“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.

Sridhar, Chanam, and Hariharan are collaborators on Reflections On Papers Past, an oral history project interviewing the authors of influential papers in ecology and evolutionary biology how those papers, and the projects they report, came to be. It’s a truly impressive undertaking on its own—the list of interviews covers the breadth of the field, from Anurag Agrawal (discussing “Transgenerational induction of defenses in animals and plants”) to Marlene Zuk (“Heritable true fitness and bright birds: a role for parasites?”). You could build a course around them all, but it might actually be too much to fit into a single semester.

In the new article, Sridhar, Chanam, and Hariharan perform a qualitative survey of all those interviews, with an eye to the role of natural history in the origins of the papers described. The result is a systematic version of prior discussions like Futuyma’s, with copious examples of three major contributions natural history makes to ecology and evolutionary biology: as inspiration for systematic investigations (“spark”), as the basis to design effective experiments and relevant models (“scaffold”), and as data for systematic analysis (“substrate”). That is, familiarity with the life history of specific organisms is, first, how a biologist identifies surprising or intriguing phenomena; second, how she plans a project to study what she’s noticed; and, third, a potential source for data she can use in that study.

This taxonomy of contributions (a natural history of natural history?) puts a somewhat different spin on natural history anxiety. The “spark” experience is available to anyone who spends time with an organism or in a particular place—or who works with mentors who have spent that time and can impart some expertise—and the “scaffold” often follows as a result of pursuing systematic study. As I started up my doctoral research, my dissertation advisor took me on a couple of day trips into the mountains outside Moscow, Idaho, to look for possibly interesting organisms as I cast about for a research focus. Today I know as much as I do about the foibles of Joshua trees and their pollinators because I spent multiple spring semesters in the desert, trying (and mostly failing) to make various experimental plans work. Between my renewed familiarity with the Mojave since I moved to Los Angeles, and time spent leading class field trips or just wandering on my own in the natural landscapes of Southern California, I feel moderately secure in my source of potential sparks, and satisfied that I can build up the scaffold on a new system if and when a spark arrives.

Natural history as “substrate” feels both more and less secure than either of the other contributions. On the one hand, digitization of natural history collections and the growth of crowdsourcing platforms—especially iNaturalist, for plant-focused folks like me—means that I have more and easier access to natural history in substrate form than any of my scientific forbears. But digital sources are only as reliable as the servers that host them, and a lot more natural history of this sort is encoded in physical specimens that have yet to be digitized, field guides and treatises that may be long out of print … and, yes, the personal experience of long-practicing field botanists and entomologists and wildlife biologists whose day jobs may have little or nothing to do with that knowledge (or were eliminated in an ideological purge). Digitization doesn’t mean that we don’t still need physical natural history collections, even as the institutions hosting them cut costs and corners.

Then, too, the real limiting factor for accessing all three contributions of natural history is that perpetual source of human but especially academic anxiety: time. It takes time to get to know an organism or a natural community to the point that you can see the variation that sparks interest. It takes time to work with a study system and build operational knowledge as a scaffold for research. It takes time to become comfortable navigating and handling even fully online, digitized natural history—and much more time to learn its limitations, or how to bridge its gaps with offline records, specimens, and taxonomic guides. Time is a function of funding for education, for student stipends and instructor salaries, and for the facilities that let us make extended stays at field sites, and funding is nothing if not unevenly distributed. Sridhar, Chanam, and Hariharan close with this thought:

The conditions that promote the operation of background natural history (which we discussed above)—such as flexibility in the conduct of research, the availability of supporting communities of natural history expertise, and the resources needed for long-term research as well as to leverage preexisting natural history information for new studies—are more present in certain geographies and institutional settings (e.g., those supported by Global North resources) than others.

We natural historians stand on the shoulders of so much prior work to understand biodiversity, and we have easier access to much of that prior work than ever before in human history. But that foundation of prior work needs constant maintenance and renewal—and even more, it needs expansion to truly accommodate the global community of people who love to notice the world around them. Natural history is dying; long live the natural historians.

References

Boldgiv B, et al. 2025. Global natural history infrastructure requires international solidarity, support, and investment in local capacity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122(6): e2411232122, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2411232122

Futuyma DJ. 1998. Wherefore and whither the naturalist? The American Naturalist. 151(1):1-6. doi.org/10.1086/286097

Sridhar H, J Chanam, P Hariharan. 2026. Spark, scaffold, substrate: The multiple hidden roles of natural history in ecology and evolutionary biology. The American Naturalist. doi.org/10.1086/741683