Thoughts on Long-Term Studies

I ran a study of the western harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex occidentalis, from 1977 to 2019, 42 years. Most scientific studies are done in two or three field seasons, which represents the time students have for a project and the need for professionals to show results. Some topics need longer and get it. Academic careers are about 40 years, so if started the year the scientist was beginning, 40 years is about the limit, unless a second person picks up the project. But people willing and able to do long-term studies are rare. In the case of the harvester ant study, retired well before I finished the harvester ant project.

western harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis) colony
They can live 40 years.

I completed the project, but I learned a series of things I didn't expect:

Thinking about Insects

We need to revise our attitude toward insects. 

It is probably fair to say we've waged war on insects this last half-century in the United States. Insects were generally bad: mosquitos when you ventured outside, cockroaches and ants in the kitchen, caterpillars and grasshoppers in the garden, moths in the stored woolens, weevils in the jar of beans of walnuts. You get the picture.

bumble bee on echinacea flower

So we deployed better and better weapons against them, to the point of spraying pesticide around neighborhoods to kill mosquitos. But of course that killed all manner of nontarget insects. (And, very few mosquitos; to reduce mosquitos, drain their breeding puddles.) So today insect numbers are way down. Not just monarch butterflies, but painted lady butterflies, swallowtail butterflies, and many, many more.

Camouflage in Plain Sight

I taught ecology for years. The text books feature dramatic examples of ecological principles--camouflage illustrated with a big green katydids shaped like a leaf, mimicry illustrated by a nonvenomous snake banded like a coral snake, or an example of mutualism with an orchid and exotic bee--almost always tropical. Which tended to make you think that to see biology you should go to the tropics. In fact, though, those basic principles--camouflage, mimicry, mutualism--and all the other pillars of ecology--predation, parasitism, competition--are everywhere. 

Time and the Botanist

Time is funny stuff. I live one day at a time. and somehow I've lived more than 26,645 of them. No doubt my memories of the past are filtered, but it doesn't seem that way to me. I easily remember things before other people were born. Weird. As I wrote about bamboos last week (link), I imagined a bamboo telling me about things that happened before I was born. More seriously, if more than 20 years elapses between the times when bamboos flower (true for many bamboos), a botanist can get only one replication of flowering into a career, that is, only see them flower twice. For species that flower less often, none of us get to see them flower more than once. 

Bamboo grove. When will it flower?