(music)
A couple years ago a group
of citizen scientists for
the Western Cave Conservancy
discovered a large, odd looking spider
in a cave in southern Oregon.
They sent it to scientists in
California. Recently, those scientists
declared that spider a new species,
Trogloraptor, and a member of a new family
of spiders. Sounds straightforward, right?
Wrong! (buzzing sound)
Science definitely is not a linear,
step-by-step fashion.
And science is unpredictable, it's dynamic.
And I don't think it ever concludes.
It just keeps going.
To communicate the real process of science,
Judy and her colleagues developed this
science flowchart to better explain
how science works.
You may start in one area and you find
a need to communicate with the community
of scientists that you work with who might
have additional or other ideas and all of
that helps to shape what science is and
how we go about the process of science.
So let's take a look at the Trogloraptor
discovery flowchart. It's less like a
linear process and more like a pinball machine.
(pinball machine sound effects)
Let's follow the path using the spider that
the citizen scientists found as the pinball.
They sent it to scientist Tracy Audisio,
who is very curious about what lives in caves.
She examined it for about two hours one
night, trying to identify it by making
observations and conferring with a colleague.
They were stumped.
The two researchers worked with the
Academy's Charles Griswold and brought the
specimen to him. He began his own
observations.
I looked at it through the vial not under
a microscope and I thought, Oh, this is a
brown recluse. It's about the same size
but when I looked at it closely all the
brown recluse characters, that is, various
details of its anatomy were wrong.
The eyes were placed in the wrong
arrangement, the jaws were wrong, the
spinning organs were wrong, everything
about it was wrong.
Science often comes down to trial and error.
The scientists shared ideas and then...
Well, first we went to the books and it
didn't fit anything. After that, we
carefully compared the new spider to
descriptions of all spider families known
in the world today and we also consulted
books on fossil spiders.
Along the way, the researchers made
hypotheses about what this spider was and
what it wasn't. Charles looked at the
Academy's collections and others.
The more we looked at it, the more we
realized that the details were wrong for
every known family, living or extinct.
What do you do in science when you're
stumped? Reach out to the scientific
community.
You consult your colleagues who are
knowledgeable, who know some things better
than you do, and present the case for your
conclusions, the evidence, and ask, What
do you think of this? The word came back
that, No, we've never seen this before.
They made a hypothesis:
We believe it's a new family, related to
the goblin spiders, but to suggest a new
family is a very big deal. It doesn't
happen very often, and the last time this
happened in North America was more than
100 years ago.
Time for more input from the scientific
community.
So we wrote the publication; they sent
the paper and its conclusions to anonymous
scientists. And they also agreed that we'd
done a good job.
(sound of fireworks)
So let's celebrate! (rewind sound)
Wait. Remember what Judy said?
And I don't think it ever concludes.
It just keeps going. Keeps going.
Keeps going.
And that's true with Trogloraptor.
In the arachnology lab at the California
Academy of Sciences, we're very interested
in this major group of spiders. And we
have a big team of scientists-- students,
postdoctoral researchers-- who want to
understand the evolution of goblin spiders.
So they're asking more questions, making
more hypotheses and observations, doing
more testing on Trogloraptor.
It has a surprising respiratory system,
the way it breathes. The remarkable claws,
which caused us to give it its name are
the subject of an anatomical study.
Facundo Labarque has actually dissected
the feet of Trogloraptor and looked at the
attachment of tendons. My PhD student is
leading an effort to understand the
phylogeny of the Haplogyne spiders,
especially the goblin spiders, through the
use of molecular data.
And Trogloraptors in general? Those
spiders live happily on in that cave and
probably other nearby caves.
The caves are protected.
So let's look at that process again,
sped up this time. (speedy pinball sounds)
Pinball machine, right? And this process
is true not just for scientists, but
the rest of us, too.
We all do science everyday. You know, we
all make observations, we ask questions,
we communicate with people we know about
our ideas, we come back to those original
ideas. So I like to think that it
demystifies science a bit.
Everybody can do science.