How to Make Your Day with Citizen Science!

How can you make an ordinary hike into an odyssey of the mind? Do some citizen science, of course!

It was a nice day in early summer, so I decided to take a hike. In Tulsa, there is really only one place to do this: Turkey Mountain, so called because it is not a mountain and has no turkeys. I could have gone to Red Bud Valley, which is a really nice place northeast of Tulsa, but the only road into and out of it is one across which trains park for hours at a time, blocking access in and out. In contrast, Turkey Mountain is near my home and is accessible.

But I have been there so many times! I almost know every trail and every tree and every rock. Of course, I always need the exercise and the fresh air. But there must be something more I could do, I thought.

There was. First, I told myself that I would deliberately look for interesting things that I might have previously overlooked. I am a botanist and I know a lot of plants, but there are quite a few that I don’t know. I did not want to carry a key with me (a big book which allows plant identification). Therefore, for many years, I just ignored the plants I didn’t know.

All of that changed with the advent of iNaturalist. Get the app on your phone; take a photo; the app will identify the species of plant (or fungus or bird or scorpion or even bacteria in some cases; it identified Nostoc commune for me, the star jelly, a cyanobacterial mat); upload it to a database with millions of observations. Therefore, I deliberately looked for new things. iNaturalist can identify plants even from crappy phone images; I verified them when I got home. Perhaps the best part is that your observation is added to the database right away, and anybody in the world can look at it, though it appears to be limited to North American observations. Within seconds you can contribute to a worldwide scientific database. Such is the power of citizen science! Bring it along with you on your hike. Participate in citizen science.

(I know you are wondering. Star jelly is mat of single cells that looks like black dried snot except that it comes back to life whenever it rains. Way cool. For centuries, it has been considered extraterrestrial in origin, e.g. asteroid poop. And an article in the magazine Fate, to which I am afraid to link, still says this. If I wrote horror novels, I would have a giant star jelly attacking Godzilla. How about, Attack of the Killer Star Jelly?)

Here is an example of how participating in citizen science helped me learn things. I had always wondered what the grass was that grew along the trail in the forest. I found out it was a panic grass (genus Dichanthelium). But as I looked, I saw the “grass” was mixed in with a rush, Juncus tenuis. They look alike until you look closely.

But this is not, so far, actual science. Somebody might use the iNaturalist database to conduct scientific research, but if I just uploaded images, I was still a participant rather than an actual scientist.

Then I noticed something. It is the peak flowering time for wild carrot, Daucus carota, also called Queen Anne’s lace.

One of the strange things about the bunch of little flowers (called, in this case, an umbel) is that in the very center there is a purplish-black knob which is actually an undeveloped flower. Why is it there? I remember us botany students discussing it back when I was in grad school. Maybe, I thought, I will look it up when I get home. But instead I decided to do some science.

I noticed, first, that some of the umbels had the knobs and some did not. Second, I noticed that there seemed to be more pollinators on the umbels with knobs than those without. The hypothesis popped into my head: the knob looks like a pollinator, and it attracts other pollinators. The insects think that, if there is already a pollinator present, the umbel must be a good place to eat.

Nice idea. Now, to test the hypothesis. I needed to find a big sample of umbels with knobs, and umbels without knobs. Just looking at some of the many umbels along the trail, I found a total of 232 umbels: 136 with knobs, 96 without. I then counted the number of pollinators on each flower, and recorded these numbers on my phone notebook. (I stopped using paper when I found that sweat would destroy my paper notes.) These are the results I got:

	Percent of umbels without any pollinators	Average number of pollinators per umbel
Umbels with knobs	39	2.42
Umbels without knobs	47	1.53

The results seemed clear: flowers with the black knobs attracted more pollinators: there were fewer knobbed umbels without pollinators, and the average number of pollinators was greater.

Notice some things I had to take into account in designing this little survey.

• First, I had to avoid bias. I really had no idea if my hypothesis was correct when I started; I was not trying to get a certain answer. I even did the analysis itself before reading any background material, so as to not let other people’s results bias my analysis.
• Second, I needed an adequate sample size of umbels with knobs, and those without. If all of the umbels had knobs, I could not have tested the hypothesis. The explanation would then be lost in the evolutionary past. But there were plenty of both kinds of umbels.

I needed a large sample size because there are many other factors at work in this system. Pollinators do not behave independently of one another. They tend to move in groups, which means that, inevitably, some knobbed umbels will remain unvisited, while some un-knobbed umbels will have pollinators, even if the pollinators have a clear preference for knobbed flowers.

The next step was one I did not have time to take, and is beyond the reach of most citizen-scientists: statistical analysis. Almost any result can occur by chance. This result does not seem to be due to chance, but a statistical program on a computer (if you can afford one) will calculate the probability that the results are due to chance. You can’t do this on your cell phone. Not only do you need a program, but you need to know what you are doing. With all of those zeroes (39% and 47% of the observations), you cannot do regular parametric statistics. If you do, and get a very significant result, it is probably okay, though. But unless you have a computer program, you can’t do either parametric or nonparametric statistics. Back in grad school, we did it laboriously by hand. On clay tablets (just kidding).

Okay, now it’s time to look at the literature. Why is there a purplish-black spot in the middle of the umbel? Legend has it that Queen Anne, an avid lace-maker, pricked her finger and left a drop of blood in the middle of the lace. But, let’s stick to science. My hypothesis, that the black knob attracts insects, is the leading explanation, according to The Carrot Museum in the U.K. (You read that right. There is, in fact, a Carrot Museum, although it is online. It is dedicated to the history, evolution, science, sociology, and art of the carrot.) If I had not stopped to do some citizen science, I would never have been provoked into searching online and discovering the Carrot Museum.

But according to a 2013 article in Plant Species Biology, the dark knob in the middle of the umbel does not attract pollinators. This study used videography and triangulation. So, who is right? Me, or those authors? This raises an interesting possibility: maybe the dark knob attracts pollinators sometimes, but not others. I just got lucky. We were both right.

Then there is the possibility that the dark knob is simply a developmental oddity that is harmless and that neither natural nor artificial selection has eliminated.

Now, was this an interesting hike or what? Oh, those poor people who run or walk along with earbuds, thinking that the natural world is not interesting enough for them! But if you are reading this you probably don’t have this problem.

My Green, Green Happy Place

Sometimes I like to go to my happy place. This time, it was so that I could relax and enjoy my happiness at being a new grandfather. For some people, their happy place is a fantasy inside their minds. But for me, it is an actual place: the forest. In particular, the forest on Turkey Mountain outside of Tulsa.

The forest is a place with layers upon layers of stories. It is a palimpsest, that is, a document with layer upon layer of writing. On this particular like, I already knew almost all of the stories. One story was the geological history of the landscape. As I looked down from the mountain onto the Arkansas River, I remembered that this mile-wide river was once ten miles wide, as the glaciers up north melted. Another story was about human impact. The forest all around me grew in just the last century, since the time when this mountain was covered with oil derricks. Each species of tree, and each tree, had its own story: an evolutionary story of adaptation, and a developmental story of how each individual tree adjusted to its immediate environment of shade and sun, of deep soil or rock outcrop. The story is written from moment to moment. When I hiked, a drought was underway, and many leaves were wilted. Wilting is not completely a bad thing; by drooping down, a leaf has less of a heat load from the sunlight and avoids some of the damage it would otherwise experience. There are also many stories of food webs, whether it is of insects that have eaten the tender leaf tissue between the veins, or fungi eating dead branches. There is the story of the hard, green, inedible persimmon fruits that keep animals away until the seeds are ready to disperse, and only then do the fruits become ripe and delicious. There is the story of stumps sprouting back to life.

I knew all of these stories, but I just wanted to see them again on this hike. But I kept my eyes open, just in case there was a new story. And I found one—just one. A mimosa sampling was hit hard by the drought. Mimosas have lots of little leaflets which, after being held horizontally to face the sunlight in the day, close upward at night for reasons that nobody knows for sure. The leaflets also close upward during moderate drought, thus reducing their solar heat load. The leaflet movements are caused by bags of water called pulvini (singular pulvinus). When the bags of water exert pressure, they push the leaflets; when the bags lose pressure, the leaflets return to their original position.

But what I did not know was, are the pulvini on the top of the leaf or the bottom? If they are on top, then the water pressure pushes the leaflets open; their nocturnal closure represents only a loss of pressure, a relaxation, going to sleep. If this is the case, then the closure of the leaflets at night does not need an explanation. The plant is saving energy by letting the leaves relax. But if the pulvini are on the bottom, then the nocturnal closure demands an explanation: why would the mimosa leaf deliberately close its leaflets at night? This requires the expenditure of energy. The same is true for leaflet closure during moderate drought. If the pulvini are on the top, leaflet closure is merely the result of drought; but if they are on the bottom, then leaflet closure is a deliberate act to prevent drought damage. Of course, the pulvini are too small for me to see.

But I saw one leaf that was so stressed by heat and drought that the leaflets were starting to curl up and die. And in this leaf, the leaflets were horizontal. This tells me that the pulvini are on the bottom. I know this because, when severe drought causes the pulvini to stop working, the leaflets are horizontal, not vertical. In the photo, the drought-damaged leaflets are on top, the leaflets that are actively responding to drought are on the bottom. The damanged leaflets are horizontal, and the responsive leaflets are almost vertical.

To me, this was a new story that I learned on my hike. But I enjoyed re-experiencing the thousand other stories in the forest that I already knew.

The Discipline of Inspiration

I certainly did not feel like taking a hike this morning. But yesterday I decided I would hike at dawn today. My body woke up before 6:00 and said, Get up, ya lazy ass, ya said ya wanted to go on a hike. So I got up, and for the next 511 calories I hiked, stumbling at first, and at last. But I decided I was going to experience the beauty of the world. And I did. Inspiration isn’t something that you wait around for. It is a discipline.

The fact that the words and music of “Sunday morning coming down,” popularized by Johnny Cash, were going through my mind did not help to inspire me, written as they were about a lonely man with a hangover. Even when alone I am not lonely, and I certainly have not experienced “And there’s nothing short of dying that’s half as lonesome as the sound…of Sunday morning coming down,” but part of my discipline was to focus the rest of my mind, the part not parasitized by that tune, on the beauty around me.

And during an Oklahoma heat wave, when it is almost 80 degrees F at sunrise, it is more of a discipline than in many other places. All I did was crouch to take a photo of a turtle, who was as zonked as I was, and I found myself panting.

It was also a discipline because the forest in which I was immersed was surrounded by frantic economic activity; just a half mile away, there was an endless grind of trucks. I had to force myself to pay attention to my surroundings. I was ready to take notes, not trusting my groggy memory. I used to take notes on paper, but I now use an iPhone, because sweat effaces both pen and pencil, and returns paper to its pulpy natal state.

We divide the year into seasons, and the seasons into periods (such as early summer, our current period). But actually the natural world goes through its seasonal cycles, and each week or two is noticeably different. It seems like just yesterday when the persimmon fruit was just a flower.This week, the Sabatia, Monarda, and Ruellia flowers were out. Two weeks hence and you won’t see very many of them. And there is no season in which the trees can sit back and just do their work. They are constantly monitoring their environments for opportunities. In most years, they simply let the leaves they grew in the springtime do their photosynthetic work for them; but this is such a wet year that many of the trees, from blackjack oaks to winged elms, have seized the opportunity to invest in the wealth and produce a new flush of leaves.

You have to decide to look and notice things. Any other time and I might have walked right past the new, unopened florets of Chasmanthium “fish-on-a-pole” grass.

Had I not glanced up, I would not have noticed the struggle for existence going on right over my head, as a spider sucked the life out of an insect.

I always teach my students that Virginia creeper vines have leaves with five leaflets. But today I was deliberately alert for surprising variation. And I noticed what I had perhaps often seen but not thought about: a Virginia creeper whose leaves had three leaflets, sometimes four.

You have to look closely and think about things. Yes, I am that guy ahead on the trail who is crouching down to look at horse droppings. It has been so warm and humid that, within a day or two, a sheen of fungus has started growing over them.

I was not the only person on the trail. A bunch of young men came running along the trail, their coach at the end of the line. They could not have noticed the quiet details that I saw, but they certainly noticed more than they would have if they had stayed at home.

There is a story I have heard about St. Francis of Assisi, who loved all the animals (and plants and Brother Sun and Sister Moon). When he encountered dying earthworms on the trail, he would pick them up and throw them back into moist soil. I wonder if, today, they would call him St. Francis the Sissy. But, as I mindfully walked on the trail this morning, I could appreciate his reverence for life. Unlike Francis, I left the worms where they were—there are so many of them, I cannot possibly save enough worm-lives to matter, and they were already wriggling in the last throes of death anyway. And worm death is part of the ecosystem I so admire. But maybe, if he had seen me stop and look, St. Francis would have smiled and reflected, At least I made him think for a moment.

Inspiration also followed discipline in my life yesterday. I am working on what might be the most significant novel that I will ever write, a rewrite of a rewrite of a 1991 rewrite of a 1990 manuscript. I had the ending pretty much tied up in the original version, or so I thought, but I realized yesterday there were too many loose ends, characters and continents left dangling. I had to write a new ending to the novel. I really did not feel like it, nor did I have a clue how I was going to do this. But I just decided to start. The wellsprings of creativity soon carried me away and I wrote 7400 words of an ending I could not have guessed even earlier the same day. This creative work took a lot out of me. I don’t think I could do it today, but there is no day on which I can write anything unless I undertake the discipline of inviting my mind to unleash its creativity.

So perhaps the best time for a nature walk is when you are disinclined to it. The great composer Antonín Dvořák routinely took a sunrise nature walk. Today is one of the few days that I have done so, but I tasted a little bit of the inspiration he felt. But even for a genius like Dvořák, inspiration only came in after discipline had opened the door.

A Brain Takes a Nature Walk

I am currently reading Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman. It is one of several books based on modern psychology that give us new insights into what our brains are like—insights that are both disturbing and liberating.

I already knew that the brain does not present us with an objective picture of reality. I thought that it processes sensory information into a model of reality, one in which the information from the environment is presented to us in a useful fashion. For example, I knew about sensory fatigue, in which an unchanging sensory input is soon ignored by the brain. This keeps the conscious brain from being overwhelmed by information. I also knew that color is an illusion. The brain uses inputs from three kinds of retinal cones to create a false-color picture of the environment, one in which ripe fruits are red so that they can be easily spotted by hungry animals without having to think about the complex mixture of wavelengths reflected from the environment.

And this is what I have been teaching my classes for almost three decades. But it turns out I might be wrong about this. The brain does not, apparently, process sensory information into a model of reality. Instead, our brains (according to Eagleman) internally generate a picture of reality. That is, what we see, hear, and feel is a model that the brain generates from its own memories and expectations. The brain uses sensory input only to modify and adjust this model as needed.

I took a walk in the woods this morning. It was the perfect time for a walk on Turkey Mountain, just outside of Tulsa. A Tuesday morning is almost the only time the parking lot is not full. The temperature was perfect, the sunlight was clear, and the leaves were light green, soft, and profuse (they will later be dark green, hard, and scraggly). It was also the last time for a while: the abundant rains that have suddenly filled our low reservoirs will return tomorrow. I walked on trails I have explored dozens of times. My mind pretty much knew where to make my body go. My mind utilized sensory input only to modulate where my feet moved so as to position themselves correctly on the rocks that my subconscious mind probably already knew were there. I could not have walked blindfolded, but just a few visual data are all that were necessary to allow me to walk—a few more than usual, since I had to avoid mud holes that others before me had not, and fallen branches and trunks.

Every person who was on the trail had a different mental image of it. Some joggers noticed only where the rocks and mud were, as they ran along listening to headphones. Some hikers saw little more than this, perhaps being aware of the vaulted canopy of branches overhead, as they concentrated mainly on their own animated conversations. The brains of dirt bikers had to do quick calculations of velocity and momentum, not having time to notice anything else.

And then there was me, the botanist. I noticed all the different kinds of trees: no matter how many times I see them, I feel like they are old friends. I wonder how many other hikers realize just how many kinds of trees there are. I also noticed the spatial patterns of the trees: the post oaks in higher and drier spots, the red oaks in the lower and wetter spots. I also noticed that poison ivy and aromatic sumac (with which it can be easily confused) never grow in exactly the same place, the former preferring shadier and wetter microclimates. Moreover, pollinating insects do not get poison ivy and smooth sumac (whose flowers look almost alike) mixed up since poison ivy is blooming right now and the smooth sumac flowers won’t open until at least next week; and they cannot confuse either of these with aromatic sumac, whose flowers open before any of the leaves have come out.

Here are photos of poison ivy flowers, and the gigantic leaves!

I also notice the bark of each tree. My daughter thinks I have a picture of every tree trunk in Oklahoma, but I know I’ve missed more than half of them. Bark is beautiful, each species having its own kind, each life stage having its own kind, and each tree having bark that reflects its own personal story of experience, growth, and recovery, as in this post oak that has had to start its life over again at least twice:

I see the forest as a functioning system in space and time, rather than as a backdrop for my own human activities. My brain noticed all these things because I consciously decided to look for them.

But my brain ignored a lot of things that other scientists could have pointed out to me. I am sure there were lots of insects, and insect galls, that I did not even see. To me, an insect-damaged leaf was one to ignore when taking photos, instead of a vital piece of information to understand the food chain of the forest. It was only by chance that I noticed a wild bee pollinating a Phacelia flower.

As for birds, you have to look closely to see the indigo buntings, whose blue backs appear black at first glance. A geologist would be able to explain how processes millions of years ago produced sandstone in some places, and shale in others, on what is now Turkey Mountain, and until recently I walked right past fossilized impressions and even petrified wood of prehistoric lepidodendrid trees without even seeing them. My brain was in plant mode just as the joggers’ brains were in don’t-slip-in-the-mud mode. I, too, entered the forest with an internally-generated model of what it was supposed to be like.

I would like to leave you with this thought. You can always enjoy a place more if you look closely and start noticing things. If you keep your brain in energy-savings mode, so that it responds only to threats and inconveniences, you are  missing the joy of being alive. Of course, I do not need to say this to anyone who is reading this essay right now! And the people who come to the forest only to jog might, in fact, find themselves surprised and pleased at discovering something about the forest through which they had merely intended to run.