Can natural history and compassion coincide?

Shifting scientific approaches in the Anthropocene

Searching for frogs by night, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, California, 2020.

There is a fascinating conversation happening in the land of professional ecologists.

In Reimagining the future of natural history museums with compassionate collection, conservation geneticist Allie Byrne asserts that the scientific collection of animals and animal tissues can, and should, be done with more compassion and ethical consideration, and that there are many alternatives to lethal specimen collection that advance science, rather than hinder it.

Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog.

Further, Allie points out that employing an explicit, values-centered approach could help institutions consider whether lethal collection is necessary or not.

This was met with controversy.¹

In a published comment on Allie’s original paper, 119 coauthors² argue that Specimen collection is essential for modern science.

The comment does not directly address Allie’s main argument—which is about the ethics of lethal collection—and instead cites that the issue of ethics has been thoroughly addressed in other papers.

It then builds a comprehensively rock-solid argument for the value of natural history collections (which has also been done before; but in this case, they really outdid themselves).

The two papers are not arguing against each other; rather, they are building arguments in separate, parallel lanes, providing for the possibility that they are both reflecting truth.

Specimens in the natural history collection at Yosemite National Park.

Natural history museums under attack

A discouraging reality underlying the papers³ is that as human reverence for nature declines, natural history museums have been put on the chopping block at many institutions.

At the University of Michigan, for example, many specimens have been moved to off-campus facilities.

By the time I was a graduate student at the University of California, the entire herpetological collection had been moved to a shipping container under the soccer stadium’s bleachers at the far reaches of campus.⁴

When I visited the natural history museum in Dublin last fall, I learned that it was locally known as the “dead zoo”.

It has become much easier to watch wildlife videos on YouTube than go out in the rain and discover things. In the process, the “dead zoos” that have been painstakingly curated at institutions for decades (and in some cases, centuries) are often devalued.

Natural History Museum of Ireland, Dublin.

In light of this struggle, it is understandable that when an up-and-coming scientist asserts that natural history museums should be shifting their practices to embrace new technologies that might replace some of the older ones, it would be met with resistance.⁵

Still, a reflexively defensive posture can inherently limit opportunities, consuming energy that could otherwise be used to resolve conflict and produce a more collaborative, productive outcome.

An Ensatina salamander in a classic defensive posture.

Practicing inclusive science

In her compassionate collection paper, Allie offers a hypothetical, but common, scenario of leading a wonder-filled student to the field, only for them to be shown that the amazing animal they had just discovered was going to be killed for the sake of science.

As she points out, this could alienate some students entirely away from the natural sciences, resulting in a less inclusive scientific community:

They wonder if they might not be cut out for this field, a sentiment perhaps directly or indirectly communicated to them by other team members. They begin to believe that compassion is a weakness and disqualifying trait for a museum scientist.

This was certainly the sentiment offered in my own training on many occasions.

Early in my career, when I told a fellow biologist my grizzly story about trying to kill a mouse that just wouldn’t die on one of my field jobs, they snapped, “You’re gonna have to grow a thicker skin if you wanna be a biologist.”

An arboreal salamander, which can break the skin—no matter how thick it is—with its sharp teeth and powerful bite (note the big jaw muscles behind the eyes!)

For whom is the compassion?

Late one spring afternoon during my grad school years, I watched in horror as one of my colleagues dumped formalin into a jar of live bullfrog tadpoles. He appeared to enjoy watching them choking in their chemically-induced death throes, as if it were punishment for their not being native to the California stream we had caught them in.

Fortunately, most field biologists are not as sadistic as this colleague.

I made pivotal career and research choices around not having to kill any more animals than absolutely necessary; and yet, I still had to do it. Some of these occasions have left small but noticeable scars on my psyche.⁶

All of the times I had to kill things for science, I felt bad about it. And that’s a good thing.

Foothill yellow-legged froglets, which I—fortunately—did not have to kill.

Compromising compassion hurts not just what we are harming—it hurts us too. The most extreme harm is when, through repetition, we eventually lose our compassion altogether, as my colleague did with the tadpoles and countless other animals he ushered to the ends of their lives.

Unnecessary lethal collection still happens. Some collectors are verifiably addicted—taking more than they or science need.

When I took issue with over-collectors about how many they were taking, they said, “But there are so many that we don’t even see—this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

With a western toad, 2018.

Waking up to the realities of the Anthropocene

“Conservation is not about the individuals—it’s about populations,” announced the instructor at an amphibian survey methods workshop, as he proceeded to allow endangered frogs to bake in plastic tubs of shallow water in the Sacramento sun.

This herpetologist advanced in his career at a different time, when individuals didn’t matter, when people couldn’t possibly have an impact on the environment, because the world is so big, and we are so small.⁷

Sadly, this is no longer true. Many species do not exist in the abundance that they once did.

An endangered foothill yellow-legged frog. Photo credit: Alessandro Catenazzi.

For my historical dissertation research on the rapid extinction of the foothill yellow-legged frog from southern California, I asked an elder herpetologist I was interviewing about the moment he made the realization that the “endless supply” paradigm had ended.  

His response was one of the most poignant moments of my career:

I would go to places I had seen them and they wouldn't be there anymore… I didn't think anything of it, of course—you see those patterns—but I saw 2 or 3 frogs at a spot one year and then went back 5 years later and didn't see anything. It didn't mean anything [at the time], but when you don't see them any more times that you're out there…then you realize that they're gone.

How scientists approach their work matters

At work in the field, 2019. Photo credit: Mike Westphal

I met Allie at an academic conference in Arizona when she was an early-stage and I was a late-stage graduate student.

She did not act like an early stage graduate student, though. Everywhere she went, she was flanked by an entourage of admiring undergraduates and spoke with confidence and conviction.

She had good reason to: she had just made one of the most significant discoveries in amphibian disease research in some time. She had figured out how to get DNA that was high-quality enough for genotyping from degraded samples. This was a big deal because though they tried, no one—yet—had been able to get past that barrier.

Allie launched over it, and kept going.

What motivates the people engaged in scientific inquiry is a good signal of where science is taking us collectively. Based on what I know of Allie, and the courage she had to stand up to her entire discipline, it seems she is motivated by something unique from many others in our field.

Her recent paper suggests that at least one of those motivations is compassion. Without it, she may not have had the drive necessary to make her important discovery.

Some scientists are choosing to embrace a new paradigm: one of taking responsibility for the entire measure of the impacts our work may unleash,⁸ rather than simply the microcosms of individual hypotheses.

To question the ways we have always done things, and whether these ways are still appropriate for the Anthropocene—whether our methods are creating the world we want or one we don’t: this is our choice.

I hope we choose wisely.

1. This is not the first time the concept of compassion in conservation has emerged in academic debate. Papers arguing for and against “compassionate conservation” have been emerging more prominently for about a decade.

2. In this case and at this high number (119), “signatories” may be a more appropriate term than “coauthors”.

3. Allie wrote a clarifying response to the 119-coauthor comment on her original paper.

4. Similarly, when I was a graduate student, older, out-of-print books—which are arguably the most valuable because they are the last of their kind—were shipped out of the library to off-campus storage. When I wanted to check out these books (because I was studying historical ecology and these old books were very valuable to my research), I either had to wait weeks for a library staff person to retrieve them, or, in many cases, though there was a record of them in off-site storage, they couldn’t be found. Out of sight, out of mind—and lost forever.

5. Look, I’m mid-career. Like the commenters, I also get annoyed when people new to my field want to come in and change everything from their limited education and experience. But Allie Byrne is not a person of limited education or experience, nor is she new to the field—not by a long shot. So there is something else going on here.

6. At this point there may be questions about dietary choices, and that would be shifting the conversation in a different direction. What I will say is this: life begets life. We kill cows and carrots to survive. I am not bemoaning the unavoidable truth of death. This essay is about how much or how little we allow compassion into the scientific endeavor, and what we can gain by facing that question squarely.

7. In a moment that is now, in retrospect, political caricature, a relative once argued with me at the holiday dinner table: “Climate change cannot be real! Humans are so small and the planet is so big! There’s no way we could ever make a difference!”

8. One word here: Oppenheimer.