“In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on." — Peter Navarro (American Economist)

Georgina Mace. Ring any bells? How about Professor Dame Georgina Mace, Commander of the British Empire? I am embarrassed to say, me neither. Yet Professor Mace, who passed away in September 2020, had a profound effect on the implementation of endangered species conservation measures. What she realized was that species’ taxonomy, IUCN Red List rankings (International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species has evolved to become the world’s most comprehensive information source on the global conservation status of animal, fungi, and plant species), and the implementation of conservation needs at local scales were often mismatched. The IUCN Red List is focused on the global status of species. Taxonomy is based on species-wide distributions. Yet, conservation often occurs at local scales, in response to local habitat losses, local stressors. This mismatch of scales allowed many species to slip through the regulatory and planning cracks by not be recognized as needing local protection, and so could and would result in an ever-widening loss of biodiversity. Countries around the world often depend on the Red List to trigger conservation actions; as a result, species with broader distributions but that were being threatened on the edge of their distributions got ignored, and so were obliterated. Mace's insights resulted fundamental changes that meant more species received protection; more biodiversity was maintained at all scales. 

Here in the U.S. the Red List plays a much lesser role in conservation planning. We have our Endangered Species list which guides what species get protection, but that alone does not obviate the conundrum Mace identified. Under the original, 1973 version of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) only recognized species that were endangered throughout their range as deserving of its protections. It was not until the 1982 amendments to the ESA that allowed for regional conservation planning (Habitat Conservation Plans), so that conservation efforts were then able to include local species distributions, species at the fringes of their distributions, and species with broader distributions but with isolated populations that were at risk, worthy of conservation attention. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service adopted evolutionarily significant units (ESU), populations of organisms that are considered distinct for purposes of conservation, a term that can apply to any species, subspecies, geographic race, or population. Mace's conundrum was recognized and resolved.

Georgina Mace was an accomplished scientist. That alone is noteworthy, but as a woman born in the 1950s, science and certainly conservation biology, was not a likely career path. Science was then considered the sole domain of men. In Charles Darwin’s time women were rarely admitted to any University. Those prejudices continued into the middle and later portions of the 20^th century, and only recently has the gender bias (of hiring primarily males) in university science departments disappeared (or nearly so). Edmund Jaeger was the author of over a dozen natural history books, a Palm Springs resident who taught desert field biology at Riverside Junior College (now Riverside Community College – RCC) and lead his students on legendary overnight field trips in the 1920s to 1950s throughout the southern California deserts. Those field trips were said to be life-changing, setting many students on a path to higher degrees in the sciences. Except women were explicitly forbidden to participate. Nevertheless, there are reliable reports that women did attend, but did so by disguising themselves as young men. Apparently, even as an astute naturalist, Jaeger was not adept at telling the boys from the girls. Mace never encountered Edmond Jaeger, but almost certainly encountered similar attitudes and so broke through similar barriers.

In the classes I teach, women always outnumber men. Our community scientists, assisting us in surveys of lizards and plants, women outnumber men by nearly 2 to 1. The perspective women bring to science has broken down long-held prejudices and in doing so advanced those sciences. As an example, it was previously believed that in animals where there is male on male combat (e.g., deer, elk, bighorn sheep) that the “winner” then got his pick of the females that were placidly watching the battles. Then animal behaviorists and ecologists that happened to be women offered a different interpretation. Perhaps the females were evaluating the male’s performances, closely watching the males’ behavior and then picking their preferred mates; rather than being the indifferent “plunder’ or prizes forcibly taken by the winners of the battles, the females were active participants in the mating game. It turns out that, after more review, the women scientists were right. Apparently, in some cases, especially where the winners of the male-male battles were overly aggressive and brutal to those males they vanquished, the on-looking females would sometimes select the losers for their mates. That epiphany catalyzed by the perspectives of women scientists created a re-examination of other long-held beliefs. Today, our understanding that female side-blotched lizards select blue, yellow, or orange-throated males base on the female’s particular preference is a direct outcome of that earlier epiphany. 

This week the community science collaborative (including me) surveyed lizards and vegetation on the Eisenhower Mountain trail at the Living Desert Zoo. Unlike similar elevations on the Boo Hoff trail further east, there was an abundance of desert mallow on this trail. The mallow is a preferred food of vegetarian chuckwallas. Perhaps then not surprisingly, we found lots of chuckwallas. I should clarify that those chuckwallas were all down for their winter hibernation, so we did not see any chuckwallas. What we saw, and so enumerated, were piles of their feces, or scat. We did see lots of the much smaller, non-hibernating side-blotched lizards, and one large but still hatched in 2020, Baja collared lizard, a predator of those side-blotched lizards. Further down the trail I climbed onto a trail-side boulder pile to investigate some scat that did not look just right to be that left by a chuckwalla. Chuckwalla scat is comprised of strictly coarse vegetation. Since they do not have molars, the plant material passes through their gut largely in the same shape as it went in. The new scat in the boulders looked different so I brought it back for the other naturalists to see. This scat was large, black, and I could see beetle legs sticking out. I had a suspicion that it might be from another collared lizard, but to be sure I spread it in my palm to expose all the individual prey items. There, mixed with beetle parts, was the diagnostic jaw and teeth of a side-blotched lizard, confirming that the scat was left by a collared lizard. Sue looked down and exclaimed it was the “best poop she had ever seen." Only a true naturalist can appreciate a good scat.

Go outside, tip your hat to a lizard, and stay safe.