Hi, my name is Dr. Earyn McGee, and I am a herpetologist and science communicator.
A herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles and amphibians,
and I specifically study lizards here in southeastern Arizona.
Even though I'm a scientist, I definitely show
my personality through my clothes and my hair.
Creativity plays a bigger role than scientists get credit for.
Having different ways of thinking about the world and interpreting the information
that you receive just helps you be a better scientist
because you have to be quick on your feet.
I had a lot of fun
and being out in the field, collecting data and analyzing data,
but there's so many different routes that you can go with that.
Lizards are super important not just to the environment and ecology,
but also to people.
My favorite kind of lizard is
Yarrow’s Spiny Lizard, Sceloporus Jarrovii.
It was the first visit I ever got to work with, and it was kind of
like my aha moment where I was like, “Oh, this is something that's cool,
I can't believe people pay me to come out here and catch these lizards.”
I think it was in the second grade, maybe like it was a, you know,
talk about your job day or something like that,
but essentially one of the parents had told me that I couldn't be a vet.
And so I don't know what I said to her, but it was,
I said enough to get sent to the principal's office.
I was just like, “Listen, lady, I'm going to be a vet.
I don't care what you say.”
I was very committed to working with animals, even that young.
I always thought that elephants, foxes and wolves would be the animals
that I worked with.
And I wasn't super interested in lizards,
but I kind of got the hang of it and was like, “This is really awesome.
I'm going to keep doing it.”
I remember this one time I brought a snake into the house
and my mom was not happy, but they were always super supportive.
One of my mom's ways of keeping me and
my siblings occupied was through arts and crafts.
We would build with LEGO bricks and we would create whole cities,
and it was just a way
that our mom could get us being creative and thinking outside of the box.
When you're coming up with questions
and a research plan, creativity definitely plays a big role in it.
Your upbringing, your culture, all of that stuff influences
who you are as a scientist and the questions that you ask
and the things that you're interested in.
When I was in college, I actually got an opportunity to work with lizards.
I can't remember any time where I wasn't fascinated by them.
My mentor started to talk to me about research, and I didn't quite
understand it until we actually went out into the field together.
And I was like, “Wow, people really pay you to do this?
I can't believe it.
This is amazing.”
Well, when I'm out in the field,
I typically get up around 7:30 or so,
we try to be out by 8:00 or 8:30,
which is another reason why I love lizards
because I don't like getting up early in the morning.
So that's kind of perfect timing.
And then we are out pretty much all day looking for lizards, lassoing lizards.
The idea is to get this loop over the lizard's head.
The lizards are heavy enough where they will collapse the loop,
but they are light enough where it won't actually hurt them.
We will take data from the lizard, so we're looking at body measurements,
its length, its tail length.
If it's shedding or not, we'll take stuff like toe clippings
or fecal samples.
We'll give it a numbers,
so that way we know that we've already caught it during the season.
Then we'll let it go and we'll move on to the next site.
And for the fun part.
I mean, the research is fun too, but for the fun, fun part.
We would go out at night cruising for herps.
It's a lot of fun because you never know what you're going to see.
Sometimes you see the hugest cow that I have ever seen in my whole entire life.
I really want to continue doing research.
I want to continue with outreach,
but then I also want to go and do stuff more on the media side.
A dream of mine is to host a natural history TV show.
So I created this game called Hashtag Find That Lizard,
where I post a picture of a lizard
camouflaged in its natural environment and people have to find it.
I include information about the lizards.
Other times I talk about conservation issues in general or even social issues.
When I was an undergrad and I was out doing field research
I tended to be the only black person there,
let alone, you know, a black woman.
The way that lizards are captured has historically been called noosing.
and for me, as a black woman in a predominantly white space,
I'm not the first person to use this term lasso,
but really, I started a conversation about it
and I was like, “Let's talk about why this language might not be inclusive
and what can we do to make it more inclusive?”
The whole point of doing mentorship and outreach is
so the people who come behind me don't have to go through the same
things that I went through and knowing that even in a small way that I can help
is really rewarding to me.