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What Does a Field Biologist Really do? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-23
A field biologist is, in many ways, a fortunate individual. They get to examine important, if often somewhat academic, questions, while spending time in the most fascinating parts of our planet. At least that is my opinion. I spent much of my career as a field biologist. My degrees were in zoology, but I also had to have some knowledge of botany as a lot of my research centered on natural enemies of weeds. My side interests of behavior, evolutionary biology and taxonomy of Jumping Spiders (Salticidae) was less involved with botany, but I did have to be aware of plant associations as the spiders often preferred one type of vegetation over another. For example, I found one species of Hentzia primarily on Saw Palmetto, and another on tall feather palms like the Royal Palm. Yet another species was found on shrubs or small trees, especially willow, but along the Gulf Coast it existed in large numbers on Black Mangrove. I had thoughtfully taken a course in plant systematics when I was at the University of Arizona in a year when spring rains had caused a heavy growth of native plants, some not seen in years.
Seeking land snails in the White Tank Mountains of Arizona. Another form of field biology: documenting biodiversity.
My Postdoc with Willard Whitcomb got me out into the field quickly. I spent some of that time in soybean fields and in alfalfa. My primary focus was initially on the natural enemies of the Soybean Looper. This meant conducting field cage studies with Soybean Looper eggs glued to soybean leaves and a potential predator. We were surprised to find that one of the common spiders in Florida, the sac spider, Cheiracanthium inclusum, was able to locate the eggs and eat them! This also meant standing in a very humid and hot soybean field in a Florida summer to try and observe actual prey capture of either larvae or eggs in the “wild”.
In Puerto Rico and in Florida, during my second stint as a postdoc under Dr. Whitcomb, my research involved observing both eggs and larvae of the Sugarcane Rootstalk Borer Weevil in real conditions in the field to determine what ate them. Clusters of eggs were laid between paper sheets in the laboratory by captive weevils and clipped to coffee or citrus tree leaves. Our main site in Puerto Rico during the second trip was an orange grove near Isabella. The newly hatched larvae were placed in Petri dishes and set out under citrus trees. The Petri dishes were filled with a mix of plaster of Paris and sterilized soil, but the larvae normally would burrow into the damp ground rapidly, so this was pretty artificial. As we originally thought the larvae dropped from the egg clusters at night, an undergraduate and I stayed up all night watching the dishes in a citrus grove in Florida. After the first time we did not repeat this error, as USDA researchers had shown that the larvae really dropped right after an afternoon rain. Still, we discovered that the main enemies of the larvae were ants and to a lesser extent spiders. The tiny tramp ant species Nylanderia bourbonica, eagerly took neonate larvae from Petri dishes in a Florida citrus grove, apparently recruiting other workers to join in. In our egg experiments, one spider was caught eating the eggs like corn on the cob.
Orange Grove, Adjuntas, Puerto Rico.
Once I was hired at New Mexico State University I was immediately thrust into a project on the natural enemies of a plant, the native range weed, Broom Snakeweed, Gutierrezia sarothrae. I mentioned this research in a former diary (See: www.dailykos.com/...) We quickly learned that, being a native plant, Broom Snakeweed, had a huge number of associated insects. It became clear to me that the native weed, which flourished in disturbed areas, was to a large degree a problem because of historical overgrazing. This was especially true because of pouring cattle on western ranches to supply beef to the military during World War I, and even before that, as ranching appeared to be the only use for millions of acres in the Western U.S.. This led to the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, but by that time much of the damage was done.
Still the plant had several promising natural enemies and we hoped to encourage them. One of these was the root-boring long-horned beetle, Crosidius pulchellus and another was the Snakeweed Grasshopper, Hesperotettix viridis. Both could do serious damage to the plants and the grasshopper could totally defoliate a plant so that it produced no seed that year and many eventually died.
Attempts by the USDA to import natural enemies from Argentina, where several similar woody snakeweeds live, failed primarily because of the dozens of native insects already adapted to the native plants. Eggs were quickly found and eaten by native ants. I was skeptical of the attempt, but cooperated with the research on the off chance that such a strategy might work. However, about all successful attempts to control pests have involved introduction of natural enemies against invaders that had escaped their natural enemies.
The other creature I was hired to research was another native, the Range Caterpillar (Hemileuca oliviae). Range Caterpillars are weird, being one of the very few giant silkworm moths that feed on grass as larvae (adults do not feed, a point over which I had an argument with a journal reviewer — he thought we should feed the adult moths in cages that we used for a sterilization study!). The problem with these is that they are boom or bust organisms, which occasionally have population explosions that lead to areas of the Blue Grama grassland forage being devoured. Ranchers don’t like this and have tried to eradicate this native moth by using various pesticides. Natural enemies will eventually do them in, but often a lot of damage can occasionally be done. Actually the caterpillars may well be on their way to extinction as they died out in part of their northern range and most likely in the Davis Mountains, as brush invaded the grassland. I discovered that mammalian predators, such as skunks, relished the fat pupae and I lost all the pupae I was observing at one site to something, probably a skunk. The pupae also eventually became heavily parasitized, which was evident when I collected dozens of pupae at Wagon Mound, New Mexico, and had only three species of ichneumon wasps and two species of chalcidids emerge!
Toward the latter part of my tenure at NMSU I worked on the natural enemies of the Pecan Nut Casebearer and Pecan Aphid complex,spending hours in the hot sweltering pecan groves in the Mesilla Valley, West Texas and Arizona. One of the main natural enemies of both pert was found to be the spider Hibana incursa in the family Anyphaenidae. These spiders would apparently set up on a nutlet cluster and ambush the casebearer larvae as the moved from nutlet to nutlet. The would eat large amounts of Black and Yellow Pecan Aphids and we could tell which they had been eating by the color of their abdomens!
Finally, I became involved in a more successful USDA attempt to control Tamarisk, a Eurasian weed tree that had been unadvisedly imported for erosion control. I sent my grad student at the time to West Texas to evaluate the possible effect of spider predation on the newly imported leaf beetle. It turned out that while orb-weavers could capture flying beetles, native spiders would not be a significant problem and the attempt was reasonably successful. At least the trees had more of the natural enemies that kept the tree in check in its native home.
A Green June Beetle, Cotinus texana, on Tamarisk flowers, Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park, New Mexico. Not the imported natural enemy!
Laying out field plots is not at all easy and unfortunately often the plan has fatal flaws. I saw this in several studies that were planned by people who didn’t seem to grasp the complexity involved. Unfortunately I was involved in one. In this case the plots were way too unlike each other and at the same time each plot was subject to being disqualified because of chance happenings (we lost two plots because a rancher used an additional chemical control method, which was with an illegal pesticide, and in the other the ranch was hit by an outbreak of Anthrax!) over which the researcher had no control. The statistician I consulted almost laughed me out of the office. Fortunately I did not design the study, but still it almost wrecked my career because my boss insisted that I submit the manuscript! As I expected, it was rejected by all of the reviewers! On top of that we worked like slaves putting up barbed wire 100 x 100 ft. exclosures and inserting pitfall traps on soil that sometimes included volcanic rock. We often worked 12-14 hour days! Take that you MAGA people who say that scientists have it easy!
Two other studies, in which I was not involved, suffered by not having any real replications. I was a reviewer on one and did the post experiment analysis on the other. I was shocked because both studies were designed sloppily by people who should know better! I knew better than to even take these to a statistician let alone recommend them for publication! My review of the one that was submitted to me was pretty acid and I seldom wrote negative reviews for the journals for which I did reviews. One should take pride in one’s work, not merely try to rack up publications. The questions posed should be answered, if not definitely, at least with an honest and well designed analysis. This requires a well thought out plan that includes a way to collect data that will be analysable by standard methods, such as an ANOVA.
A field biologist has to deal with world realities. It is usually easier to do laboratory studies, and indeed such studies have yielded very important results. Still I think there should always be room for field studies as they treat a very messy and chaotic real world, which the lab work avoids. Both are necessary for a true understanding of the natural world.
Finally, I have to add that we field biologists are not trying to answer useless and unimportant questions. Understanding the environment and the organisms it contains, to the best of our abilities is, I believe, vital to our long-term survival. The fact that we field biologists enjoy our work (although not all the hard labor- running away from an escaped coil of barbed wire is not fun, and neither is being attacked by range bulls, being possibly exposed to anthrax, hantavirus, rabies, and bubonic plague, running into violent storms, or rattlesnakes crossing your transects) is indicative of our dedication to reality. Sometimes reality is unpleasant, but that is all part of the life that all of us lead, even if we aren’t scientists.
Note: My experiences are not necessarily the same as those of other field biologists, but the problems involved are often similar and the answers to ecological questions certainly important, despite ridicule from politicians or people who don’t understand what such studies involve. As I have noted, there are failures and these should be avoided if possible. Scientists and their work are not above criticism. In fact science thrives on informed review. Some mistakes can be avoided with proper planning beforehand, but some may simply be part of the learning process. Also, I apologize if I have repeated part of this material from other diaries and if I have gone on about myself too much.
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