Confessions of a Genuine Science Geek

For the last several weeks I have been recording the pollinators of wild flowers in Birds Hill Provincial Park. One rather windy and uneventful day I was able to reflect on my chosen profession and was forced to conclude that I am a science geek. I remembered an old episode of the Simpsons where Bart discovers a comet. While searching the heavens with Bart, Principal Seymour Skinner says, “There’s nothing more exciting than science! You get all the fun of sitting still, being quiet, writing down numbers, paying attention – science has it all!” That pretty much describes what I’ve been doing for the last seven years: sitting quietly, waiting for an insect to land on a flower, and writing down the number of flowers she/he visits. In the winter I identify plants and insects, study the data I collected, make graphs, run statistical analyses, and write scientific papers. The funny part is that I really do find it exciting. It’s fun to find out if the patterns you surmised while in the field were real or indistinguishable from nature’s background noise. Plus, there’s nothing more thrilling than correctly identifying a mysterious species of sedge! Hence my revelation and this confession.

I also take solace in the fact that the specimens and data I collect will probably be studied long after I’m dead.  Not everyone can say that about their life’s work.  So even though I am a science geek, I don’t mind at all.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution in Banff, Alberta. However, being stuck inside a building on several beautiful sunny days was agonizing and on several occasions I found myself gazing wistfully out the windows at the mountains beyond. Fortunately, visiting other museums while I travel is an important part of my job as it helps me to plan exhibits here at the Manitoba Museum. This trip was no exception and I was able to visit the Banff Park Museum during a long lunch break one day.

The Banff Park Museum is such an old museum (1903) that the building and its collection were protected as a National Historic Site in 1985. So basically it is a museum of what old museums used to look like. Apparently in the late 1950’s some people in the community wanted the Museum torn down and replaced with a new building and more modern exhibits. Looking around at the beautifully crafted wooden cases, hundred-year old specimens and gorgeous Douglas Fir wood panelling on the ceilings, I was thankful that cooler heads prevailed.

The Museum contains numerous “cabinets of curiosity”, as they used to be called. These cabinets contain more than 5,000 mounted birds, mammals, insects, plants and eggs collected in western Canada mainly between 1890 and 1930. Some of the “newer” exhibits created in 1914, displayed animals in their habitat, an approach that was considered radical at the time. Eventually this approach evolved into our modern-day dioramas. Nowadays some Museums are tearing down their dioramas and putting in “cabinets of curiosities” again, albeit with a modern twist. So I guess that “what goes around comes around” even in Museum design. I myself tend to think that what is most desirable is a mixture of the best of both, especially when many dioramas themselves have become worthy of preservation.

I was reading the job description of the ideal Curator in the Museum’s interpretive brochure. Professor John Macoun suggested in an 1895 correspondence that the ideal Curator should possess the following qualifications:

• “A man of wide intelligence;
• Energetic (not a hotel lounger);
• Ought to be able to skin a bird or mammal;
• Will talk natural history, mineralogy, geology or anything else to the visitor, and
• A political bloke should be the last man for that place.”

At the heart of every taxonomist is a curious little monkey who just can’t stop exploring the world around him or her, sometimes to their detriment. I was reading a great book called “The Plant Hunters” by Tyler Whittle and was amazed at the trials and tribulations that early botanists like William Dampier (1651-1715), Philibert Commerson (1727-1773), and David Douglas (1799-1834) went through. Curiosity drove them to explore the remote areas of the world under extremely difficult circumstances in the hopes of finding plant species unknown to Western scientists. Many of the specimens that these men collected can still be found in European herbaria, providing us with a valuable snapshot of the past.

If you wish to bring a specimen in to the Museum for identification, please call first to make an appointment as I am often in the field over the summer. Vascular plants and mosses can be brought fresh in a plastic bag with some moist paper towel inside, or pressed and dried between two sheets of newspaper. If you don’t have a plant press, you can use several large books to weigh it down. Try to collect specimens with leaves and flowers or fruits as you need both to identify some species.

If you wish to bring in a fungus, it should be kept in a paper bag as plastic will make it go slimy. As some mushrooms get eaten by maggots quickly, they need to be brought in soon after picking or dried using a fan, dehydrator, silica gel dessicant or a warm (140°F/60°C) oven. Since dried mushrooms change colour quite drastically and shrink in size, photographs and measurements of the cap and stem are useful. A spore print, made by laying a mushroom cap over a piece of paper and covering it with a glass or bowl for a few hours, is also useful for mushroom identification. Happy hunting!

In order to get my degree in environmental studies I had to take six classes in economics so that I would have some understanding of how the economy worked. In reality, I only needed three weeks of economics to understand that much of what they were teaching was a load of bunk. When I asked my professor how pollution and environmental degradation were accounted for in the economic theories she was teaching us she replied that those things were “externalities” and would not be discussed, as if we as a society could somehow pretend that they didn’t exist. I decided that perhaps nature would be a better teacher of economics.

So what have I learned about economics from the study of ecology? First of all diversity is a good thing. Although some species of plants rely on only a few pollinators, most are serviced by a wide variety of insects. This means that even if one species is doing poorly, others can fulfill the same functional role. Diverse systems are more resilient, can continue to function under atypical circumstances and recover faster from perturbations. The globalization of our economy means that we increasingly depend on just a few companies or countries to produce certain goods in the name of efficiency. Unfortunately when disaster strikes, as it just did in Japan, key parts that only Japanese companies manufacture are now in short supply, threatening the functioning of other companies half way around the globe! Imagine for a second that we were suddenly unable to rely on China for manufacturing? Would anyone else in the world be able to produce the things we need in the quantities we need them in? Species that are highly specialized are efficient but that efficiency comes at a price and that price is resiliency. With an unpredictable global climate confronting us, it is the resiliency that comes from diversity that will prevent ecosystems and economies from totally unravelling.

Another lesson I’ve learned is that EVERYTHING is interconnected. The rare Western Prairie Fringed Orchid is a fascinating plant in terms of its interconnections. In order to grow it depends on a mychorrhizal fungus found in certain soils. To reproduce, it requires the pollination services of a few species of moths. The larvae of those moths require trembling aspen trees for food. We cannot save the orchid without also saving the fungus and the moth and the aspen and all of the other organisms they in turn are connected to. We Canadians like to think that we are isolated from the troubles in the rest of the world but, as the recent collapse of the banking system and subsequent decrease in the value of every Canadian’s retirement savings has shown, we are not. The fact of the matter is that we are all in this crisis together so we’d  better start getting along.

The last thing I’ve learned is that every system has its breaking point. Yes, diversity can buffer an ecosystem from extreme changes but that only goes so far. Once too many species are lost, cascading extinctions due to the interconnectivity of the world’s ecosystems will bring just about everything down. Sure there will be a few hardy survivors left behind to evolve into new and wonderful creatures in a couple million years, but they are unlikely to be the ones that humanity needs to survive. Unless you really enjoy eating jellyfish and cockroaches, I’d be concerned! The fact is 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct; we know this through the fossil record. It is inevitable that humans will one day follow in the footsteps of the dinosaurs to a rocky grave. The only questions are when and how. That is what humanity has just a little bit of control over. The good news is that you have a little bit of that control too. Every day, through the choices you make, you alter the destiny of humanity for good or ill. Which one will it be?