Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 52(2): 35-56. 

Drawn to Learning

This post is a short attempt to peel back the curtain on my “bad at pollen” process.

Since my very first pollen clinic in the BEAST Lab at University of Maine I’ve been instructed to sketch the pollen as I see it on reference slides and create my own kind of visual library. This approach makes sense — I remember drawing carex perigynia and fern pinnae in my first field botany course, filling my Rite-in-the-Rain notebook with pages of half-erased sepals and efforts to capture anther angles.

I’m not a practicing sketch-book type of scientist — my field books from my PhD research are mostly long tables dotted with squashed mosquitos and lists of taxa — but I don’t vehemently claim that “I just can't draw”. When I was a master’s student, I took at print-making class at Burlington City Arts and got off campus and out of my head for a couple hours each week. I couldn’t completely stop thinking about my research, but I could redirect that energy towards creating screen prints of my study species. I poured over my photographs from my field season and sketched each of the six flowers over and over again.After I graduated, and moved to Chicago, I took a class at the Lillstreet Art Center and did it again — creating a new alpine plant screen from a new series of sketches of the same six species.

But, I knew those plants (even if, as it turns out, our volunteers maybe didn’t know them?), and drawing familiar flowers repeatedly is perhaps a different game from sketching pollen grains and lining the margins with notes like “cute tennis ball” (Fraxinus) and “I think this is a margo” (Acer).

A recent paper in Journal of Biological Education reinforces the idea that drawing plants — or in my case, pollen — can help us develop botanical knowledge. The paper, “A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge,” presents a case study that supports the sketch-to-learn model, or at least the sketch-to-better-capture-the-details-in-your-notes model. Drs. Bethan C. Stagg and Michael F. Verde led half-day wildflower events where students filled notebooks with either descriptive writing or labelled drawing for a suite of plants. Later, the students were given an identification test (labeling plants from the learning activities with their common name or noting ‘look-alike’ for trick question species that were not a part of the learning activities) and a morphology test (true/false questions about diagnostic characters of the study species).

These were all self-described novice botanists — “the event announcement stated that participants should not be able to identify more than twenty common native plants.” The writers and drawers scored equally well on the tests, but Stagg and Verde found that the sketches captured more recognizable diagnostic characters for each species than the written descriptions.

“Drawing in biology develops students’ observational skills by engaging the learner in close, detailed study of the focal organism,” Stagg and Verde write in the Introduction. They reel off a list of citations, but this connection between drawing and observing in biology has a long tradition in natural history training. In the classic essay “Look at Your Fish,” a prospective entomology student joins Louis Agassiz’s lab in the 19th century and is given a jarred haemulon fish specimen and instructed to study it.

Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and with a feeling of desperation again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish: it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish, and now with surprise, I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the professor returned."That is right," said he; "a pencil is one of the best of eyes."

Ultimately the student spends three days observing this fish and sporadically fielding questions from Professor Agassiz in what sounds like one of the most stressful and bewildering orientation exercises. Agassiz is never satisfied and leaves every interaction cryptically instructing him to “look at your fish” before disappearing for an unspecified period of time.

The pedagogical style is outdated, kind of. While none of my PIs pulled a straight Agassiz on me, the essay has been assigned as a reading in natural history courses twice in my career.

My fish is a box of pollen slides. But my fish is also a stack of literature, palynology and conservation paleobiology papers in a field where I am very much still sketching the outlines and learning the vocabulary. Is it possible to bring that pencil-is-one-of-the-best-of-eyes attention to detail to reading indoors instead of botanizing outdoors or pollen-counting under a microscope?

The amazing botanical illustrator and comic artist Liz Anna Kozik inspired me to think about this last month.

She tweeted, “I'm going to do quick TLDRs for the articles I read~!” and posted a handwritten summary of the 2003 paper Keeping the Academics in Service Learning Projects, or Teaching Environmental History to Tree Planters with an illustration of a student sitting by a freshly-planted seedling asking “What did I just do + what does it mean?” Liz usually creates artwork that centers the prairie plants she studies, but here, she's sharing digital sketches of the academic literature. She beautifully distills the papers into these concise take-away nuggets framed by her simple, striking art. Each TLDR page is inviting and memorable —and the process creates so much more meaning than my haphazardly highlighted pdf pages and marginalia from my folder of #365papers.

I love exploring prairie ecosystems through Kozik’s eyes, but now I can’t wait to see more of her TLDR and follow her reading! To circle back, I’ve been trying to apply Stagg and Verde’s advice to my pollen sketches — “Participants were encouraged to be undeterred by drawing ability or botanical knowledge and were advised to create their own terms for unknown morphological features.” I’m not quite at the level of sketching paleoecology papers, but my “light freckles, three-cornered popcorn kernel” is slowly becoming “surface psilate, exine indistinctly tectate, sub-triangular to spherical, pores aspidate.” 

Reference:

Stagg, B. C., & Verde, M. F. (2018). A comparison of descriptive writing and drawing of plants for the development of adult novices’ botanical knowledge. Journal of Biological Education, 28(2), 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2017.1420683

Book Review: The Lady from the Black Lagoon

In 1953, ichthyologist Kay Lawrence joined a research expedition searching for fossils in the Amazon Basin. This was the same year that Rosalind Franklin left King’s College in London, after she created the X-ray diffraction image of DNA that was shown to Watson and Crick without her approval or knowledge. Lawrence was the only woman in a team of five scientists, and the only one without a PhD, or at least the only one who was not referred to as “Dr.” in the publicity materials for the expedition. Her fieldwork hit some snags — not the least of which was a foreboding black lagoon and an amphibious monster that fell in love with her and her extremely scientific white bathing suit.

Yes — Kay is actress Julia Adams and the amphibious monster is the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But there’s also a Rosalind Franklin figure in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and like Franklin, her contributions were obscured, overshadowed, and openly questioned for decades. Mallory O’Meara brings the story of Milicent Patrick, the makeup artist and special effects designer behind the Creature, to life in a fun and funny new biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.

O’Meara grew up loving horror films and she was over the moon when she learned that her favorite movie monster, the Creature, was designed by a woman named Milicent Patrick. The world of horror is dominated by men, and so even though O’Meara only knew the barest details, she clung to Patrick as a patron saint of representation. In her introduction, O’Meara writes:

“Milicent was holding a door open for me that I never realized I had considered closed. Come on, she said. We belong here, too. I accepted her invitation. I make monster movies for a living. I produce them, I write them. Over the years, I searched for information, for anything that could tell me more about her. For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.”

O’Meara’s book is wonderful and engaging. She pieces together the lost legacy of her horror icon and takes the reader along on the research journey. I listened to the audiobook and fell in love with O’Meara’s voice which is somehow both welcoming and acerbic, irreverent and admiring. And, from the beginning, I was struck by how well the world of science mapped onto The Lady from the Black Lagoon’s world of science fiction. The story of why Milicent Patrick’s legacy was lost turns out to be completely banal, standard issue sexism and O’Meara deftly places this history in the context of the #MeToo movement.

“So many women share this experience, women in every profession. We’re ignored, sexually harassed, talked down to, plagiarized and insulted in and out of the workplace. It’s worse if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a disable woman, a transwoman and worse still if you’re a combination of any of these. I don’t know a single woman working in my field, or any creative field, or any field at all, who cannot relate to Milicent Patrick. It’s not just her story. It’s mine, too.”

I love O’Meara's description of Patrick’s process during the design of the Creature: “for inspiration, Milicent researched prehistoric animals: reptiles, amphibians, fish. She specifically looked for illustrations of animals from the Devonian period, which is when the Creature claw fossil in the film is from. The Devonian period, about four hundred million years ago, was the time period when life began to adapt to dry land from the sea. She spent weeks sketching out designs.” I had no idea The Creature from the Black Lagoon built a myth from this core kernel of scientific truth. Aside from this deep dive into a specific monster origin story, O’Meara’s book is not a science story*. But, I spent much of the book’s treatment of women in the film industry thinking about women in STEM.

When O’Meara compares Patrick’s Hollywood to her own experiences in film in the 21st century, the resemblance of these narratives to the past and present in STEM fields is eerie. O’Meara began her project because the idea of Milicent Patrick — a woman working behind the scenes in horror films — embodied such an important possibility to her in a field where otherwise she did not see herself represented. But, as she uncovered uncomfortable truths about Patrick as a person, she had to grapple with how to portray an imperfect personal hero. “The problem with being the only woman to ever do something is that you have to be perfect,” she laments. “When I found out about her as a teenager, I thought that for Milicent to be the first and only woman to ever design a famous monster, to be one of the first female animators, she had to be superhuman. She had to have been better than any other woman who ever wanted to design a monster. She had to have been the only one worthy enough to enter that boys’ club. This way of thinking is a mal-adaptation women have developed over the years to be able to deal with the fact that we’re getting passed on for jobs because we’re female. You force yourself to believe that there just haven’t been any women good enough for the job, rather than accept the fact that the entire system just doesn’t want you in it.” This is the hip, feminist-forward biographer’s way of saying that the water is not responsible for fixing the leaky pipeline.

I have my own Milicent Patrick, only her name is Annie Sawyer Downs. She left behind just enough of a scientific legacy that I’m awed by her botanical prowess and totally frustrated by the blanks in her life story. Like O’Meara, I’ve considered this woman to be “a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged.” O’Meara opens her book with the story of her Milicent Patrick tattoo — and, even before you read Chapter 1, you see the beautiful cover art for the book, which was created by her tattoo artist. On the Literary Disco podcast in March O’Meara explained: “When you get a tattoo of someone, you become a sort of information kiosk.” O’Meara later describes an exchange with a librarian at USC’s Cinematic Arts Library: “I even sheepishly rolled up my left sleeve to show him the tattoo of Milicent and the Creature. I’m so deeply invested in this project that asking me about it is like asking a new parent to show you pictures of their baby.”

I don’t have a tattoo of Annie Sawyer Downs, but I did name my kid after her. Asking me to show you pictures of my baby is literally asking me to dive into the story of my Milicent Patrick. I loved following O’Meara’s journey as she tracked down the pieces of Patrick’s life because I’ve done that too — I finagled an invitation to the Maine summer house that Annie Sawyer Downs’ built, I found her herbarium specimens at Harvard, I read through her collaborator’s field notes and could not help but notice that after she mentored him for the better part of a decade he went on to found a botanical club that did not admit women as members. I’m so happy that O’Meara got to write the book on Patrick — and I really did love this book — but I found the whole experience of listening to it to be bittersweet, and not just because the misogyny that ended Patrick’s career still hangs over Hollywood — and everywhere else. It was bittersweet for me to watch someone else find their Annie Sawyer Downs, tie up the loose ends, and bring a full story to light because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that for Annie. Annie died almost a century before Milicent Patrick, her trail is colder, her work is less renowned, there is no cult following of Rhododendron canadense forma albiflora like there is for the Creature**. And, as much as I feel Annie deserves a book like The Lady from the Black Lagoon, I know there are countless fully erased BIWOC in my field who didn’t even get to leave behind a name, let alone a trail of breadcrumbs, for future historians to follow. And so, once again Milicent Patrick is a kind of singular woman — a stand in for a whole suite of women who have given the faintest glimmer of representation to my generation, a small hope that we could see ourselves in them, even if we couldn’t read their full story in a book or Wikipedia page. Maybe I can’t have that for Annie, but I’d love to read the story of another ecologist’s Milicent Patrick figure next — write that book and/or send me your recommendation!  

*Still, some science creeps in to the science fiction, for example in O’Meara’s footnote on page 19: “Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Directory in 2010, the first and only. Sixty women have been to space. It’s harder for women to get into Hollywood than it is for us to get to space.”

**There definitely should be more botanical cult classics.

For Love of Ecology

Happy Valentine's Day! A shortlist of loves.

• I loved this episode of Major Revisions podcast— PLoS Ecology Community Editor Jeff Atkins interviews Rob Nowicki. Their conversation covers Nowicki's analysis of keywords in ecology papers over the past three decades which finds that ecologists today are centering management, and thinking about predictions to a greater degree than their 90s predecessors. Jeff & Rob also compare their fears of bears (the marine ecologist's fear) and sharks (the forest ecologist's fear) and talk about the decline of taxonomists and their own personal failings as naturalists in their study systems. (This honesty is so refreshing! I feel like I am a pretty good naturalist in a very narrow study system, and my skills drop off dramatically as I hike away from the alpine zone, or into southern New England.) Great episode of a fun podcast.

• Earlier this month, K. Taylor PhD wrote a wonderful twitter thread highlighting historic black women in STEM from Diann Jordan's Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists on Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science. Required reading.

• Some adorable ecology Valentines! Plant Love Stories (hot tip: #PlantHeartArt artist Rosemary Mosco has some additional romanticc omics on her website birdandmoon.com), Maine Audubon & McHenry County Conservation District

• And #ValentineASpecies has been a super fun twitter hashtag.

Up All Night

 As a parent to a newborn, I was drawn to the recent PLoS ONE paper ‘Creeping in the Night.’ I’m creeping in the night all the time — but I don’t get the excitement of working with mongoose, full moons, and unexpected den visits.

Drs. Carol Anne Nichols and Kathleen Alexander documented nocturnal behavior in a diurnal species when their camera traps captured some surprising late-night activity. Their paper, Creeping in the night: What might ecologists be missing? is part natural-history-note and part call-to-action for ecologists to shake off our perceptions of how animals partition their days and nights. As a reader, I came for the sleepwalking mongoose, but I stayed for the existential questions of how we structure our research activities and when binary traits might actually be blinders. 

Nichols and Alexander have been studying banded mongoose behavior in Northern Botswana for years. The project began in 2000, Alexander joined as a field ecologist in 2014, and in 2016 they began camera trap research as a means to study behavior without observer presence. I asked if the den site selection for the camera traps, which spanned urban areas and natural habitats, was serendipitous or it they had intentionally radio-collared urban and country mongooses. They told me that they studied mongoose troops in “town” (ie urban areas of Kasane and Kazungula) and “park” (Chobe National Park) habitats to “understand how different landscapes influence wildlife behavior and potential impacts that could impose on pathogen transmission dynamics.” Within a month of deploying the camera traps, they caught a mongoose outside of a den at night on film.

“It was certainly an amusing discovery to find so early in the project,” says Nichols. “We were excited to see if more nocturnal detection were to come, or if, as we joked, that first mongoose was just sleepwalking.” After 215 trap days, they had photographs of mongooses at night from 7 trap days. Among these photographs, there was no pattern of more night-activity among town (vs. park) habitats or moonlit (vs. dark) nights. In at least two photos, a mongoose appears to be sneaking around a den of another troop. In a scene that could be the trailer for a mongoose-version of COPS, a series of photos captures one mongoose approaching a den at night, another mongoose emerging from the den, the ensuing chase, and hours later, a single mongoose returns.

Nichols and Alexander say they are now deploying more cameras in hopes of understanding ringed mongoose nighttime behvavior. “This discovery has changed the way we thinking about mongoose,” they write. “There is much more happening! This discovery has made us question all our assumptions. The mystery continues!”

In the same month that Nichols and Alexander published Creeping in the Night, Dr. Kaitlyn Gaynor and colleagues published the meta-analysis The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality in Science. Gaynor compiled 76 studies comprising 62 mammal species from across the globe to explore how daily patterns of wildlife activity responded to different types of human disturbance, including vehicles, resource harvesting, development, and recreation. Each study in the meta-analysis included data on animal nocturnality under conditions of low and high human disturbance. They found that across all the different types of human impacts, the mammals showed a significant increase in nocturnal activity compared to mammals in low-impact habitats.

This contrasts with the ringed mongoose — Nichols and Alexander’s data were not included in the meta-analysis, but they found no difference between the human-impacted town den sits and the park sites in mongoose night time activity. Nevertheless, at least in habitats marked by human disturbance, mongoose might not be the only so-called diurnal mammals creeping in night. This pattern of nocturnal behavior among mammals that we thought were diurnal calls into question the traditional dichotomy between day-time animals and night-time animals. In their Discussion, Nichols and Alexander write that this “limited approach [only looking at day time behavior] may fail to capture data critical to understanding the ecology, biology of a species, and the temporal nature of space use.” As she reviewed their photos, Alexander recalled Samuel Sneiders’ “The theory of ecology” — “specifically that heterogeneity was an underlying phenomenon of ecology. In our writing, we wanted to emphasize that these unexpected events are really the interesting nuggets of new discovery!”

The Discussion encourages ecologists to be open to temporal heterogeneity with references to classic ecological work in spatial heterogeneity. This connection made me think of a recent essay in Current Biology: Are the ghosts of nature’s past haunting ecology today? Here, Dr. Brian Silliman and coauthors explore trends of rebounding populations of large-bodied consumers. These species —for example, sea otters and alligators — seem to be expanding into habitats that ecologists thought were beyond their niche space. Often this is beause we decimated their populations before thoroughly studying their original ranges, and we’re working with incomplete baseline data. In both cases — spatially with rebounding sea otters and alligators and temporally with ringed mongoose — this limits our ability to provide recommendations for management and conservation. As Nichols and Alexander write, “This work emphasizes the idea that you don’t know what you don’t know.” They encourage researchers to:

Push the envelope and see what you find. It might make all the difference in your approach to management and effective conservation of a species. With mongoose, we realize that between group dynamics and contacts are more complicated than we thought with these nighttime excursions and we need to understand the drivers of this behavior to understand disease transmission in this population — a critically important management objective.

For me, during those rough 4 am feedings, it's weirdly comforting to think, maybe there's a mongoose out there who is also awake right now. But, as I look forward to returning to my own research next semester, I will be thinking about Nichols and Alexander's big question What might ecologists be missing? and working to better define the edge of my assumptions around my study system, species, and methods. 

References:

Nichols, C. A., & Alexander, K. (2018). Creeping in the night: What might ecologists be missing? PloS One, 13(6), e0198277–7. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198277

Gaynor, K.M., Hojnowski, C.E., Carter, N.H. and Brashares, J.S. (2018). The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality. Science, 360(6394), pp.1232-1235.

Silliman, B. R., Hughes, B. B., Gaskins, L. C., He, Q., Tinker, M. T., Read, A., et al. (2018). Are the ghosts of nature’s past haunting ecology today? Current Biology, 28(9), R532–R537. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.002

Summer Reading (Part 2)

Last week I wrote about my favorite new papers on mountains and phenology after a summer of scientific reading. In the second half of my top ten list, I’m highlighting some plant mysteries and best practices of 2018. 

“Plant mysteries” is a label that I’m using to lump together three plant papers that I can’t stop thinking about. They cover some of my favorite methodological quirks — historical field notes, herbarium digitization, citizen science — and two genera that I think are cool — Sibbaldia and Erythronium. The mysteries range from: Is this still here? to Why is this here in two colors?  to Can I get this specimen to tell me what else grew here? without much thematic overlap, but all three papers tell gripping stories. If nothing else, they share a strong natural history foundation and well-executed scientific writing that made for lovely hammock-reading.

“Best practices” are just that — descriptions of how we can improve our science as individuals and collectively. We can design better spreadsheets for our data and we can support gender equity in our scientific societies. I strongly recommend that all ecologists read up on both. 

Plant Mysteries

I didn’t particularly notice [trophy collecting/associated taxa/pollen color polymorphism] before, but now I can’t not see it…

1. Sperduto, D.D., Jones, M.T. and Willey, L.L., 2018. Decline of Sibbaldia procumbens (Rosaceae) on Mount Washington, White Mountains, NH, USA. Rhodora, 120 (981), pp.65-75.

I love this deep dive into the history of snowbank community alpine plant that occurs in exactly one ravine in New England (though it’s globally widespread across Northern Hemisphere arctic-alpine habitats). Over the past four decades, surveys in Tuckerman’s Ravine have documented a continuous decline in the abundance of creeping sibbaldia, and recently researchers have been unable to find it at all. This would make creeping sibbaldia the first documented extirpation of an alpine vascular plant in New England. Dr. Daniel Sperduto and coauthors revisit the photographs and notes from contemporary surveys and find that mountain alders are encroaching on the creeping sibbaldia’s snowbank habitats. These notes also include anecdotes of local disturbances like turf slumping at the sites where creeping sibbaldia used to be found. In herbaria across New England, Sperduto and coauthors discovered sheets covered with dozens of specimens — this “trophy collection activity” in the 19th century led them to calculate that “there are more than three times as many plants with roots at the seven herbaria examined than the maximum number of plants counted in the field within the last 100 years.” I am obviously partial to New England alpine plants, and I got to see Sperduto present this research as a part of an engaging plenary session at the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering in April, so you could write this off as a niche interest. Despite this, I see creeping sibbaldia as a lens for considering the universal mysteries of population decline and extirpation, and the challenges of tying extirpation to concrete cause-and-effect stories. 

2. Pearson, K.D., 2018. Rapid enhancement of biodiversity occurrence records using unconventional specimen data. Biodiversity and Conservation, pp.1-12.

Leveraging herbarium data for plant research is so hot right now. But what if you could squeeze even more information from a specimen label? For example, many collectors note “associated taxa” along with the date and location of collection. The associated taxa are plants that were seen nearby, but not collected — a kind of ghostly palimpsest of the community that grew around the chosen specimen. Herbaria across the globe have spent the past decades digitizing specimens and uploading photographs of their pressed plants. In this process, the associated taxa on specimen labels are often stored in a ‘habitat’ database field. In this impressive single-author paper, Dr. Kaitlin Pearson extracts the associated taxa data from Florida State University’s Robert K. Godfrey Herbarium database with elegant code that can recognize abbreviated binomial names and identify misspellings. She then compared the county-level distributions of the associated taxa database with their known county-level distribution from floras and herbarium specimens. Incredibly “the cleaned associated taxon dataset contained 247 new county records for 217 Florida plant species when compared to the Atlas of Florida Plants.” There are plenty of caveats: the associated taxa can’t be evaluated for misidentification the way a specimen can, and lists of associated taxa are obviously subject to the same spatial biases as herbarium specimens. But this is clearly a clever study with a beautifully simple conclusion: “broadening our knowledge of species distributions and improving data- and specimen-collection practices may be as simple as examining the data we already have.” 

3. Austen, E.J., Lin, S.Y. and Forrest, J.R., 2018. On the ecological significance of pollen color: a case study in American trout lily (Erythronium americanum). Ecology, 99(4), pp.926-937.

Did you read Gelman and Hill’s Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Modelsin a seminar and think, this seems like an amazing resource but I’m an ecologist and examples about school children watching Sesame Street or election outcomes and incumbency for US congressional election races just don’t resonate with me? The ecological and evolutionary mystery of red/yellow pollen polymorphism is super interesting in its own right and Dr. Emily Austen and coauthors thoroughly attack this question. For me — and I’ve admitted here before that I am the kind of learner who benefits from repetition  — Austen’s statistical methods are the star. Austen demonstrates glm best practices and brings stunningly clear plant ecology examples to the Gelman and Hill framework. I would probably teach this paper in a field botany course (trout lilies are charismatic! look at this fun map of pollen color polymorphism!), but I would absolutely prefer to assign it in a statistical methods course, especially as a supplement/set of alternative exercises to Gelman and Hill. 

Best Practices

Do this…

1. Potvin, D.A., Burdfield-Steel, E., Potvin, J.M. and Heap, S.M., 2018. Diversity begets diversity: A global perspective on gender equality in scientific society leadership. PloS one, 13(5), p.e0197280.

Gender equality in biology dramatically decreases as you look up the ladder in academia — compare the gender breakdown in the population of graduate students to tenured professors and gender disparity is stark. Leadership in our field is still heavily male skewed. Dr. Dominique Potvin and her coauthors asked, is this true in scientific societies too? Scientific societies are generally more open than academic departments, and there is more transparency in the process of electing governing boards and leadership positions. Potvin and coauthors leveraged these traits to ask: what is the role of scientific societies in rectifying gender inequity? why are some societies better than others at promoting women in leadership? After considering 202 societies in the zoological sciences, they found that the culture of the society — the age of the society age, size of its board and whether or not a it had an outward commitment or statement of equality — was the best predictor of equality in the gender ratio of society boards and leadership positions. This “outward commitment or statement of equality” covered anything published on the society website — a statement, committee, or other form of affirmative action program — that “implies that the society is dedicated to increasing diversity or improving gender equality.” Of the 202 societies they studied, only 39 (19.3%) had one of these visible commitments to equality. Whether societies with high proportions of female board members were more likely to draft and publish these statements, or whether societies that invested time and energy in producing such commitments attracted more women to leadership positions is a bit of a chicken-and-egg riddle. Societies looking to reflect on their own state of gender equality can take advantage of the resource presented in Table 6: “Health checklist for scientific societies aiming for gender equality.” Assessing gender equality is kind of a low hanging fruit — and the authors encourage societies to reflect on intersectionality and race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and income level as well. Basically, if a scientific society is struggling to support white women in 2018, there’s an excellent chance it is failing its brown, LGTBQ, and first-generation members to a much greater extent.

2. Broman, K.W. and Woo, K.H., 2018. Data organization in spreadsheets. The American Statistician, 72(1), pp. 2-10.

If I could send a paper in a time machine, I would immediately launch Broman and Woo’s set of principles for spreadsheet data entry and storage back to 2009, when I started my master’s project. Reading through this list of best practices made me realize how many lessons I learned the hard way — how many times have I violated the commandments to “be consistent”, “choose good names for things”, or “do not use font color or highlighting as data”? Way too many! Eventually, I pulled it together and developed a data entry system of spreadsheets that mostly conforms to the rules outlined in this paper. But, if I’d read this first, I would have skipped a lot of heartache and saved a lot of time. This is an invaluable resource for students as they prepare for field seasons and dissertation projects. Thank you Broman and Woo, for putting these simple rules together in one place with intuitive and memorable examples! 

Happy Fall Reading! 

The Rollercoaster of Exploding Pollen

When I think about reading peer-reviewed natural history papers — including contemporary articles in a ‘Natural History Miscellany Note’ or ‘The Scientific Naturalist’ section — I imagine them mostly as a classic throwback: just a scientist, a hand lens, and a notebook. I generally do not think about employing $50,000 of high-speed video recording equipment to test dueling hypotheses about pollination modes from the 1860s. I’m clearly missing out. 

The American Naturalist recently published a mash-up of 19th century natural history observations and 21st century tech: in “Dispensing Pollen Via Catapult: Explosive Pollen Release in Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia)” Dr. Callin Switzer and coauthors present speed records, specialized weaponry vocabulary, and plot twists. 

The Speed Records: Mountain laurel is well known for its explosive pollination — a great botanical cocktail party conversation starter*, but an adaptive function that has remained a mystery since the 19thcentury. Back in 2005 fans of understory plants of the temperate deciduous forest and speed records** were wowed by bunchberry — researchers from Williams College clocked this explosive pollinator launching pollen grains at 3.1 meters/second, and accelerating pollen at 24,000 meters/second2.Switzer’s research at the most basic level sought to record the speed and acceleration of mountain laurel’s explosive pollen. The mechanisms behind the explosion were well documented by the 1990s (pollen on the mountain laurel anthers are tucked into “pockets” in the petals and held under tension by curved filaments — when the anther is released from the pocket, the pollen is launched into the air), but the speed was still unrecorded. Switzer explains, “The paper was inspired by walking around the Arnold Arboretum with several of the faculty there. Robin Hopkins (my PhD advisor) and Ned Friedman both knew that I had done some high-speed video projects in the past, and they suggested that I should take a look at the mountain laurels. I first had the high-speed videography background, and then Robin pointed me to the 19th century literature.” From the high-speed videos, Switzerfound that mountain laurels launched pollen at 3.5 meters/second for an average maximum speed and achieved average maximum acceleration at 4,100 meters/second2. Mountain laurels thus have “one of the fastest-moving floral parts recorded”! But why? In 1867 The American Naturalist published competing hypotheses for the adaptive function of explosive pollination in mountain laurels. Was the pollen aimed at the stigma for incredibly efficient self-pollination? Or is the pollen catapulted on to visiting bees for cross-fertilization? These 19th century natural history observations sat at the heart of Switzer’s interest in quantifying the speed of mountain laurels — a chance to unravel this species’ mythology of adaptive explanations. “I think of natural history as a part of biology that starts with curiosity about the natural world.” Switzer reflects. “Naturalists tend to get ideas for projects simply by going out into the field with a hand lens and a notebook -- with all the new technology available, however, naturalists can do a lot more interesting and quantitative studies.”

Before revealing the speed-pollen’s adaptive function, I just need to acknowledge the weird side effect of reading about explosive pollen — I learned a ton about the physics and vocabulary of medieval weapons…

Specialized Weaponry Vocabulary: The next time you are struggling to articulate the difference between a regular catapult and a medieval trebuchet, just think about the difference between a mountain laurel and a bunchberry. While both flowers have filaments under tension and fling pollen from the tips of their anthers, on bunchberry anthers there is a hinge connecting the anther to the filament tip. The bunchberry trebuchet is a specialized catapult: the payload is attached to the throwing arm by a hinge. Mountain laurels may be standard issue catapults — without the hinge that propels bunchberry pollen with incredible acceleration — but mountain laurel pollen grains are structurally designed to be their own weapon. The mountain laurel’s pollen grains “form tetrads connected with viscin threads…causing each anther to release several stringy aggregations of pollen when it is triggered.” Switzer hypothesizes that these stringy aggregations may act as a bola— hitting a target/pollinator and then wrapping around to attach itself tightly. Both the bunchberry and mountain laurel papers weaponize their flowers, making explosive pollination seem explicitly conflict-driven. I asked Switzer, “Are plants at war with their pollinators?” He responded, “plants and pollinators are in evolutionary conflict -- they have different "goals", and both are constantly evolving to suit their own goals.  If you'll excuse the anthropomorphizing, plants "want" bees to keep pollen on their bodies and transfer it among flowers, but bees "want" to collect the maximal amount of resources, without wasting energy carrying pollen among flowers.” When we look closely at the world around us, the metaphors of natural harmony and balance blur and fade: petals are architects of secret triggers, flowers a minefield of exploding pollen. 

The Plot Twists: Switzer filmed 69 mountain laurel pollen explosions outdoors at the Arnold Arboretum to capture the insect visitors and causes of catapulting pollen. Bees — mostly bumble bees — triggered the anther catapults, while appearing to search for nectar. During this fieldwork, and in the playbacks of the high-speed videos, Switzer watched pollen fly past the bees. It seemed like the catapults were missing their target. Maybe this was an elaborate, Rube Goldberg-esque set up to have a bee trigger a catapult to self-fertilize a flower via an extremely fast but weirdly complicated mechanism?A second set of high-speed videos, recorded in the lab, allowed Switzer to calculate pollen trajectories in 3-D space. In these videos, the flower is set in profile to the camera and half the petals have been removed to give a clear view of the flower parts: stigma, style, anther pocket and filament. The catapult is manually triggered by a needle. When the pollen trajectories are traced and modeled into 3-D space, it’s clear that most of the time the catapulted pollen crosses the central axis of the flower at just about bee-height. Switzer admits, “I was very surprised when I made observations with only my eyes, and I saw pollen flying past the bees. I came up with all kinds of interesting explanations in my head, until I collected the high-speed videos and saw what was really happening.” In the Discussion of the pollen catapult paper, there is a refreshing transparency about this plot-twist moment: “Only with detailed experimentation and observations were we able to better understand the adaptive significance of explosive pollination—we realized that field-based observations did not allow us to see how much pollen actually hit the bee (because the bee’s body often blocked the view).”

The story of the research — stretching back to those 19th century naturalists and the mythology of adaptive explanations — is so clear here. We thought we saw something. We tested it from another angle and saw something else. 

As Switzer explains, “This was indeed a gut-check moment, and it did help me have more empathy for 19th century naturalists as well as present day naturalists. Doing good science with good statistics is hard -- it can be so easy for scientists (myself included) to convince themselves of something that is not true.  For me, it's really helpful to get constructive feedback from others to help me find those 'blind spots.'”

Switzer’s ultimate contribution — beyond allowing mountain laurel to rest on its speed laurels, side by side with bunchberry in the Fast Plants Hall of Fame — is this effort to keep looking: to bring in two high speed cameras, half-dissected flowers in a lab setting, and 3-D modeling, and shed light on the unknowns with every tool in his 21st century natural history toolbox.

References:

Callin M. Switzer, Stacey A. Combes, and Robin Hopkins, "Dispensing Pollen via Catapult: Explosive Pollen Release in Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia)," The American Naturalist 191, no. 6 (June 2018): 767-776. https://doi.org/10.1086/697220 

Edwards, J., Whitaker, D., Klionsky, S., & Laskowski, M. J. (2005). A record-breaking pollen catapult. Nature,435(7039), 164–164. http://doi.org/10.1038/435164a    

*Botanical cocktail party conversation starters are definitely a thing. Just read Amy Stewart’s The Drunken Botanist.

**There are many fans of understory plants of the temperate deciduous forest and speed records. Just think of all the trail-runners you know who are also ecologists and/or iNaturalist enthusiasts. We generally have two speeds: extremely slow (botanical observations) and extremely quick (peak bagging). We pack lots of snacks. We have favorite races based on the phenology of the date and the beta-diversity of natural communities along the course. We like to poke things.

Reading, Walking, Wishing

June in New England is a long stretch of long-lit days. When I was a PhD student, my Junes were the peak of my field season and I spent the long days logging miles up and down Cadillac, Sargent, and Pemetic mountains. For four years, my Junes were hiking ridges, recording data, wearing holes in the toes of my trailrunners. Now, I’m revising the papers that were written on the heels of those leg muscles and it’s weird to be indoors in June, sitting at a computer, without the tight hamstrings or blackfly bites.

After a long slog through a cold spring, this June I’ve returned to reading, picking up #365papers again in earnest after slacking off on the literature for a few months. Last week, I read Liam Heneghan’s essay “Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method” in Trends in Ecology & Evolution. I was indoors, at my desk, with the AC whirring, reading about walking. I felt like a fish out of water, or more aptly a field ecologist out of nature. In the essay, Henegham makes the distinction between ecologists and naturalists, comparing word counts in the anthologies The Essential Naturalist: Timeless Readings in Natural History (2011) and Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries (2012).

“Although the two disciplines ‘observe’ and ‘see’ things in equal measure, natural historians nonetheless report engaging all of their senses in the pursuit of observations of nature to a greater degree. Natural historians report touching, feeling, hearing, and smelling the things of the world to an extent that scientific ecologists do not. Indeed, ecologists, if this small sample is representative, have abandoned smelling in its entirety. Moreover, natural historians ‘walk’, ‘roam’, ‘climb’, ‘sniff’, and ‘listen’ to a degree their ecological colleagues do not.”

I am a roaming, climbing, sniffing ecologist. But I bristled at the thought that ecologists as a whole should be compelled to walk to prove some kind of connection to the true core of the discipline. Heneghan does not outrightly demand that all ecologists walk, roam, and climb — his main argument seems to be the gentle conjecture “ecologists may have overlooked the fact that scrutinizing nature can benefit from an engagement of all the senses” — but he doesn’t leave much space within the discipline for non-field ecologists.

Perhaps Heneghan’s essay title is misleading and he isn’t worried about all ecologists losing their senses, just the outdoor ones. The field-based, nose-to-the-ground, perambulatory science that Heneghan and I practice is clearly not universal to ecology — and it shouldn’t be! We need modelers and theorists and lab scientists! But I fell for this essay hard. I am the target audience. When I started as a master’s student at the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist and Ecological Planning program, my Botany 311 class, the Fall Field Practicum series of weekly full-day field trips, listed 7 goals on the syllabus. Goal #7: “Visit bakeries and enjoy spending the day outdoors.” In Heneghan’s analysis of word counts in the Ecology vs. Natural History texts, “Breakfast” receives 0.72 mentions per page in The Essential Naturalist; it does not appear at all in Foundations in Ecology*. Just digging out my Fall Field Practicum syllabus conjured up memories of cider donuts and eskers, travel mugs of maple-syrup-sweetened coffee and ombrotrophic bogs. My UVM experience was steeped in the kind of sensory details that Heneghan would appreciate and savor.

‘Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method’ reminded me of a similar paper I’d read in another (sadly non-bakery-centered) UVM class: Craig Loehle’s 1990 ‘A guide to increased creativity in research — inspiration or perspiration?’ Loehle also identifies the benefits of walking as a part of the scientific process when he encourages students to “get bored” as a work habit. This is recommended alongside running, procrastinating, and surfing — allegories for carving out time to think deeply and engage in non-productive, non-routine activities. These pursuits, Loehle promises, will facilitate creative problem solving. When I went back to re-read Loehle this week, I was surprised to find the advice “Don’t read the literature” under his list of methods for releasing creativity. I am, traditionally, a big fan of reading the literature. I’m a reader: when I was asked to review a Tansley Insight manuscript for The New Phytologist, my first move was to download and read the 2015 editorial “Introducing Tansley Insights – short and timely, focussed reviews within the plant sciences.” I won’t admit how many other Tansley Insights I downloaded after. A lot, okay? Maybe all of them. But Loehle’s “Don’t read the literature” is not a blanket statement; he clarifies that the first step as a scientist begins mulling over a new idea should not be to run to Web of Science (or whatever researchers used to find papers back in the dark ages of 1990), but to work through it a bit on your own.

“[Reading the literature] channels your thoughts too much into well-worn grooves. Second, a germ of an idea can easily seem insignificant in comparison to finished studies. Third, the sheer volume of material to read may intimidate you to abandoning any work in a new area.”

I agree with Loehle on all three points, but I’d add that the habit of reading broadly in the literature — taking recommendations from twitter**, searching outside of the Table of Contents of your subdiscipline’s favorite journal, checking out how your pet methodology is applied in another country or ecosystem, or seeking out papers with your field site as a keyword by researchers who are not in your field — is a kind of antidote to the well-worn grooves.

This month I read papers from Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Alpine Botany, Bioscience, Conservation Biology, Current Biology, Ecology, Ecosphere, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Integrative and Comparative Biology, Journal of Applied Ecology, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Nature Geoscience, New Phytologist, Ocean & Coastal Management, Palynology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution. I am a broadly trained field ecologist — thanks UVM! — but as my career has progressed I’ve naturally found myself engaged in narrower research pursuits, and reading broadly keeps me centered, provides context for the tedium of slicing a 4.09 m core of lake sediment into half centimeter subsamples, and makes my work feel connected to society, policy, and big-picture conservation.

I’ll likely never publish in Ocean & Coastal Management, but reading “‘Back off, man, I’m a scientist!’ When marine conservation science meets policy”*** resonated with my own experiences writing public comments and meeting with congressional staffers. In a way, reading broadly is a kind of indoor-walking for restless ecologists who are prone to wandering.

Loehle and Heneghan’s essays are endlessly quotable for natural history students. But while they strive to expand how scientists engage in the world — Shake off your routine! Get outside! Smell! — they present an ironically narrow picture of role models. The patron saints of creative, roaming researchers, name-checked by both Loehle and Heneghan, are Darwin and MacAthur. I feel very strongly that if your argument around what’s needed in the “culture of ecology” can be reduced to “be more like this white man who had the privilege to travel freely and comfortably in the outdoors” you are fundamentally wrong. In Heneghan’s case, in 2018, there’s no excuse for whitewashing field ecology. Priya Shukla’s amazing piece in Bay Nature Magazine beautifully lays out the importance of representation in contemporary ecology, and the urgent need to uncover and share the ways in which wild landscapes are not empty areas that blankly awaited manifest destiny and reflect only Anglo-European stories. She writes “We need an act of revisionist natural history to color in the environmental and conservation movements. We should remind every hiker, biker, birder, citizen scientist, and field researcher that innumerable diverse people have shaped our natural spaces.” In a series of profiles of diverse voices in outdoor recreation, James Edward Mills writes in Outside, “Organizations like Outdoor Afro, Latino Outdoors, and Out There Adventures have begun stripping away the presumption of a white, male, heterosexual experience. Even more importantly, by unapologetically presenting their unique points of view, they’ve shined a light on a rich heritage of adventure and environmental stewardship that has been there for generations.”

This diversity exists in field ecology and natural history writing too, and it is not hard to find. Sure, Darwin and MacArthur were great at walking and writing about walking with wonderful sensory detail — but have you read J. Drew Lanham’s essay ‘Birding While Black’ or his book The Home Place? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass? Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood****? Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl —in which the titular "girl" (Jahren) spends long stretches outside of the lab writing lyrically about working in the outdoors?

Heneghan begins his essay in a bog, but his call to arms (hiking boots?) is not simply an #OptOutside manifesto. He follows his walking naturalists — his long list of old white men: Irish botanist Robert Lloyd Praeger, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Robert McArthur, and E. O. Wilson — indoors to their writing desks. At the end of the piece, Heneghan is in the archives, reading Praeger’s papers and reflecting on his prodigious writing. “A day’s walk can furnish long hours back at the desk.” Heneghan muses, “Thus for every insight into nature, there is a hidden process by which that insight was achieved; every active life contains a hidden core of repose.”

So this is my indoor June, my hidden core of repose. My trailrunners lie neglected, but the writing & reading continues, as I adventure through the memories and field notes and spreadsheets on the heels of the illustrious white men, and the many, many equally bold, sure-footed, and thoughtful unnamed white women and people of color who have trod this path before me.

References:

Heneghan, L., 2018. Have Ecologists Lost Their Senses? Walking and Reflection as Ecological Method. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1–4. doi:10.1016/j.tree.2018.04.016 

Loehle, Craig. 1990. "A guide to increased creativity in research: inspiration or perspiration?." Bioscience 40.2: 123-129.  

*I have a confession to make here. I read most of Foundations in Ecology while I was a PhD student. I had not even heard of The Essential Naturalist until I read this paper. So maybe I’m not such a great naturalist after all? ...Or maybe I’m an amazing naturalist, always outside tromping around, and I don’t have time to read natural history anthologies because I’m too busy smelling nature?

**I found Heneghan’s essay by way of @ChelskiLittle’s prolific #365papers tweets. Thanks Chelsea!

***I found this paper by way of @Drew_Lab’s #365papers tweets. Thanks Josh!

****I cannot say enough about Milkweed Editions. This independent, nonprofit literary powerhouse in Minneapolis publishes incredible environmental writing. My husband gifted me a Milkweed book subscription years ago and it's my absolute favorite piece of mail every month. Maybe 30% of my love for LacCore & the science they do there is a side effect of the fact that every time I visit LacCore, I get to take a side trip to Milkweed. 

Book Review: The Feather Thief

I’ve got my conference roadtrip routine dialed in. This spring I drove to the Northeast Natural History Conference (215 miles each way), the Northeast Alpine Stewardship Gathering (150 miles), the University of Maine Climate Change Institute’s Borns Symposium (250 miles), and (as a fan, not an ecologist) the New England Division 1 College Men’s Ultimate Frisbee Regional Tournament (100 miles). I packed insulated mugs for both hot and iced coffee, a trusty ice scraper for the always-lovely April ice storm in northern Vermont, a light-weight wrap to chase the air conditioning chill on my bare arms after ducking inside on the actually-lovely first 70° days of spring in Maine, and a garment bag of professional clothes to replace my ripped maternity jeans/driving uniform upon rolling into the conference center. I hit the best bakeries (King Arthur’s, Beach Pea, Florence Pie Bar). And on the last few legs, I listened to an amazing, engrossing audiobook: Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. 

My favorite moment in The Feather Thief is not the poignant description of Alfred Russel Wallace watching four years worth of his South American collections burn at sea from the lifeboat of the Helen, or the almost heroic depiction of the generations of curators of natural history collections shepherding scientific information through the ages. It is the suitcase scene. Author Kirk Wallace Johnson and his wife are packing a suitcase: a laundry-laden re-enactment of Edwin Rist’s 2009 theft of hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring: 

“Do you think two hundred ninety-nine birds would’ve fit in just one?”…Seeing where her questions led—that multiple suitcases would suggest multiple people—I got out a medium-size suitcase. Having seen the window at the Tring, I knew he couldn't have fit one much larger through it. Working together, we spent the next hour building a pile of fake birds. A rolled-up pair of dress socks formed a Blue Chatter. She folded several dozen T-shirts and dish towels in the approximate size of an Indian Crow, and used her leggings to fashion Respendent Quetzal tails.We started packing. Marie-Josée, consulting the Tring’s spreadsheet, counted off each species. When the suitcase was halfway full, we were already at eighty birds. Of course, our experiment was hardly scientific—my washcloth Flame Bowerbirds might have been a bit large—but it seemed as though it would’ve been difficult to fit all of them in a single suitcase.

 By this point in the book, the reader (in my case, the listener) has followed rapt while Johnson evolved from a memoirist trying to escape writer’s block through fly-fishing to an amateur detective with an accordion file of notes on the history of biogeography and conservation biology. In the prologue, when he first hears of Edwin Rist’s theft, Johnson is running a foundation committed to helping Iraqi refugees who have worked for U.S.-affiliated organizations to obtain visas to the U.S. (This American Life listeners may remember Johnson’s story from Nancy Updike’s interview in episode 607). He knows almost nothing about fly-tying, museum bird collections, Alfred Russel Wallace, or how these topics could possible overlap. The Feather Thief weaves these niche interests and the unbelievable robbery of 299 bird skins from the Tring into a compelling, larger-than-life narrative that traces Wallace’s birds of paradise from Southeast Asia to Victorian trends in hat fashion to the International Fly Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey. 

When Johnson begins packing his suitcase with laundry-birds, we are deep into the story — the thief has been caught, the case is closed, the Tring curators are sifting through the remains of bird skins separated from their tags, including Ziploc bags of feathers plucked for individual sale and returned to the museum by a paltry few of the fly-tiers who discovered their eBay purchases were stolen goods. In the suitcase scene are the echoes of all the travels of both the bird and human characters of the book — Wallace’s voyages, the ships laden with feathers for fancy hats, the bird skins and other natural history collections spirited to the English countryside and away from bombed out London during World War II, the American flautist studying at the Royal Academy of Music, the stolen bird skins mailed to eBay customers across the globe, Johnson’s own travels from Iraq to New Mexico’s Red River, to New Jersey, South Africa, Germany, and Norway tracking down fly-tiers associated with Rist. 

Many of the legs of Johnson’s trip will be familiar to ecologists. As a community, we know the namesake of the Wallace Line, we’re familiar with the story of how Wallace’s correspondence coerced the plodding Darwin to finally, publicly share his theory of natural selection, we know that some of the earliest major conservation policy was driven by women who were appalled by the hidden cost of other women's decorative hat choices, and we can expound on the value of natural history collections. Though, The Feather Thief might make us think twice before again exclaiming broadly, “Given [natural history collections] breadth of importance and relevance, it would be difficult to imagine anyone dismissing the value of natural history collections to society relative to the research, education, and training of next generation scientists” (Bradley et al 2014).

Throughout the book, the value of natural history collections to society is routinely dismissed — the tags associated with Wallace’s bird skins are tossed aside and the record-keeping at the Tring is questioned by fly-tiers who suggest the museum should sell their extra skins to fly-tiers instead of keeping them in musty drawers. Reflecting on the scientific loss related to his crime, Rist cavalierly (and wrongly) says, “after a certain period of time—I think about a hundred years—technically speaking, all of the scientific data that can be extracted from them has been extracted from them. You can no longer use DNA, because what you would want to do it for is to prolong and help living birds, which hasn’t really worked anyway, because they’re still going extinct, or will go extinct depending on what happens with the rainforests.” This scene reminded me of another science-heist book, Sex on the Moon, in which a NASA intern steals a lab safe full of moon rocks for kicks. The scientist whose samples were taken tells the FBI that the safe also contained his notebooks documenting thirty years of research. The thief “didn’t remember seeing any green notebooks in the safe. As far as he knew, they hadn’t thrown any thing out, other than the safe itself, so if there were notebooks, they’d still be either in Sandra’s storage shed or in the suitcase that had been with them in the Sheraton. But [the thief] didn’t really want to talk about some phantom notebooks.” In both cases, the scientific value of the stolen goods barely registers with the young, white males who believe they are entitled to these rare items.

In The Feather Thief this tension between the curators who mourn the loss of the skins and tags, and the general public’s perception of the heist — a hilarious tale of an American kid robbing a British museum for feathers so he can tie flys that no one will ever actually fish with! — reflects our biases; we, as scientists, do not clearly understand the difference between how we value natural history collections within our community and how these same collections are valued by those outside of science. 

Finally, I want to note one failing in the book. As a former natural history museum intern (shout out to Worcester’s EcoTarium) and herbarium researcher, I bumped on the clumsy way that Johnson described the record keeping associated with museum specimens. He never explained the accessioning process — how museums enter items, like skins or specimens, into their collections. I think that this oversight diminishes Johnson’s eureka moment when he, late in the book, receives the Tring’s spreadsheet of stolen birds: “it meticulously noted the exact number of skins gathered from Edwin’s apartment the morning of the arrest (174), the number of those with tags (102) and without (72), and the number of skins subsequently returned by mail (19).” Later, this same spreadsheet returns but when Johnson reads the column headings aloud, the first one is “Number of Specimens Missing in July 2009.” This column sounds like it was sourced from a museum database, while the first description reflects numbers collected by the police from a crime scene. Johnson documents the fly-tying community’s dismissal of the Tring’s records — "'Ask Tring the last time they counted all their birds!'"— but drops the ball on presenting clear, compelling evidence to support the museum's count of 299 lost skins. It’s never explicitly explained how the 299 tally is calculated, which is a shame because I imagine that opening the empty drawers in the Tring, matching the tags of the left-behind birds — juvenile males and females without the prized technicolor feathers — to the accession numbers and digital photographs of museum records, creating a Missing List for each species and drawer, all of this would be high drama while also offering a window into the work of natural history collections. What specific research had these skins, the missing and the left-behind, contributed to in the past? Which birds had donated DNA or geographic information to scientists before the heist? I imagined these notes, papers, and reports exist but Johnson doesn’t cover them, except to offer general examples of the kinds of research that rely on collections. And here’s the thing: The List Project literally started as a spreadsheet. Johnson knows spreadsheets. Why is this one, which figures so prominently in Johnson’s moment as a main character, which drives his detective work as he dives deeper into the case, so poorly-described? Just another unsolved mystery of The Feather Thief… 

References:

Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Viking, 2018.

Robert D. Bradley, Lisa C. Bradley, Heath J. Garner, Robert J. Baker; Assessing the Value of Natural History Collections and Addressing Issues Regarding Long-Term Growth and Care, BioScience, Volume 64, Issue 12, 1 December 2014, Pages 1150–1158, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu166

Biodiversity Patterns in Melanesian Coral Reef Fish: New Research with Old Naturalists

Old naturalists are my jam. I dedicated my PhD dissertation to a 19th century botanist who had spent her childhood following Thoreau around the Concord woods. I have a soft spot for research that draws on the work of older ecologists, for data that was handwritten before the advent of ballpoint pens, for 21st century papers based on museum natural history collections. This nostalgia is well-timed: museum collections are increasingly digitized and freely available online, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library is doing the same for scientific literature on biodiversity.

Just as my kind of fieldwork no longer requires taking the steamship to downeast Maine and a buckboard on wild roads between logging communities, my scholarship is not dependent on scouring the library stacks for a particular volume or traveling to the archives of a natural history collection to comb through specimens for just the right sample. In the 21st century it is significantly easier to be an armchair laptop historical ecologist. Easier, but not easy.

“Natural history and collections seem to be a bit of a hard sell when it comes to the ecological literature, which surprised me,” says Dr. Kathryn L. Amatangelo. She and Dr. Joshua Drew just published a PLOS ONE paper using coral reef fish data from museum collections records, peer reviewed literature including fish check lists, and biological inventories. The biodiversity pattern they were attempting to analyze and understand — that reef fish diversity in the Indo-West Pacific decreases along a longitudinal gradient from species-rich Papua New Guinea to species-poor American Samoa — was described in 1906.

Amatangelo laments, “It seems almost passé to look at old collections and think about how and why long-dead historians collected their data. When you try to combine that with statistics and scientific analyses people seem to get a little squirrely.”

Drew and Amatangelo’s paper “Community Assembly of Coral Reef Fishes Along the Melanesian Biodiversity Gradient” applies modern ecological theory and big data statistical tools to observations recorded by David Starr Jordan, a Victorian-era ichthyologist who was both the founding president of Stanford University and a suspect in the possible murder of Jane Stanford. If that legacy is not problematic enough, he was also into eugenics.

Thanks to the efforts of Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), we can read Jordan’s 1906 paper “On a Collection of Fishes from Fiji” where he notes the diminishing diversity of fish as you travel across Melanesia. Drew remarks, “historical ecologists are always looking for old species lists, and it was super cool to find that he worked in my study system in Fiji.” Drew describes a Jordan as “an ichthyological hero of mine, a complex and not unproblematic figure”: Jordan’s writing on ichthyological biogeography and community change, his system for organizing ichthyological collections and his service on the US Fish Commission, a precursor of NOAA, provide a foundation for the kind of work that Drew and Amatangelo so beautifully execute here.

In the pursuit of quantitatively describing this biodiversity gradient, Drew and Amatangelo compiled presence/absence records for 396 fish species in five taxa across 7 countries. As Drew describes it, this dataset was created from “a massive literature search from collections-based and peer-review based lists that were then double-checked with FishBase.” They looked for agreement across all three datasets (collections, literature, and FishBase), which gave them more confidence in the data since it was not susceptible to the biases present in only one dataset. Amatangelo is a community ecologist with a plant background, she partnered with Josh Drew through a twitter connection, bringing statistical savvy to these new-to-her taxa and ecosystems. I asked her what it was like to work with unfamiliar study species in this project. “One downside was that things that were intuitive to Josh, such as why some traits are important, was a bit of a mystery to me. That could also be considered a positive, though, because it meant that Josh had to be able to explain WHY they were important, which helped in writing the paper.”

The paper’s ultimate goal was to illuminate the processes behind the reef fish biodiversity pattern to inform conservation efforts. Drew acknowledges that their conclusions are not ground-shattering — the biodiversity gradient was described 110 years ago, and likely broadly known before then in local communities. “But it’s nice to put a p-value on it,” he says. “Natural history and traditional ecological knowledge are not always recognized because they don’t come with a p-value, so here we did that. We probably could have told you the same result before, but this adds weight to the management recommendations.” Those management recommendations include collaborations across Melanesia to more efficiently share resources and partition the region into functional biodiversity groups.

Through the power of twitter, digitization, and online collections two modern ecologists were able to build on a paper from 1906 and study Melanesian coral reef fish diversity from their laptop screens in the United States. So much of this data would be instantly recognizable to Jordan, but so little of the actual process of collaborating, compiling and analyzing data, and writing a paper has remained constant since 1906.

Drew reflects on this revolution in his recent correspondence to Nature Ecology and Evolution: “Digitization of museum collections holds the potential to enhance researcher diversity.” He and coauthors write that “the advent of digitization (open access to images and specimen data) now makes a wealth of biodiversity information broadly available…Digitization allows access to museum holdings to those for whom collections have typically been out of reach.” The concentration of collections in the Global North is a reflection of our discipline’s role in the history of exploration and colonialism. Untangling this broader context of past research is perhaps the most impressive, thoughtful work that a historical ecologist could pursue.

In two papers this fall Drew has managed to both uphold the ichthyological legacy of Jordan, and articulately argue that the museum collections Jordan once organized in his spare time from being abhorrently racist, could be, in digital form, a force for increasing diversity in science. 

References:

Drew, Joshua A., and Kathryn L. Amatangelo. "Community assembly of coral reef fishes along the Melanesian biodiversity gradient." PloS one 12, no. 10 (2017): e0186123.

Drew, Joshua A., Corrie S. Moreau, and Melanie L. J. Stiassny. "Digitization of museum collections holds the potential to enhance researcher diversity." Nature Ecology & Evolution (2017):10.1038/s41559-017-0401-6

Flying Foxes and Lilford’s Wall Lizards: At Your (Seed Dispersal) Service

I'm Dr. Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie, a new PLOS Ecology Community Editor. Last summer I was a PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow at the 2016 Ecological Society of America meeting and I'm excited to join the team year-round! My first post as a Community Editor has me reflecting on my field site in the "off season", #poopscience, and the under-appreciated role of seed dispersers in ecology and conservation. Two papers dig into the seed dispersal services provided by charismatic megafauna in island ecosystems, and in both cases it's not much of an exaggeration to say: 'Save the Seed Disperser, Save the World.' 

I study plant phenology, specifically leaf out and flowering, on an island in Maine. I leave my field site just as flowers are senescing and unripe fruits are developing, and return again in early spring to catch the last patches of snow before the first green shoots emerge. I hardly ever think about what my plants are doing from July through April, but of course the ecological processes in these months — fruiting, seed dispersal, germination — underlie a fundamental assumption of my fieldwork: that there will be new plants each year when I return. I depart Maine and the seeds are just developing in green fruits, I arrive and new green stems are popping out of the soil, but in between seed dispersal was quietly a crucial, and perhaps overlooked, part of this circle of life. 

Two recentpapers in PLOS One highlight the seed dispersal services of charismatic megafauna in different study systems with implications for island conservation and habitat restoration. Both studies focused on the relationship between an animal seed disperser and a plant that prefers to grow in open, sunny environments. In Sa Dragonera Natural Park, on an islet in the Mediterranean off the coast of Mallorca, Dr. Constanza Neghme and her coauthors studied Ephedra fragilis, an evergreen shrub that produces pseudo-flowers and pseudo cones. E. fragilis is an early successional shrub, colonizing new areas and establishing in open ground without a “nurse” (for example, another plant) to provide shade and minimize water loss. So, E. fragilis seeds need to get to these open areas, away from the shade of their parents. In fact, seeds that were not dispersed, and landed below the parent plant, did not survive in Neghme’s study.

Dr. Ryszard Oleksy and collaborators worked in three forests in varying states of fragmentation and degradation across Madagascar, with a focus on fig trees: Ficus polita, F. grevei and F. lutea. These are all pioneer species, able to survive in degraded areas, and as their root systems penetrate hard substrates, they can improve aeration and drainage of the soil, facilitating the establishment of other plants. Fruiting fig trees depend on frugivores (fruit-eating animals) for seed dispersal, but rapid deforestation in Madagascar has decimated native wildlife populations, dramatically reducing animal-mediated seed dispersal. Dr. Neghme’s E. fragilis and Dr. Oleksy Ficus have particularly charismatic seed dispersers: wall lizards and flying foxes. The Lilford’s wall lizards (Podarcis lilfordi) are “superabundant” on Dragonera islet; they are endemic to the Balearic islands, but now extinct on nearby Mallorca and Menorca. Neghme reports that they are the only known seed dispersers of E. fragilis on the islet. In Oleksy’s research, the Madagascan flying fox (Pteropus rufus) is studied as a potential long-distance fig seed disperser. Madagascan flying foxes are the largest bat species on Madagascar. These frugivores crush fruit in their mouths to devour the fruit juice and soft parts (often including seeds), then spit out the fibrous fruit coating, not unlike my two-year-old eating blackberries. I’m sure she would love to eat figs with flying foxes if given the chance.

Both of these studies depend heavily on #poopscience. The #poopscience hashtag is popular among a certain segment of ecologists on twitter, and though the authors were unfamiliar with this term when I contacted them, they were universally enthusiastic to talk about their experiences in #poopscience. Neghme told me: “ My first time with poop science was when I was doing my bachelor thesis with lizard in high mountain ecosystems, I was helping a post doc and he encourage me to do questions by my own, then I saw the lizard poops carrying seed, and after reading an article from lizards as pollinators and seed dispersers in island ecosystems I started the journey in to poop.” Dr. Gareth Jones, the corresponding author on Oleksy’s paper, said that he’s “been into #poopscience for ages, initially using microscopic analyses to analyse prey of insectivorous bats, more recently using DNA barcoding to identify insects in poop to species level.”

To know what a seed disperser is eating, and to test the germination success of what Oleksy euphemistically calls “bat-processed seeds”, scientists collect and pick through lizard and bat faeces. Both studies planted “undispersed” (read: collected from parent plant) and dispersed (read: found in poop) seeds and tracked seedling emergence and seedling survival in a range of microhabitats. For both E. fragilis and the Ficus species, the “processed” seeds won. Lizard-dispersed and bat-dispersed seeds were much more likely to germinate, emerge, and survive as seedlings than the undispersed (non-faecal) seeds. Logically, the next question is where are the lizards and bats taking these seeds? We know you proverbially should not poop where you eat, but how far apart are the eating and pooping places of these lizards and bats? Neghme estimated how much time the lizards spent in different microhabitats on the islet, assuming that the proportion of time spent in each place would determine the probability of seed dispersal to those microhabitats. She and her colleagues walked transects and recorded if the lizards they spotted were in open areas, under Ephedra, or under other plants. The lizards spent most of their time in open habitats, and, unsurprisingly, this is where Neghme found the most lizard poop.

In Madagascar, 11 bats were outfitted with GPS devices, which tracked their movements overnight. These GPS tracks were combined with information about the bats’ gut retention time from a captive bat experiment. Basically, captured bats were fed a known quantity of fig seeds on banana slices and then researchers recorded the length of time between feeding and pooping, while counting the fig seeds present in each pooping event. (Ecology research can be especially glamorous.) Oleksy’s team then modeled the “seed shadow” of the bats’ flights — which is a nice way of saying they created a map showing where the bats were most likely to have pooped on the landscape. These “probable poop maps” confirm that Madagascan flying foxes are important long distance seed dispersers, and they frequently disperse seeds in degraded habitats as they fly between forest fragments. I love that both Neghme and Oleksy created sophisticated stochastic models of seed dispersal, and then ground-truthed them by walking through their field sites* and saying, “Yes. This is where the poop is.”

The ecosystem services provided by the E. fragilis shrubs on Dragonera and the Ficus fig trees on Madagascar are so important to habitat restoration and conservation. These early-successional species colonize open and degraded areas, and facilitate the growth and success of other, less-hardy plant species. But without their seed dispersers, they cannot access these open habitats and their seeds languish in the shade of parent plants. The Madagascan flying fox is listed as ‘Vulnerable’ in the IUCN Red List; Lilford’s wall lizard is ‘Endangered’. These seed-dispersing animals can act as super-conservationists: naturally maintaining and regenerating habitat through their poop. Neghme explained to me that the lizards are threatened by introduced predators and habitat loss, both “usual[ly] happen in island ecosystems to build tourist resorts.” In Madagascar flying foxes are legally hunted, and Oleksy notes that the “best protection would be to ensure that no one is allowed to hunt between August and December. Also no hunting at the roosting trees…Education would be a key to ensure local communit[ies] understand the role and importan[ce] of the bats.” The parallels between the lizards and the bats, the open-grown shrubs on Dragonera and pioneering fig trees in degraded Madagascan forests, run through these papers from study design to conservation implications. These strong relationships between plants and their animal seed dispersers highlight the importance of conserving species interactions for biodiversity maintenance and ecosystem functioning. Or as twitter might say: #poopscience can inform conservation! 

References:

Neghme C, Santamar ́ıa L, Calviño-Cancela M (2017) Strong dependence of a pioneer shrub on seed dispersal services provided by an endemic endangered lizard in a Mediterranean island ecosystem. PLoS ONE 12(8): e0183072. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183072

Oleksy R, Giuggioli L, McKetterick TJ, Racey PA, Jones G (2017) Flying foxes create extensive seed shadows and enhance germination success of pioneer plant species in deforested Madagascan landscapes. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0184023. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0184023 

*Note that ground truthing was limited by violence in Oleksy’s study. He explains: “at the time of the study south of Madagascar was at war with local rebels. I was based at Berenty Reserve which was rather safe, however due to the war we were not allowed to leave the reserve. We would still capture bats beyond its boundaries accompanied by a guard and ground truth in nearby areas. However, the more distant places to which bats flew were too dangerous to visit…Fortunately, we got enough data to analyse the GPS.” 

Leveraging the Power of Biodiversity Specimen Data for Ecological Research

A guest post from PLOS Ecology Reporting Fellow, Caitlin McDonough, on research from the Ecological Society of America Scientific Meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, August 7-11, 2016.

Leveraging the Power of Biodiversity Specimen Data for Ecological Research at ESA 2016 While ecologists spend their graduate days troubleshooting code, writing manuscripts, and fighting with dataloggers, they often trace their roots back to a love of natural history--an acknowledgement of a childhood curiosity sparked by museums, camping trips, and backyard bug collections. This curiosity ties us ecologists to a long line of scientists, taxonomists, and collectors; we imagine that we could have sailed on the Beagle, or climbed Chimborazo, or that we would have happily canoed the wild Allagash River to botanize with Kate Furbish. On Wednesday morning, a group of 21st century ecologists presented a modern twist on these natural history dreams, with research in collaboration with these taxonomists, botanists, and collectors of the past. (A video of the session will be posted here.) 

iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections) organized this session, which brought together a diverse array of ecologists who have leveraged the power of biodiversity specimen data to approach 21st century problems in taxonomy, conservation biology, and climate change research. Each project relied on some form of biodiversity specimen data — from herbarium specimens to insect collections to marine collections — for applications ranging from restoration ecology to unraveling cryptic speciation, or creating species distribution models to tracking patterns in phenology. Recent efforts to digitize biological specimen data have sparked a renaissance in their use — pressed plants and pinned bees that once sat neglected in a dusty corner are now accessible to researchers thousands of miles away. In many cases, the 19th century collectors would likely recognize these research goals as they too were interested in species distributions,  recorded phenological events, and made observations about interactions between herbivores and plants. But, Thoreau did not geotag his field notes, and Linneaus might be surprised to find his herbarium specimen available as a jpeg. The importance of making biodiversity specimen data digitally accessible was clear from the start of the session.

Pamela Soltis noted that there are over 1,600 natural history collections in the U.S. with somewhere between one and two billion specimens. But iDigBio estimates that only 10% of biodiversity specimens are digitized. Throughout the session, presenters noted both the benefits of accessing the digitized data and the challenges of working with taxa and trophic levels that were underrepresented in the digital specimen world. Katja Seltmann lamented the lack of digitized parisitoids collections, and called out a bias towards plants and pollinators. Joan Meiners, who uses digital natural history collection specimens to investigate native bee conservation, showed a graphic of the low proportion of digitized bee specimens at major U.S. insect collections. The next speaker, Francois Michonneau, topped both of their complaints with an example of a historic sea cucumber collection that had been preserved in pieces, the equivalent of an ornithologist placing a beak and talons in a glass bottle and calling it a bird collection.  It is clear that the biodiversity specimens that are digitized are inspiring new research. Emily Meineke shared the origin story of her herbaria research: her project began in her kitchen. While flipping through old specimen data online during a procrastination jag, she noticed herbivory damage captured in one of Linnaeus’ specimens. With a little more digging, she found evidence of herbivory in many specimens — leaf mines, chewing damage, and galls — as well as actual insects preserved in the old leaves. Another example of unintentional data captured in herbarium specimens is Amanda Gallinat’s fruit phenology study. She found over 3,000 specimens comprising 55 species in seven major New England herbaria that contained mature fruit pressed among the plant material. Just as Meineke realized that herbaria offer unprecedented opportunities to understand what factors drive herbivory rates across large spatial and temporal scales, Gallinat was able to assess patterns in fruiting across native and invasive species at a regional scale from the 19th century to the present. Meineke has begun surveying for herbivory damage in the Harvard University Herbarium collection, but she is also working to make this a citizen science project called Bite Marks in the Zooniverse. Soon everyone will have the opportunity to look at herbivory damage while procrastinating in their kitchens! 

In addition to the diverse research that has emerged from digitized biological specimens, this session provided some practical advice for all ecologists. Pamela Soltis presented Charlotte Germain-Aubrey’s project “Using museum data for species distribution modeling: The case of plants in Florida” and provided a thoughtful behind-the-scenes look at the building of a maximum entropy model. She deliberately explored the process behind decisions about climate data (e.g. average climate vs. climate data from the year of collection for each specimen), the area in which the model trains, smoothing response curves, and the number of background points. François Michonneau closed his talk with a great overview of his best practices for instituting data quality checks in R code workflow. While these skills are typically missing from our training, he stressed the importance of building a culture of documentation and replication, recommending courses from datacarpentry.org. Katelin Pearson showed that the collector community — a group that is regularly in the field, well-trained to recognize patterns and norms, and communicate with other experts — currently lacks the protocols and the semantics to document outliers in a consistent, meaningful way. This community has great potential to detect outliers in phenology, distribution, ecology, behavior, morphology, but at the present there is no direct feed between the collectors and ecologists who are tracking changes or outliers.

Finally, Libby Ellwood closed the session with an overview of iDigBio’s citizen science projects to engage the public in the work of digitizing the many, many biological specimens that are not yet a part of the digital record. 

Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie is a PhD candidate in the Primack Lab in the Biology Department at Boston University. She spends her field seasons in Acadia National Park, Maine studying leaf out and flowering phenology and patterns of historical species loss across plant communities. Her field methods include three ridge transects that are conveniently located adjacent to beautiful running trails and carriage roads. Away from Acadia’s granite ridges, she’s interested in underutilized sources of historical ecology data including herbarium specimens, field notebooks, photographs, and old floras; the potential for citizen science in phenology research; and the intersection of science and policy.  (Follow Caitlin on Twitter @CaitlinInMaine)