Natural history is dying; long live the natural historians

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A Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) contemplates natural history on the Oregon coast. (Flickr, me)

“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” — Yogi Berra

“You can observe a lot by watching.” — also Yogi Berra

One of the formative papers I read in my first year of graduate school was a lament about the state of the field I was trying to enter. It was a 1998 essay by Doug Futuyma, “Wherefore and wither the naturalist?” published in, appropriately, The American Naturalist. Futuyma was concerned with the future of naturalists, or natural historians, people with granular knowledge of organismal taxonomy and life histories. He reports results from a survey taken at the 1993 Evolution meetings, in which the general sentiment was that (1) natural history knowledge is important and valuable, but (2) it is increasingly hard to come by, probably because (3) it isn’t, on its own, a viable basis for a career in science. This is a problem because, as Futuyma explains, even if with think that “conceptualization”—forming and testing hypotheses about the processes of evolution and ecology—is the “real” work of science, we can’t do that work without a foundation of natural history knowledge.

Worries about the state of natural history probably also reflect our personal anxieties. On the one hand, there’s a fear that one’s own natural history knowledge isn’t valued in hiring, grant funding, or promotion decisions. On the other hand, there’s the fear that one knows less natural history than one ought—and that ecologists and evolutionary biologists working today, as a group, know less natural history than their predecessors did. I know the latter very personally, having first taken over an angiosperm systematics course in a region—southern California—wildly different from the Pennsylvania woods where I learned plant identification; and then watched not one but two more knowledgable (and confident) senior colleagues retire. It is weird to find myself the senior botanist in a department where, before winning tenure, I was at best the third-most adept plant taxonomist.

These worries, both the personal and the systemic, are recurring themes among ecologists and evolutionary biologists—Futuyma cites a precedent from 1950, and a paper slated for the September 2026 issue of The American Naturalist cites Futuyma and then a series of reiterating articles that bridge the three decades between them. That newest paper, by Hari Sridhar, Joyshree Chanam, and Priyanka Hariharan, finds a fresh perspective on our natural history nervousness, however, by drawing on an impressive scientific oral history project to describe how natural history supports fundamental research in ecology and evolutionary biology.

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My comment on the proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance: Scientific communication is essential to scientific discovery

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On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget posted OMB-2026-0034, a sweeping set of proposed changes to the ways that federal agencies administer funds granted to individuals and organizations, including the research grants made by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. The proposed changes are framed as preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, but in detail they create dramatic new restrictions on how federal funds are granted, how those funds may be spent, and what people working on federally funded projects may do. In brief: funding decisions would be made directly by political appointees, not by expert agency staff; use of funding for a variety of important activities like conference attendance, publication of results, or public outreach would be heavily restricted; and funded organizations would be restricted from speaking on a sweeping list of allegedly controversial topics, from climate change to human diversity.

Former NIH Program Officer Elizabeth Ginexi has detailed the many concerning rule changes, and helped lead a general call for people to provide comment on the proposals, from their perspectives as members of the American public, as federally funded scientists, and as representatives of scientific organizations. These comments are supposed to inform OMB’s decision to implement, revise, or scrap the proposed rule changes — and, more likely, provide an evidentiary basis for pushback by Congress and in lawsuits that seem very likely to be necessary.

I’ve signed on to statements by the scholarly societies in which I’m a member, and I’ve consulted a bit on some of the language in those; and the California State University system, my employer, also has a comment in process. Today I also submitted a comment from me, personally. Individual comments are limited to 5,000 characters, and specificity is key, so I focused in on a recurring theme I saw in the changes — restrictions on scientists’ ability to communicate. I’m posting the text of my comment here as an independent record, and in case any readers want some additional motivation or inspiration for their own comments. Comments on the proposal are still open until 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Monday, 13 July, and I’d encourage you to contribute if at all possible — you can do so here.

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Not the fittest, but the fitted

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A small butterfly with wings folded to show a white-and-gray checkered pattern with two big blue-black eyespots, perched on an inflorescence of tiny white flowers, all amidst clover leaves and blades of grass
A marine blue butterfly (Leptotes marina, native to the Americas) nectaring on the flowers of a white clover (Trifolium repens, native to Europe) in the lawn of a Los Angeles city park. (Photo by me)

A little knowledge of natural history is a dangerous thing. This is, first, because knowing a few things — the names of some common wildflowers, or the songs of some neighborhood birds — begets curiosity about more things, and soon enough you’ve gone from installing an identification app on your smartphone, to ordering a field guide, to pricing binoculars. But, second, it’s dangerous because once you know a little natural history, you start to notice living things are often not where you expect them.

Should the violet-blue flowers of a jacaranda really be shading the upper slopes of the Griffith Park ridgeline, overlooking the urban sprawl of Los Angeles? Can that really be an eastern gray squirrel chattering at you from the bushes in suburban Seattle? Why on Earth is a honeybee visiting the flowers of a Joshua tree, which offer no nectar and very little pollen?

The most immediate answer for all of these is, because humans put them there. Jacarandas and eastern gray squirrels and honeybees are just some of the species we’ve carried to new habitats for our own purposes. But in all three cases these organisms are not going about human-directed business — they’ve gotten away from the places they were introduced, to make a living on their own terms. And the questions they prompt apply much more broadly.

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Feed the birds, meet the neighbors

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View through sliding glass and screen doors to a small apartment balcony furnished with two wicker chairs and a small low table, with three crows perched on the balcony railing
A trio of neighbors on the balcony

Perhaps the most Seattle thing I’ve done, in a year I’ve spent more time in Seattle than LA, is attempt to make First Contact with the Capitol Hill murder.

Seattle has an unusually high density of urban crows — the suburb of Bothell has a particularly huge co-roosting population, but they’re out in force across the greater metro area — and human residents are quite fond of them. Crows recognize and remember humans who treat them well (or badly!), and urban crows have a lower baseline fear of bipedal apes that makes them particularly amenable to friendly overtures. University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom has gone as far as to recommend befriending crows, and suggests starting with an offering of shelled unsalted peanuts.

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Annus horribilis/ annus mirabilis

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A chestnut-backed chickadee at That Spot in Stanley Park. (Flickr, jby)

This has been, for fairly obvious reasons, a hard year. Most of the institutions that define what I do for a living have been weakened to the point of desperation, if not outright dismantled — some inviting the vandals in, some forcibly invaded and hollowed out. It was a year in which I tried to explain to students that most of the research projects on our campus were under threat, threw together a local pro-science satellite rally, squinted at the text of the US Code to no discernible effect, wrote plaintive op-eds for the newspaper I read back in high school, tried to plan for what I’d do if immigration enforcement agents demanded entry to my classroom, and pressed on with projects whose long-term future is uncertain at best.

And yet, by any objective measure, it’s been a very fortunate year. I ran the Boston Marathon, and had a pretty good time of it, even if it wasn’t a personal-best time. I hosted a collaborator for a guest seminar on campus, and we took a day to drive out to the desert and see wildflowers, including blooming Joshua trees. I landed a sabbatical semester for the fall, with plans that let me spend most of my time with C in Seattle, from June onwards. We road-tripped north through Yosemite and Crater Lake National Parks, both first-time visits for me, and then took a long week in New England and New York City. I spent most of another week in Georgia for the Evolution Meetings, where I gave a high-pressure plenary that seems to have gone over pretty well.

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No, peer reviewers have not forced 22 percent of chemists to add errors to their research papers

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The headline caught my eye, as it was intended to: “One in five chemists have deliberately added errors into their papers during peer review, study finds.” It’s introducing an article in Chemical and Engineering News reporting on a new article in the journal Accountability in Research by Frédérique Bordignon, who surveyed research chemists about their experience of the peer review process. The article’s abstract echoes the news headline, saying, “Some authors yield to reviewer pressure knowingly introducing changes that are clearly wrong.” That’s a fairly eye-popping result — peer reviewers are pressuring scientists to introduce changes that are clearly wrong into our descriptions of our research?

Well, here’s the funny thing: If I’d been a reviewer on that paper, I’d have said that statement in the abstract was an error. I’d probably also have said that it was a dangerous one.

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The walled garden at the end of the Internet

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“Portal” (Flickr, Floriane Kratz)

I am not a fan of large-language model chatbots. I’m enough of a hater, in fact, that I don’t like calling ChatGPT and its LLM-powered kin “AI” — they are a particular class of products of a particular form of machine learning, which guess the correct response to a query as informed by associations between words and phrases in vast volumes of training text. One of the most painful lessons of the last couple of years, I think, is that what I’ve just described turns out not to be anywhere as close to “intelligence” as it appears.

I digress; the distinction is important, but it’s not exactly my point. My point is that it recently dawned on me that the LLM chatbots are the latest iteration of a now multi-decade process of big tech companies trying to fit the whole Internet into a box that they own and control.

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Yosemite to Acadia

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A white-breasted nuthatch, doing the nuthatch pose at Glacier Point in Yosemite (Flickr)

We spent this June more on the road than otherwise. C drove down from Seattle over Memorial Day weekend, and after I spent a workweek packing for an extended stay on Puget Sound, we road-tripped north. We only had a three-day weekend, but we strung together some sightseeing stops along the way.

We had an overnight stay in Yosemite National Park, where I finally saw the Yosemite Valley — and not one but two new-to-my-camera lupine species, and a very cooperative nuthatch, the headline image for this post.

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What can we learn from a Joshua tree?

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Joshua trees on Ryan Mountain, overlooking the Joshua tree woodlands in the heart of Joshua Tree National Park (jby)

I have a new op-ed at LNC|LancasterOnline, making the case for the “curiosity-driven” science that the National Science Foundation has supported through much of my adult life — and which is under dire threat from cuts proposed by the Trump Administration and the budget bill under consideration in Congress right now. In it, I discuss some of the possible long-term applications of my lab’s research on Joshua trees, which seem at first like they might be too weird to tell us anything helpful in daily life:

Joshua trees’ pollination by a single species of moths serves as an informative contrast to plant and pollinator interactions that play out in more common, more complicated situations, such as pollination of fruit and nut trees by wild insects and domestic honeybees. By studying Joshua trees’ simplified system, my graduate mentor learned how cooperative relationships like pollination stay cooperative, with two different species trading resources and services, even when they have incentives to cheat.

My lab has also studied how weather influences Joshua trees’ very sporadic annual flowering. Most years, they either flower prolifically, or not at all — and until recently we didn’t know what made the difference between bloom or bust. For that project, we developed software to use machine learning models trained with easy-to-collect data, which may work well for many other species of plants. That could be helpful in agriculture, or in planning to protect rare plant species, or even in understanding how the environment limits where different species can live.

But — and this is the important part — work with Joshua trees and hundreds of other peculiar creatures in distant habitats is important even if it doesn’t pan out into applied discoveries.

Of course, none of these applications of Joshua tree research may pan out. For every Thermus aquaticus [the hot-spring bacterium whose chance discovery enabled modern genetic research] there are hundreds of scientific projects that end in nothing more than a peer-reviewed research article and some fond memories of fieldwork. But we need those hundreds of curiosity-driven studies to find that one lucky, world-changing discovery.

This column is a new iteration of the connection I made with my old hometown newspaper thanks to the Science Homecoming campaign, and anticipates the McClintock Letters initiative rolling out later this month. Go read the whole thing, and — please — call your congresspeople to ask that they preserve funding for NSF’s support of curiosity-driven science.

Boston!

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Selfie at the starting corral
In the pack (MarathonFoto)
Still moving (MarathonFoto)

Monday, I ran the 129th Boston Marathon. It’s something like 15 and a half years after my first marathon, and it’s taken me that entire time to get to Boston.

I ran my first marathon back in October 2009, in Portland. I’d tried a spring half marathon and survived it, and found a simple enough training plan to work my way up to a 26.2 mile (42km) distance, running through the rolling Palouse hills beyond the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho. Portland went well enough that I signed up for another the next year, and another the year after that.

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