Insectarium visit

On the way to the French Quarter for some oyster po-boys, there was a window full of tropical butterflies fluttering around.  This is not something you usually see in the windows of big federal looking buildings so it caught our attention.  A few yards beyond was the entrance to the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium located weirdly within the US Customs House.  OK, this made sense of the butterflies inside a federal looking building, except why that's where it was placed anyways?  Well, as the only adults unaccompanied by kids we sort of looked out of place, and a lot of the exhibits required you to bend down real low, but this was really a quite nice exhibit, so sayeth the biologists and aficionados of natural history.  Of course you saw the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Some exhibits did a great job of grabbing kids attention and directing their activity.  Some parents did a good job at helping their kids focus on things.  Some of the exhibits just didn't work.  It would take a while, watching them to figure out why, and then some ideas about how to fix them.  One thing is clear, kids don't read signs.  They don't notice them or if they do, they don't even try.  They simply ignore them and seek to investigate on their own.  This means that taxonomically organized displays just fall flat.  Even if the organism is a cool as all get out, the lesson is lost.  The Seattle Aquarium (not sure if the name is right) took a different and simpler approach.  How do fish hide?  How do fish swim?  and then each question was followed by a series of examples and a nice illustrative diagram.  To heck with the names although they were there.  The ugly was seeing adults giving eeky, icky, yucky, repulsive, physical displays of negativity, great role models for the kids. You know how hard this is for us teachers to knock this type of behavior out of students because they grew up with parents who provide poor role models?  One of the best exhibits was a butterfly room, and it was quite lovely, quite nicely done, which we'd seen from the outside.  Here's a bird wing on a feeding station.  TPP was familiar with many of the neotropical butterflies, or their close relatives.  Of course lots of kids were totally ignoring the "don't touch" rule, so not only don't they read, they don't listen.  People you got your work cut out for you to teach your kids how to be patient, curious observers and listeners. 

Dealing with ecological rejection

I firmly believe in sabbatical leaves, and it is my great good fortune to have been allowed to take four of them. The academic world of science is difficult and it takes a concerted effort to try or explore new things, to learn new areas of science, and while taking a break from the week to week routine. As this is being written my fourth and last sabbatical leave is winding to a close. I'm taking a week to visit friends, a week to attend national scientific meetings, and that leaves two weeks to prepare for classes. Already I have people clamoring for a laboratory guide.

As part of this leave's exploration into new topics, I collaborated with an old friend and colleague. I dragged him to the rain forest to study insects that consume flowers, but aren't involved in pollination (my usual tropical topic). These insects had never been studied before, and in fact no one even knew these flowers were their brood substrate, or that they had two broods, a smaller one that produced bigger adults, and a larger one that produced smaller adults, or that they had a female biased population, and a number of other things. And we had fun doing it.

Oh, but science isn't science until its published, and our manuscript was just rejected. And the reason was it was too much natural history and not enough ecology. This means we didn't conduct an experiment aimed at determining some ecological principle, but just figured out a previously unknown biology. In the eyes of ecological snobs, ecological studies trump natural history. But ecological study is impossible until you know enough about the system to manipulate it.

Ecology is coming of age. It's getting snobby. Long treated as an inferior, less than demanding, descriptive field of science, barely divorced from Victorian natural history, ecology is now asserting itself by dumping on the very field that gave rise to ecology. This is because biology is done by people, and many people have need of a pecking order and having someone lower down to peck at to feel good about themselves. And this is nothing but someone inforcing their personal belief that ecology, as they define it, is better, more important, higher quality science than natural history.

Fortunately I know how to deal with such rejection. My lapsed membership in the organization will now be on permanent hold. Another publishing venue will be found, and our natural history will become part of biological knowledge, and then some stinking ecologist will use our study to do some "real science" that can get published in a top ranked journal, well, top ranked for ecology.