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A lot of us think about science as a narrow, top-down process, where there are “scientists” and
there are “not-scientists.” Scientists wear white coats, work in labs, write a bunch of papers,
and then teach the rest of the not-scientists about it, in a way that only someone with a
degree in science could do. But there are a lot more ways that we can study the world around us
and produce important knowledge. Often, indigenous tribes, citizen scientists,
volunteers, or just everyday people living their lives and looking around them play a crucial
role in driving academic inquiry. And sometimes they’re even the ones making these discoveries,
way before the researchers do. So here are five instances where people just like you and me beat
the scientists at their own game. When it comes to collecting observational data on certain species
of birds, YouTube creators have a feather in their cap. There’s a group of birds called tits. Yes,
really. Tits build their nests using animal fur from a variety of sources,
with one study finding that tit nests contained fur from more than twenty species. The fur is
a great insulator to keep their nests warm, and it may strengthen the nests
structurally or even deter predators or parasites. But until recently, no one had
looked into how these birds collected that hair. Since
researchers were fairly sure none of these birds were also
barbers, they assumed that the birds were gathering the
fur from ground sheddings or from animal carcasses, since
doing so is low risk and high, hairy reward. However, it
turns out that not only were these birds sourcing their furs
from live animals, but the evidence that they do so has
been available for years. A search on Youtube will pop up
with dozens of videos of birds diving down and pulling
hair directly from live animals, some of which were posted
as far back as 2012. Often these videos show birds stealing fur from sleeping dogs and cats,
and sometimes from potential
predators like foxes and racoons. Most interesting of all, some show them
stealing hair directly off of humans’ heads, and some of
them were even willing participants. Which,
if you ask me, is taking the whole “sharing is caring” idea a little
bit too far. But videos like this inspired a group of
researchers to classify this behavior within the academic
literature. They named the practice kleptotrichy,
which comes from the Greek words “klepto,” to steal and “trich,”
hair. While this may not be the first time anecdotal evidence has led to academic
publications, it’s the only one we know of where Youtube
played a key role in the process. Now, social media and
video-sharing websites aren’t the only ways that people
have documented nature before researchers could get to
it. As meteorologists have gotten better at predicting the
occurrence of auroras, more people have been able to
take up aurora-hunting as a hobby, armed with high-resolution cameras to document what they see.
Starting in 2015, photographers on the hunt for Northern
Lights in Alberta started noticing an unexpected pattern in
the dancing lights. Instead of typical ribbons of green, blue,
yellow, or purple light, these strange patterns looked like
long, skinny columns of mauve-ish light, sometimes accompanied by several short dashes
of green. Although these were appearing
on nights where auroras were more likely to occur, the photographers
didn’t think that they were the same as a regular
aurora. These funky lights looked more like something
called “proton auroras,” which are more likely to occur at lower
latitudes, but are also almost impossible to spot
with the naked eye. So these photographers concluded that,
since these were neither true auroras nor proton auroras,
the light show needed its own name. And since the
new phenomenon had no official name, the citizen scientists decided
to call the arc simply “Steve.” Hey,
you try naming a brand new astronomical phenomenon. Eventually, one of these photographers
showed these pictures of Steve– No, not that Steve, these
pictures of Steve to researchers at NASA, and they launched a series of investigations
aimed at determining what exactly this beam of
light was. It turns out that Steve is, in part, the end product
of a long chain reaction between the sun and Earth’s
magnetic field. Generally, auroras form when charged
particles from the sun collide with gasses in the upper atmosphere,
causing electrons to rain down and
producing the pretty waves of light we all know. However, subsequent investigations have
determined that Steve is actually two separate phenomena
occurring simultaneously, which makes it both an aurora
and not an aurora. The green picket fence is a true aurora
created by electrons raining down from the sun. However,
the colorful purple arc comes from charged particles
colliding in the upper atmosphere. The friction from these
interactions heats the molecules and causes them to emit
this beautiful, wavy light. Much the same way electricity
heats the filament inside an incandescent lightbulb until it’s
hot enough to glow. The team of academics and citizen
scientists decided to name the new phenomenon a Strong
Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. Or, STEVE for
short, as an homage to the original photographers who
made the investigations possible through their
documentation. All that said, the next time a bunch of
photographers discover something new in the sky, here’s
hoping they workshop the name a little bit longer. This next
story is about a time where researchers thought they knew
best, but ended up eating some fruity humble pie. The
island of Borneo is in Southeast Asia and is home to over
50 different ethnic groups of people. Two of these groups,
the Iban and Dusun people, recently shed light on a
taxonomic mistake Western biologists had been making for
almost 200 years. The first researcher to document the
plants in the region wrote about a tree he called Artocarpus
odoratissimus. They noted, however, that there was a lot of
variety in this species of tree, with some having larger
leaves and sweeter fruit than others. However, the Iban
and Dusun people, who cultivated the trees, used different
words to refer to the two kinds of tree. The Iban people
called the trees with larger fruits and leaves lumok, and the
ones with smaller, less sweet fruits pingan. To see if this
linguistic difference would be represented in the DNA, a
team of researchers compared the genotypes of the these
trees and found that they were indeed genetically distinct
species, instead of varying members of a single species.
The authors note that the primary motivation for the
genetic sequencing was the indigenous peoples’ linguistic
specification, and Iban and Dusun people were included in
the study. It seems like those who have cultivated and ate
the plant for generations knew much more than the botanists who occasionally came into the
field. Who would have thought? Now,
when trying to piece together the lives and practices of people long gone,
we can sometimes turn to experimental archaeology.
This often involves extensive research into the technologies
available to people at the time, and an intimate
knowledge of whatever literature is around, meaning that experimental
archaeologists tend to be entrenched in their
academic field of study. But in 2008, a Baltimore hair stylist made waves
among those who study ancient
Rome. When Janet Stephens first saw a bust of a Roman empress at a Baltimore museum, she was
captivated by the woman’s hairstyle. In order to figure out
how the ancient Romans did it, she tried to recreate the
ornate hairdo on her own, but didn’t get very far at first. It
wasn’t until she tried sewing the braids of hair together with
a needle and thread that she was able to replicate the
empress’s look. But to her surprise, there was no mention
of hair sewing in any research about Roman hairstyling.
Most archaeologists thought that these hairstyles were
impossible to achieve with the wearer’s own hair, and
could only be created using wigs. Following a hunch,
Stephens decided to dig deeper and see if the archaeologists were missing something.
Her research led her through 800 years
of Roman texts describing various cosmetic practices, leading
her to spot something that may have gotten lost in translation.
During her research, she noted that the Roman word
“acus” was generally being translated by scholars as a
catch-all term for three distinct instruments: a hair bodkin,
a needle-and-thread, and a hair curling iron. She eventually
found sources that referenced its translation specifically as
the same instrument that clothmenders used,
in effect, a needle and thread, which supported her claim that the Romans used sewing or
weaving to create their elaborate hairdos. In order to
demonstrate her theory, she reproduced several complex
Ancient Roman hairstyles using multiple types of hair
fasteners, identified Roman artifacts that could have gotten
the job done, and even found historical cosmetic sets that
included these same needles. Her research was published
in the Journal of Roman Archaeology in 2008, making her
only the second non-archaeologist to do so in the journal’s
history. The journal’s editor even said of her work, “I could
tell even from the first version that it was a very serious
piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who
was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would
have been able to write.” But all that said, the jury’s still out
on whether “The Roman” will ever be the next big trend in
hair. Our last story isn’t a singular discovery, and instead
shouts out one of the largest and most impactful citizen
science projects out there, which you can take part in,
too. But before we get there, a little background on how this
project came to be. Right around the turn of the 20th
century, it was a popular tradition in the United States to
engage in a Christmas Side Hunt. During these hunts,
opposing groups of hunters would compete to see whose
side could shoot the most animals, usually birds and foxes. However,
there was a young officer at the then-fledgling Audubon Society named Frank Chapman who proposed
an alternative to the hunt: Instead of shooting at birds,
what if we counted them? And so, he organized the first
ever Christmas Bird Census which took place in the year
1900 on Christmas Day. Twenty seven birders participated
in various locations throughout the United States and
Canada, counting up a total of 90 bird species. Over a
hundred years later, the bird count lives on, and the flock of
bird-brains participating has only grown. For starters, the
count is now conducted over a three-week period, from
December 14th through January 5th. Now, around 80,000
birdwatchers sign up each year across Canada, the United
States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific
Islands. In the 2018 to 2019 count, volunteers tallied more
than 48 million birds from over 2,600 different species. And
these bird counts aren’t just for fun. Knowing what’s up
with bird populations helps conservation efforts across the
globe. Researchers, conservation organizations, and
government agencies all use the database to assess bird
populations and help guide conservation efforts. To date,
The Audubon Society claims that their database has been
cited in over 300 peer-reviewed articles. All of which has
come from the observations of citizen scientists. Science is
about so much more than sitting in a lab and writing up
papers. It’s a process, and a way of thinking about the
world. And if you’d like to volunteer to do some science,
you can sign up for the Annual Christmas Bird Count using
the link below. But if you find anything new out there, make
sure you pick a better name than Steve. So you too can be
a scientist without the hefty price tag of a formal academic
degree. And if the price tag is keeping you back from cloud
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