Carolina parakeet, RIP

On this day in 1918, the last Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinatti Zoo. Gone. Extinct. Not just extirpated, but obliterated. Once numerous throughout the eastern half of the U.S., they steadily declined throughout the 19th century due to overhunting and land clearing. Essentially, the narrative of the last days of the Carolina parakeet is the same as that for the more widely known passenger pigeon. And our collective shame at causing it should be just as great.



Image from Wikipedia

How many more species will go extinct, recorded or not, before we make a better peace with the rest of life on Earth?

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Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. Born in 1909, Stegner helped create a genre of literary fiction that, while not strictly grounded in natural history, placed its characters in real landscapes that became important parts of the story. From the West (The Big Rock Candy Mountain) to the East (Crossing to Safety), Stegner used landscapes from his own life's experience almost as additional characters in his stories. In a very real sense, he was a true practitioner of natural history through is detailed practice of observation.

Wallace Stegner passed away in 1993. His absence is still felt today.

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Engaging fully with where you live

As usual, I am behind on my reading, so it was just this past week that I cracked open the Autumn (2008) issue of Living Bird, the truly excellent magazine produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Two articles leaped out at me from the issue, in part because they both relate to topics I care deeply about, and in part because I think they intersect with each other in a way that perhaps neither author fully appreciated.



First, in "Straight--No Chaser," Mel White brilliantly advanced the argument that if birders still feel that it is affordable to travel to distant locations simply in search of a rare sighting, then gasoline doesn't cost nearly enough. As he says in the tagline to the article's title, "It's time to reconsider traveling just to add a checkmark to a list."

"I remember one January when a Fork-tailed Flycatcher appeared in central Arkansas, attracting a mini-convention of birders the next morning (I was in attendance) hoping to see this stray from the tropics. Lots of $1.19 gasoline got burned that day, nearly everybody saw the bird--and it meant nothing, except that everyone's state and United States lists (and many world lists) advanced a notch. It wasn't a precursor to range expansion, it wasn't an endangered species, it wasn't part of a significant migration trend. It was just a mentally or physiologically defective individual that flew a long way in the wrong direction. When a severe cold front passed through a couple of days later, it no doubt met its Darwinian fate and became, as somebody said, 'possum food.'"

Amen to that. When the world is confronted with the kind of climate crisis we now face, and when the vast majority of the people in the world are confronting daily challenges in meeting their most basic needs, chasing birds simply for the purpose of expanding one's list at the expense of environmental protection is the height of self-centered arrogance.

I wrote about this briefly in a post last November, when I acknowledged that I no longer maintain lists for birds outside of my county. Think globally, but bird locally. It's the grown-up thing to do, people.

Of course, I leave myself open to the criticism that by even listing in my county I am pumping CO2 needlessly into the atmosphere, to which I can only say mea culpa. But nothing is simply "good" or "bad." I'm willing to compare my county-only carbon footprint to anyone else's state- or nation-wide footprint any day. A time may come when none of us will go anywhere for any reason unless it's under our own power, at which point I will change my goal to a list of birds seen anywhere I can ride my bike to. But we all have to start somewhere, or at least we all SHOULD start somewhere. Leaving behind the selfishness of natural history jet-setting for no good reason is a good place to start.

White's piece was followed by Jack Conner's In the Field column, called "The Accidental Phenologists," in which he counselled natural historians to pay attention to the actual timing of events, and hence seasons, where we live. We might come to notice that we don't experience the four traditional seasons but rather something more like two ... or twelve ... or fifty-two. For years now I have berated my students for not paying closer attention to the actual rhythms of the natural world, rhythms that change tempo and melody through the year and can only be discerned through careful, purposeful attention to what is real (a close approximation of how Tom Fleischner encourages us to view the practice of natural history).

Several years ago, I began experimenting with different ways of subdividing the year based on my field observations. To be honest, I've yet to come up with a single scheme that I think is clearly superior to all the others. Some of my schemes focus on what the birds are doing (e.g., The Week the Phoebe's start singing), some on the trees (e.g., Leaf Out), some on the weather (e.g., When the Ice Breaks), and some on ad hoc combinations of all three. But for me, finding the superior scheme has not been the point. My goal has been to focus on nature's patterns; paying attention to what is going on where I live ... even down to the most minute details that wouldn't merit notice in a field journal under most circumstances ... is its own reward.

And here's where the two articles intersect. Think globally, but bird (or whatever) locally. It is only by foregoing the chase for the rarities and oddities that you can truly get to know a place. Intimacy can only come from familiarity, which can only come from attention to detail and full engagement with where you live. If you can't even describe the TRUE nature of the seasons where you live, then it's time to scale back your territory and open your eyes.

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Teaching Natural History and the Spirit of Place

Fred Taylor and John Tallmadge have a new article in the Journal of Natural History Education on Teaching Natural History and the Spirit of Place. Using the field-based graduate seminar they teach as a case study, they explore the opportunities and rewards of teaching course to non-specialists that combines a literary and scientific perspective on what it means to understand and inhabit a place.

From their abstract ...

This paper describes the design and conduct of an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar on the spirit of place offered in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota to adult learners of the Union Institute Graduate School. Natural and human history were addressed through readings and class discussions combined with observations and excursions by canoe, simulating the experiences of early explorer-naturalists. Exercises in narrative and descriptive writing as well as reading the landscape and splitting the spruce roots used for bark canoe repair provided visceral appreciation of the unseen dimensions of the ecosystem and the literary achievements of the poets and writers discussed. This type of course can be easily tailored to fit different venues or clientele. Such approaches are timely as we intensify the search for a sustainable world.

Check it out.

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You are here

The Global Environmental Monitoring unit of the European Commission has hust published a nifty, if somewhat despressing, map of the travel time to major cities, which they use as a surrogate measure of "accessibility." Even without seeing the map you can probably guess what the U.S. looks like: mostly bright yellow, which symbolizes travel times of one hour or less.

While accessibility itself is not necessarily a problem, the ways in which we achieve accessibility in this current era are. Road networks, in particular, are a disaster for the natural world, causing problems for wild nature in ways ranging from chemical contamination, spread of exotic species, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, and outright mortality from contruction and roadkill.

Hopefully, the future will bring modes of transportation that don't jeopardize the natural world or destroy the presence of wild nature. Hey, it's a new political era in the U.S.; I can dream, can't I?

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Myth 4: My story is only worth telling if I describe everything I do in my entire class.

[This post is the continuation of a thread begun on 12/15]

Wrong. The more you try to describe with your story, the more complex it becomes and the harder it is for someone to learn from it. I realize that effective teachers usually plan classes as complete and distinct constructions, where exercises and field trips connect logically one to the other to support overarching themes and standards. Yet this does not mean that the component parts of the class are not useful or important on their own. Other teachers could easily incorporate a single new exercise into their own class construction to support their own educational goals.

I experience this regularly in my own school. I am blessed with colleagues who teach classes on other taxa and with other conceptual emphases than I do, yet who share my interest in natural history. We commonly talk with each other about what we do with the students in lecture, field, and lab, and more often than not, we each find aspects of what the others do that we want to incorporate into our own class. This does not change the taxa we focus on or the concepts we emphasize, but it provides for steady improvement in the quality and effectiveness of our instruction, whether it is something as simple as how to keep a field notebook or as complex as how to introduce students to a statistical technique for interpreting behavioral observations in the field.

The truth is that you make more of a contribution, not less, if you focus your story on one simple thing: an exercise, an activity, a discussion, a technique, a field trip. Here the dictum “Minor est magis” (Less is more) is relevant: tell a detailed story about one thing. The fact that you have many such stories to tell simply means that you can write several different articles; it does not mean that you need to find a way to compress all your stories into one.

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Myth 3: I should only write my story if I am sure that what I do is unique and significant

[This post is the continuation of a thread begun on 12/15]

Myth 3: I should only write my story if I am sure that what I do is unique and significant.

Wrong. I suspect this myth is ingrained in us from the body of publications that we are used to reading in the course of our research on new findings in education and natural history. Although we may accept that a core principle of the scientific method is that results must be repeatable – and hence saying something that has already been said is a key part of science – we typically do not see publication of such results. This has unfortunately led us to believe the same is true of for all publications, or even that it is desirable for all publications.

But this is not the case. For a renaissance in natural history to occur, we need to foster an explosion in the prevalence of natural history education in classrooms and community nature centers everywhere. Publications in this journal are not simply about novel ideas. They are about your practices: what did you try, what worked, what failed, what would you do differently? And there is value to reporting on activities that others have reported on … or even reporting on activities about which you have no idea whether or not they are novel. If someone reads about your practices and says, “Well, will you look at that. That’s the same exercise I heard about elsewhere,” then they are more likely to remember it and be empowered to try it. The truth is that your story is worth telling simply because it is your story, regardless of how unique it is.

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Goals for the year

One of the things I've learned about myself over the long years is that I have to have goals. The vague notion, which I develop around this time every year, that I need to do "more" of something or get "better" at something never quite seems to transform into real action. To get from notion to reality I need to set real targets for myself.

I was finally able to articulate this after talking with my partner the other day during our numerous trips up a mountain in a ski lift. "We should ski more this winter," she says. "I agree," I reply. "Let's ski more."

Yeah, ok. Let's ski more, bird more, climb more mountains, finally learn those wetland trees, and look for beetles in some different places. (Not to mention lose a few pounds and knock some time off my 5K.)

But, as I said, I need goals if it's really going to happen. Maybe that's a manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. But whatever it is, I realize now that I need to set specific targets if I'm really going to take it seriously. So I spent the rest of yesterday thinking about my goals for the year.

See 160 species of birds in my county. Check.
Climb 10 summits in the Green Mountains that I haven't climbed before. Check.
Read 5 natural history accounts that I haven't read before. Check.

And finally, complete my book on ecoregional-scale conservation planning. Double check.

I'll let you know how it goes.

So ... what about you? Got goals?

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Quote of the day

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Isaac Asimov

Well said, Isaac. This is equally true if you substitute the word "nature" for "society." Not all change is good, mind you, but our relationship with nature went seriously off the rails once humanity got it into its head that we could prevent change and enforce a kind of ecological stablity.

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone. And in the coming year, just remember ... the possibilities are endless if we just keep our eyes open.

copyright 1995, Bill Watterson

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The web of life ... and of our meddling with it

Kirk Johnson has a story in Friday's New York Times that is about exotic trees, the Dust Bowl, willow flycatchers, radiation, economic stimuli, citizen-based ecosystem restoration, beetles, drought, and Superfund. Seriously.

Check it out.

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Anniversary today

On this day in 1831, a voyage began that would ultimately rock our understanding of how the natural world came to have the form that it has. Charles Darwin, born into a middle-upper class British family in 1809, developed an early love for the natural world but apparently little ambition for any of the traditional career paths open to a person of his social standing in the early 1800s. Following his graduation from Cambridge University in 1831, he accepted a position as ...

... naturalist and companion to the captain of the British ship HMS Beagle, whose mission was to chart the coast of South America. The voyage of the Beagle lasted five years, circumnavigated the globe, and provided young Darwin with the opportunity to explore the diversity of the natural world from a global perspective. While he was certainly not the first explorer to have done so, he was among the wave of 19th century explorers who were ultimately provide a framework for understanding the processes that are responsible for shaping the patterns we see in the natural world today.

Many years after Darwin's return from the voyage in 1836, he developed a logical argument for how lineages of organisms could change over time in response to differential selection -- with respect to both survival and reproductive success -- caused by the environment. Dubbed natural selection, Darwin eventually (in 1859) fully laid out his argument in the book On the Origin of Species, which drew heavily on the observations he made while traveling on the Beagle; and the world has never been the same since.

Part of the attraction for me of Darwin's life story has always been its example of the power of observation. At the risk of understating the hardships of the voyage itself, Darwin in fact did little more on the voyage than collect, observe, and take meticulous notes. That, coupled with his brilliant ability to patiently ask (and answer) how one could make the most sense of his field observations, was all it took to shake human understanding of the world to its core.

The seismic tremors that began with the voyage of the Beagle have still not ended, since an acceptance of evolution by means of natural selection remains one of the primary touchstones in the global religio-culture wars. But regardless of where one stands with respect to those wars, one has to acknowledge the significance of a small ship that sailed out of Plymouth harbor on December 27, 1831.

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Species at risk from climate change

A recent article from the New Scientist reports on a new study released by the World Conservation Union on species susceptible to climate change impacts. The highlights are not pleasant.

Of 17,000 assessed species, over 7000 could become threatened with extinction because of climate change.

Ninety "life history traits" - essential elements of a species' behaviour or lifestyle - were identified that were likely to be affected by a change in a species' local climate. These included:

* Requirements for a specialised habitat: some amphibians depend on a stream or pond, so if that dries out there is no way they can survive;
* Specific environmental tolerances: many corals cannot survive if the water temperature or pH exceeds a certain threshold;
* Dependence on environmental cues: many species depend on changes in day length or rainfall to start breeding;
* Dependence on interactions with other species: without prey a specialised predator cannot survive; lichen depend on trees, and many plants on their pollinators;
* Ability to disperse: as their historical habitats become increasingly hostile, species will need to move to new territories but may not be able to do so if there is something - a body of water, perhaps - in their way.

Half of all amphibians, one-third of all birds and over two-thirds of assessed corals are susceptible to climate change.

Within each group, some species are more likely to suffer. Among the birds, all albatross and penguin species were deemed susceptible. Herons, egrets, ospreys, kites, hawks and eagles, on the other hand, are less so.

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Myth 2: Big-picture philosophy is more important than practical advice

[This post is the continuation of a thread begun on 12/15]

Wrong. Big-picture philosophy is great, of course. It’s what provides a pedagogical grounding for what we do, and the field of education is rife with big-picture philosophies: people learn more by doing than by seeing; children benefit by spending time outdoors; collaborative learning is good; and so on. But picture yourself as a novice educator, armed with only these philosophies. What will they actually empower you to do with your students on Monday morning? How can you translate them into a lesson plan? A field-trip itinerary? A wish list for equipment and supplies to put together a new exercise or museum display? For philosophies to translate into anything useful, they have to be followed up with practical, detailed advice on what to do and how to do it. The truth is that the details of your experiences translating philosophical truisms into educational activities are a critical part of educational theory. Without practical advice, philosophies will never come to life and bear fruit, and your detailed stories are precisely the kind of practical advice that others need.

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Five myths about writing about teaching natural history: Myth 1

Yes, the title of this post is a mouthful. Yet it makes an important point. A year and a half ago the Natural History Network launched the Journal of Natural History Education, and since that time, as editor, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with numerous people about developing articles for the journal. Some of them contacted me at the suggestion of an NHN board member or colleague; some simply came across the journal on the web and thought they had an idea for an article.

Without exception, all of them had interesting and important stories to tell about teaching natural history. But also without exception, my conversations with them, both initial discussions about how a story could be developed into a manuscript as well as follow-up conversations about how manuscripts could be improved, revealed that teachers are enormously intimidated by and uncertain about telling their stories.

Five key myths emerge repeatedly. I call them myths because they are fundamentally incorrect, but I could just as easily call them barriers because these myths stand in the way of telling our stories in ways that share knowledge and experience, as well as empower other teachers to participate in the natural history renaissance (Trombulak and Fleischner 2007). Over a series of posts, I'd like to describe each of these myths. First up, Myth 1 ...

Myth 1: Nobody really wants to know about what I do with my students.

Wrong. Imagine that you come across an article that talks about teaching natural history to the same kinds of students you teach and with the same kind of emphasis you make. What is your reaction to that article? Do you say, “No, I don’t want to read it because it is too relevant to my life as a teacher”? Of course not. As teachers, we are always looking for better ways to communicate, educate, and evaluate. We are well aware that there are a thousand different ways to construct an exercise or activity, most of which we know we would not develop on our own. So we are always talking to our colleagues about what they do and how well they think it works.

Your colleagues are no different than you. Just as you want to learn from them, so too do they want to learn from you. Maybe they will listen to your story and adopt your approach in their own class, and maybe they will decide that they prefer what they are currently doing. But that’s not the point. What matters is that you are giving them the opportunity to consider alternatives and improvements. The truth is that they want to know what you are doing with your students because it gives them the opportunity to improve as educators, whether or not they agree with you.

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The mind of mice

Natural History magazine reports on a recent study published by Karen Mabry and Judy Stamps in the journal American Naturalist about how juvenile brush mice (Peromyscus boylii) select new nest sites. This species is native and broadly distributed throughout western North America. Rather than simply selecting the first acceptible nest site they encounter, they spend a week or more searching for and revisiting sites until eventually settling down.

What I find interesting about the report is that it further exemplifies the cognitive complexity of non-human animals. Sure, they are just mice, but they are actually comparison "shopping," a cognitive skill that involves the ability to compare items encountered at different times and different locations as well as the willingness to forego an acceptible resource in current possession (the potential nest site the mouse is presently at) for a better resource that was encountered in the past.

When I was a graduate student, Don Griffin had just published the first edition of his book Animal Thinking. I remember it being highly controversial because it argued (quite persuasively, in my opinion) that animals were conscious creatures. Prior to the 1980s, most behaviorists seemed comfortable thinking of animals as if they were non-conscious automatons. Griffin argued otherwise, and the avalanche of studies that have been done otherwise seems to support his position.

Comparison shopping for homes by mice seems to me to fit quite nicely into this view. The natural world is not only alive, but much of it is conscious and aware!

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It's that time of year

No, not the holidays. Final exams and papers. I'm up to my eyeballs with papers about exotic species, ecological reserves, and conservation initiatives. While most are generally well written (I am blessed with being able to teach a fairly high caliber of student), some make mistakes that are downright embarrassing.

"The range of the American chestnut once stretched from Main to Georgia."

"Zebra muscles were introduced into the Great Lakes in the 1980s."

and my personal favorite so far ...


"The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park led to a reduction in the size of the elf population."

What these (and many other examples) all have in common is, I think, an over-reliance on spell-checkers and a lack of careful proofreading. No great sin, I suppose. But when I see these kinds of mistakes I am always reminded of Taylor Mali's poem, "The The Impotence of Proofreading."



And the memory of it always makes me smile.

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Quote of the day

How Strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), in Letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper

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Birthday celebration

Today is the birthday of C. Hart Merriam, one of the natural history pioneers in North America in the 1800s. Born on this day in 1855, probably Merriam's most lasting contribution to the field of natural history was his introduction of what we call today "Merriam's life zones," an early attempt to describe regions based on their plant and animal communities. When I was a kid, Merriam's system of life zones (e.g., Sonoran, Hudsonian) was the primary method my little brain used to organize a vast amount of natural history information, making it possible for me to make sense of what I was seeing around me as I began to travel more widely, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Although we now have far more sophisticated ways of subdividing the landscape, Merriam set the stage for subsequent generations of natural historians and geographers.

From Wikipedia ...

Clinton Hart Merriam (December 5, 1855-March 19, 1942) was an American zoologist, ornithologist, entomologist and ethnographer.

He was born in New York City in 1855. His father, Clinton Levi Merriam, was a U.S. congressman. He studied biology and anatomy at Yale University and went on to obtain an M.D. from the School of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1879.

In 1886, he became the first chief of the Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy of the United States Department of Agriculture, predecessor to the National Wildlife Research Center and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. He was one of the original founders of the National Geographic Society in 1888. He developed the "life zones" concept to classify biomes found in North America. In mammalogy, he is known as an excessive splitter, proposing, for example, tens of different species of North American brown bears in several genera.

In 1899, he helped railroad magnate E. H. Harriman to organize an exploratory voyage along the Alaska coastline.

Some species of animals that bear his name are Merriam's Wild Turkey Meliagris gallopavo meriami, the now extinct Merriam's Elk Cervus elaphus merriami, and Merriam's Chipmunk Tamias merriami. Much of his detail-oriented taxonomy continues to be influential within mammalogical and ornithological circles.

Later in life, funded by the Harriman family, Merriam's focus shifted to studying and assisting the Native American tribes in the western United States. His contributions on the myths of central California and on ethnogeography were particularly noteworthy.

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The Welland Canal ... and other thoughts about lamprey

Today marks the anniversary of two events with lasting implications for the natural history of large freshwater lakes in eastern North America. On this day in 1824, ground was broken for the construction of the Welland Canal, intended to become a bypass around Niagara Falls and allow cargo ships to move freely from Lake Ontario (which has direct access to the Atlantic Ocean) into Lake Erie (which then allows access to the North American interior as far west as Duluth, Minnesota).

And on this day in 1829, the Welland Canal was completed. Although it was modified on a series of occasions over the next several years, it was on this date that free movement upstream from the St. Lawrence River into the heart of the continent became possible. And not just for ships, mind you, but for everything else that lived in Lake Ontario.

Unfortunately, this also meant Sea Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus). Sea Lamprey are one of a handful of jawless fish that feed as adults as ectoparasites, attaching to the bodies of thin-scaled bony fish (such as Lake Trout), rasping wounds with "toothed" oral muscles, and feeding on body fluids seeping out of the wounds. Sea Lamprey, native to Lake Ontario but unknown from Lake Erie westward, colonized the interior lakes through the Welland Canal. Over the course of about 100 years, their populations grew to the point where they had decimated many of the inland cold-water fisheries, causing enough damage to inspire a massive control program.

The life cycle of Sea Lamprey is complex. Adults swim up certain rivers and streams to lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae settle down where the sediment is sandy-to-silty, burrowing tail first with only their mouths and gill chambers exposed into the water. Here they live for several years as filter feeders before eventually metamorphosing into ectoparasitic adults and migrating downstream to a larger body of water (such as Lake Erie).

The only control method that seemed to be effective was the use of a chemical, 3-trifluoromethyl-4-nitrophenol, aka TFM. When applied into the water of the breeding rivers and streams, TFM killed the filter-feeding larvae. (While much debate swirled around the use of TFM, there is no debating its effectiveness at controling lamprey.) By the early 1960s, more than 130 years after the completion of the Welland Canal, the controlled use of TFM final brought lamprey populations under control in the Great Lakes.

The Welland Canal. Another example of unintended ... and long-term ... consequences.

Postscript: I can't help but add a coda to this story. The success of controling Sea Lamprey in the Great Lakes with TFM has been used to justify the control of Sea Lamprey in Lake Champlain, a large freshwater lake on the border of eastern New York and western Vermont whose outlet connects to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River. By the 1980s, lamprey attackes on freshwater fish in Lake Champlain had grown so severe that a coalition of federal, state, and special interest group advocates successfully lobbied for a TFM program in lamprey breeding rivers flowing into the lake. The primary argument was that Sea Lamprey entered Lake Champlain following the contruction of the Champlain Canal, connecting Lake Champlain southward to the Hudson River, in 1823. Thus, just as Sea Lamprey were successfully controlled with TFM in Lake Erie following their accidental establishment, so too should Sea Lamprey be controlled with TFM in Lake Champlain. What worked for controlling an exotic species in one location could and should be used to control the same exotic in another location.

There's just one problem with that concept. Sea Lamprey are not exotics in Lake Champlain.

They are irrefutably native, and the ability of agencies to shape public and court opinion to the contrary is a marvelous example of the power of words to create perception, and the risks of not knowing enough about the natural history of one's region.

Prior to the explosion of Sea Lamprey in Lake Champlain in the 1970s and 80s, they were typically described as a native species. This language began to change, however, as their effect on game fish like Lake Trout increased. Press releases and government brochures began to describe Sea Lamprey as "native, or possibly exotic," then as "exotic, but possibly native," and then as simply "exotic." When asked to justify the conclusion that they are exotic, the answer typically invoked the argument that they were not recorded in Lake Champlain until after the completion of the Champlain Canal. Interesting correlation, but hardly evidence of causation, given how little was recorded about the natural history of aquatic ecosystems in Vermont and New York prior to the 1840s.

In any event, now that the Sea Lamprey was "officially" an exotic species, it became justifiable to wage chemical warfare on them. Afterall, they were exotic, and shouldn't be there in the first place. The fact that TFM is also lethal to other forms of aquatic life, including the rare aquatic salamander called the mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus) was unfortunate, but that's just the price that needed to be paid to control this exotic pest.

Of course, if one REALLY wanted to learn whether or not Sea Lamprey were native or exotic to Lake Champlain, one could easily imagine a simply study that could answer this question. In fact, the study is so simple and so obvious that generations of my students, when posed with the question of how to determine the Sea Lamprey's status, always came up with the answer within 5-10 seconds: make a genetic comparison of Sea Lamprey from Lake Champlain with those in Lake Ontario and the Hudson River. Surprisingly, it wasn't until 2005 until someone thought to make such a comparison. And completely unsurprisingly, at least to me and many others, the results conclusively showed that the Lake Champlain populations of Sea Lamprey are too distinct from those in the Hudson River to have been recent colonists, but rather, were native.

Of course, the response of the pro-lamprey control lobby was predictable. When confronted with evidence that their straw-man argument was false, they began the rhetorical side-step shuffle. "Well," they said, "it really doesn't matter whether they are native or exotic. They still need to be controlled."

In fact, that may well be true. Blind warfare against exotics and blind acceptance of natives no matter what the circumstances are both foolish propositions.

What has my BVDs in a bunch on this issue is not that state and federal agencies would try and control a native species. Its that by ignoring the real natural history of this species ... and in fact manipulating the perception of the natural history of this species ... these agencies blinded themselves to looking at what was really going on. The search for the cause of the lamprey's increased depredation in game fish was derailed from the start: they were exotic, end of story. By not knowing the truth, simplistic solutions (dump poisons into the rivers) could be promoted and enacted without serious exploration of the real causes. Yes, the increased rate of depredation was real. I don't doubt that. But unless the true status of lamprey is recognized, then the critical question could never be asked: If Sea Lamprey are native, why is the rate of depredation increasing now?

I don't know the answer to that question, nor at this point does anyone else. Have we critically altered the biotic communities in the lake? Altered sedimentation or nutrient loading via rivers and streams? Altered influx of air-borne pollutants? All of the above? Something else entirely? Only future work will untimately answer these questions.

My point is this: We could never answer these questions until we asked them. And we could never ask them until we got the natural history right.

So perhaps the biologists who now say that it doesn't matter whether or not the Sea Lamprey are exotic are right, but only on a superficial level. It matters a great deal when it comes to asking the right questions.

Earlier in this post I mentioned that the fact that Sea Lamprey are native was unsurprising. You might well ask why. It is simply this: Geologists have known for decades that up until about 10,000 years ago, Lake Champlain was actually a salt-water arm of the Atlantic Ocean called the Champlain Sea. This sea drained and became a small freshwater lake only after two millennia had passed since the retreat of the last glacial ice sheet from this area and the Earth's crust could finally rebound in elevation. Ten thousand years ago this region not only had open access to the Atlantic Ocean, it was the Atlantic Ocean. Sea Lamprey had to have been present, and no rational argument has ever been advanced as to how they could have been wiped out only to successfully recolonize via the Champlain Canal.

Natural history is not just telling Just So Stories about nature. It's knowing the history of where one lives. That history is written in the rocks; it's written in each species' genome; it's written in the landscape carved by glaciers, cut by axes, and broken by plows. Ignore any part of that history and not only will you fail to find the correct answers, but you will fail to even ask the correct questions.

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