True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist
Nine years ago, I visited London’s Natural History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials — knowing something about writing and little about butterflies — I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire’s archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles. Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum’s Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract "Why Not Eat Insects?" ("Why not indeed!" asked the author. "I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them."), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, "Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people’s pomposity." At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: "There is so much we don’t know!" Vane-Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. "You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound." Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder — there is still so much to discover. Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright’s words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don’t know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought. At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we’ve beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry. We’ve turned the earth into our private estate — a garden here, a junkyard there — and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious. And yet… You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet . It’s a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true? Humans have managed to find and describe an estimated 1.9 million species, about a million of them insects. Every year about 2,400 beetles and 1,200 flies are added to the list. Most biologists believe there are more than 10 million animal species in the world still to discover. In the United States, some 73,000 animal and plant species are unnamed. Recently, in a book called Red Desert: The History of a Place , an entomologist wrote about spending 36 hours sampling insects in the Wyoming desert, making him the world’s leading expert on the area’s arthropods. Of the 5,000 insect species that live in the desert, he estimated that several dozen were not known to science. When the Keeper of Entomology at the Natural History Museum said "you" could spend a week studying some obscure insect and become a world authority, the you in that sentence was an entomologist. Only an entomologist could gain the necessary knowledge in such a short time, not someone like me who doesn’t know a beetle’s anterior apodemes from its mesonotal stridulatory file. Someone like me would take much longer. Someone like me would have to immerse herself in insect physiology as well as general principles of ecology, choose her obscure insect carefully (focusing on ease of collection and observation), and learn some basic field research and laboratory techniques. Someone like me would need to work her way up from rank amateur to professional amateur, often abbreviated to pro-am, also known as citizen scientist. For some time now, traditional research in entomology — how insects behave and where they live — has been the realm of the professional amateur. Partly this is because there are so many species to keep track of and so many good field guides. And then there are all the new Internet sites to help the amateur do this work. While there is some concern that amateurs aren’t rigorous or detailed enough, many scientists welcome the help, especially as climate change causes species to head north or south or disappear altogether. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. I have always wanted to be a field biologist. I imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, hours and days that pass like a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted. I imagine a kind of rapture and loss of ego. John Burroughs, a nineteenth-century American naturalist, wrote that he went to nature "to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more." Burroughs captures exactly my own experience walking through the rural West. I enlarge in nature. I calm down. At the same time, eventually I get bored. Eventually I go home because my work (my writing, my students, my laundry) is elsewhere. But what if that employment, my engagement with the world, was right there, in the largeness and calm of nature? For Burroughs and other naturalists, a passion for what is obscure and unsung in nature is about passion itself. This is the herpetologist mad for a leopard frog, the botanist most happy parsing forbs. In some way, such unworldly love is about authenticity. To devote your life to crayfish? That’s authentic. Such love is also about competence and a vertical burrowing into knowledge. Vertical would be a new direction for me, since my understanding of the world is almost completely horizontal. I know a little bit about a lot. I stretch around the world knowing a little bit about state politics, national scandals, ocean chemistry, and Indonesia. My reach is long, but I don’t go deep. The woman (scientist, pro-am, or rank amateur) who wants to understand the Canyon Rubyspot damselfly, however, must think differently. She must also know about canopied streams, insectivorous bats, and flycatchers. She must think vertical, burrowing into one place. I have always wanted to be John Burroughs, and I have also wanted to be a rock-and-roll musician. Here I am, a woman in her fifties, in good physical shape, with a lively mind, having zero chance of becoming so many things — an ER doctor or the creator of cool television shows. We are defined by our limits as much as our loves. At every point in life, there is a long list of what we will not ever be. You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. John Burroughs was one of those semi-annoying optimists. "If you think you can do it, you can," he wrote. "Leap and the net will appear." Could I take not a week but many weeks in my life and become what I was not: a "leading world authority" on some obscure species of mite or dragonfly in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, which also happens to be my own backyard? I am searching in my kitchen drawer for cheesecloth. Marriage is about balance. My husband is a saver. I am a purger. Just last week, I purged this kitchen drawer of a wad of cheesecloth that I pretended had gone stale. We never use cheesecloth! But now I need it for my tiny pink-orange eggs and tiny black larvae and somewhat larger black larvae and rather active Calligrapha serpentina adult beetles that I am keeping in a series of labeled jars. A square of cheesecloth secured with a rubber band would be the perfect lid, preventing escape while allowing in air. I have also been told to wet a wad of cheesecloth and leave it in the jar so the insects won’t desiccate. I feel a familiar stab: purger’s regret. In my efforts to become a leading world authority, I have already made my first big mistake. I did not choose Calligrapha serpentina for its obscurity. I went for beauty instead. This leaf beetle is a stunner, with shiny green-gold wings marked by a sinuous, symmetrical pattern of black dashes, swirls, and fillips. Even the name is beautiful, the name of the lover in a poem, "Oh, Calligrapha! Oh, Serpentina!" Typing just a description of this insect into Google gets me 10 photos on BugGuide.net. Fortunately, the life cycle of Calligrapha serpentina is not as celebrated or well known. As a member of the large and commonly encountered beetle family Chrysomelidae , in the genus Calligrapha (with more than 80 recognized species native to North and South America), this insect is not even noteworthy as a pest, unlike its cousins the potato, cucumber, asparagus, and bean leaf beetles. As one entomologist explained to me in an e-mail: "In spite of their showy appearance, little is known about the life history of most species of Calligrapha . Much of the information that you desire has never been published. If you carefully document and publish your observations, they would constitute valuable scientific contributions." That was exactly what I wanted to hear. Early in the summer of 2009, when I first dreamed of becoming a pro-am, dozens of these metallic green beetles were vigorously mating on the leaves of the globe mallow ( Sphaeralcea augustifolia ) growing in my yard. About one centimeter long, the insects clamored and humped on top of one another like so many miniature Volkswagen pileups. On the underside of globe mallow leaves, their eggs could be found massed irregularly in pink-orange groups, each cylindrical pink-orange egg about one millimeter long with smooth and shining ends. Although I never observed a beetle laying eggs, in 1908 the zoologist Robert Hegner watched a similar species and wrote one of the few descriptions. As the insect clings to the undersurface of a leaf, the tip of its abdomen "moves rhythmically up and down about fifteen times at intervals of a little less than one second," he wrote. Following a drop of colorless liquid, the egg emerges and is attached to the leaf by the fluid. The insect shifts slightly, and the process begins again. Hegner studied 54 pairs of beetles of three species, Calligrapha multipunctata , Calligrapha bigsbyana , and Calligrapha lunata , with host plants of willow and wild rose. The females, slightly larger than the males, each produced an average of 315 eggs from June 15 to August 27. The average time for hatching was about six days, and the small emerging larvae were gregarious, eating their host plant together, shedding their skins together as they grew larger, dropping to the soil to pupate at about the same time, and emerging together as adults. Hegner found the average larval stage to be 20 days and the average pupal stage 12 days — about 38 days from egg to beetle. My observations of Calligrapha serpentina were much the same, although I never had as many insects or watched their rhythmic movements quite so closely. I did raise a number of eggs to adults, cheering on as the squirming dots of black broke out of their egg cases, began to eat the leaf they stood on, and grew steadily into dark, hairy lumps with reddish-brown heads and six legs. As beetle larvae grow and shed their skin, each new stage is called an instar. Compared with its former miniatures, the final instar of Calligrapha serpentina seemed monstrous — a great galumphing fellow covered in long bristles, the head and front legs seeming to strain and heave their appendage of a body like Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars series. In my role as voyeur, I was also a manipulator, a kind of God in the life of Calligrapha serpentina . Not all of my charges survived. In truth, the habitat I provided was hit or miss. Too much water, and a fungus could grow that would attack the eggs. Too little water, and the larvae dried up. I sometimes had to travel with my jars (who can you really trust to feed your larvae?) and wondered about the effect of the car’s motion. I knew that temperature could alter the timing of my beetles’ hatching and growing, and I worried that the jars were too much in the sun. Or in the shade? Some of my black dots may have been worried too. A surprising number of them escaped through the holes in the cheesecloth. In the end, these insects may have done better with me than in the wild, where they would have been constantly exposed to predators. Whenever I felt particularly inept, I went online. Sites such as buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net offer all kinds of information and anecdotes. Asked nicely, professional entomologists readily send advice. One consoled me: "Freezing excess immatures is a painless (to them) and effective method of discarding insects you probably cannot and/or should not release locally. Alas, there is much death and death-dealing in this work." This same entomologist concluded: "Please remember, specimens are worthless without data. THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE DATA. And it’s about sharing your data through publication for the entertainment and education of others. I assign a specimen number to every animal or series of like animals when I collect them. These numbers go on their jars, written on masking tape. So a monarch larva gets the number 9856, say, and a series of pyralid caterpillars in their communal webbing initially gets the number 9857, with each caterpillar getting a letter code when they are isolated, as 9857-A, 9857-B, etc. Thus when I get two parasitoids, different wasp species, from jar 9857-M, I know that both wasps developed inside A SINGLE CATERPILLAR, which is high quality information." One day, in my own jars, a number of the monstrous black instars of Calligrapha serpentina started turning pinkish-orange and then became wholly pinkish-orange and finally could be seen writhing and thrusting out their abdomens in what appeared to be a painful and desperate act. It could be that this is how instars bury themselves in the dirt in order to pupate. I don’t know. I couldn’t watch for long because I had to go to work (a fact that instantly labels me Not a Real Naturalist). Later I would find the pupae motionless in the soil that I had put in the bottom of the jar. Beetles often pupate naked, without a cocoon or protective casing. Under my hand magnifier, each pink-orange oval seemed to contain a curled-up, mummylike creature beneath a translucent coating — although there may have been no actual coating, only the shiny surface of the half-forming beetle. Days later still, the miracle: metamorphosis, the great spiritual metaphor and enactment of myth. Sometimes I could see the patterned wings under what still looked like a thin covering and then the legs were distinct and then the beetle quivered and was there, moving as if dazed, fumbling in the dirt. In a few moments the wings had dried and the miracle began to lumber across the bottom of the jar toward a globe mallow leaf. Now — and again and again as the beetles pupated and emerged — I saw that the resulting insect was beautifully colored red and black, not green and black. Had I raised up the wrong species? Was I a kind of anti-naturalist? Particularly gifted in doing the wrong thing? Was this some effect of an artificial environment? Or, since some beetles are known to hybridize, perhaps this represented a cross between species? As my jars filled up with pure red and black beetles, all looking alike, I theorized that red was a juvenile stage — a possibility no one had mentioned to me or discussed in the scientific literature. In about a week, the red beetles turned green. Testable question. Hypothesis. Conclusion. I felt like a kid who had just won first prize at the science fair. Okay, this was not the first of many "valuable scientific contributions." I never could determine how many instars the larvae went through. My examination of the pupae was hardly thorough and did not include dissection. As important, I am not sure how the beetle overwinters. I think the last adult generation of the season goes dormant once the temperature drops. (By the first of September, I could not find any beetles outside on my globe mallow.) But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. I also never became comfortable with beetle anatomy. In volume 2 of American Beetles, when I am faced with a description of Chrysomelidae in which the dorsum is "usually glabrous, vestiture when present sparse to dense and consisting of simple hairs," I can only murmur back, " ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…" I do believe, however — and I am proud of this — that I have a fairly complete collection of all the papers ever written on Calligrapha serpentina , including the 1897 "Biological Notes on Some Coleoptera From New Mexico," the heavily illustrated 1941 "Relationships Within the Family Chrysomelidae as Indicated by the Male Genitalia of Certain Species," and the 2006 "The Evolution of Unisexuality in Calligrapha Leaf Beetles." It is a small personal library my friends are welcome to peruse on any weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. Unfortunately, my own documentation was essentially confined to notes on my desk calendar, with "eggs in Jar #2 hatched" sandwiched between "call optometrist" and "potluck at Madge’s, make salad." I have no plans to publish, only to e-mail a few entomologists ("I think the red coloring of Calligrapha serpentina is the juvenile phase! I’m so excited!") and tell my new friends on buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net . I did not, did not, become a leading world authority on Calligrapha serpentina . And, yes, I feel bad about withholding that information until near the end of this essay. Sorry. What I did do was add my voice to a chorus, standing shoulder to shoulder in that growing crowd of citizen scientists who rarely become individual experts but who contribute to the collective expertise. We send our observations to the real experts who can then make them part of their research and publication. Moreover, for the citizen scientist, this is not really about publishing data, as important as that is. The further job of the citizen scientist is to mesh the world of science with, well, the world of citizenry. We trumpet the beauty of Calligrapha serpentina to friends, co-workers, relatives, real estate developers, and politicians. The more we fall in love with our own backyard — with the marvel and complexity of life — the more committed we are to protecting its diversity. In my case, once I started looking for one beautiful green and black beetle, I found so much more: many more eggs, brown or white, red or yellow, and many more larvae, some that deceive by looking like bird droppings and some that hide by rolling up in leaves. In a single morning, I might find a marbled orb weaver like some aproned, plump grandma, 1,675 ants, and the grace of a pipevine swallowtail. I saw that Dick Vane-Wright was truly right when he said, "There is so much we don’t know," and that lots of things I don’t know are outside my front door, the theater of insects playing all summer long. Nor is my infatuation with Calligrapha serpentina over. I have learned that I am not really made for the exacting work of a scientist, the tedium of 9857-A, 9857-B, 9857-C. A leading world authority needs many more jars and would label them better. But I do have plans next fall for a large outdoor terrarium filled with the larvae and beetles of Calligrapha serpentina and their host plant. As cold weather approaches and the globe mallow dies, I can watch and observe. How do these beetles overwinter? I hope to find out.
More here: True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist