“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you” —Frank Lloyd Wright

A common trait of young naturalists, or many older naturalists as well, was (and is) a passion for collecting. Rocks, fossils, bones, leaves, seashells or seed pods would fill the empty niches in their rooms.  Not too many decades ago, all naturalists were collectors of birds, lizards, butterflies, beetles, plants, collections that filled museum cabinets, and fueled ideas about patterns in nature and that sometimes perplexing question of what defines a species. Alfred Russel Wallace, having no money of his own, funded his nineteenth century explorations of the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago by collecting and selling his specimens to museums and private collectors. His collecting provided more than travel and living expenses. By examining thousands of beetles, butterflies, and birds before shipping them back to England for sale he independently developed his own theory of the origin of species that mirrored Charles Darwin’s theory in every detail. 

Darwin was a collector as well, although for most of his youth his exploits in nature hardly hinted at what he would come to be. He was a poor student, preferring rambles through the countryside to studying any of the topics he was being taught in school. Only after his father, in desperation, enrolled him at Cambridge University to study to become an Anglican minister, did Darwin discover his “calling”. Among the various courses he took at Cambridge, including Greek, Latin, Euclidean geometry, and of course theology, he took a course encompassing geology and botany from Professor John Stevens Henslow. Henslow opened Darwin’s eyes to the new field of natural science. The two became nearly inseparable wandering through the fields and forests surrounding Cambridge collecting beetles and plants. Darwin was especially passionate about collecting beetles. One story had Darwin climbing a tree in pursuit of a rare beetle. He had prized beetles in each hand when he saw an especially rare species within reach. Lacking a third hand, he popped one of the beetles into his mouth, freeing up a hand to grab the greater prize. As he reached for the beetle, he lost his balance and went crashing down to the ground, losing all three beetles and his mouth felt on fire – the beetle he deposited there had excreted an acrid chemical that burned the inside of his mouth. A year later Henslow recommended Darwin to the British Admiralty to serve as naturalist on the HMS Beagle and dinner companion for the ship’s Captain, Robert Fitzroy (it was then customary for ship’s captains to never socialize with members of their crew). The rest is history.

Growing up, I too had the collecting bug, filling my shelves with rocks and fossils and shells. In 1979 I enrolled in a Masters Degree program at California State University at Long Beach to study Spotted Owls. My ornithology professors made it clear that as part of our education graduate students were expected to collect and prepare museum quality bird specimens, and submit at least five bird species to help build their teaching collection. Collecting rocks and shells was one thing, but killing wild birds, even in the name of science and education, was something altogether different. I solved my dilemma by “collecting” birds I found along the side of roads that had been recently hit (and killed) by vehicles. Problem solved. Then I discovered that I was also required to create an insect collection for my entomology course. Birds or bugs, it did not matter to me, I did not want to kill things. I asked the entomology professor if I could draw the required number of insects rather than kill them and pin them into a collection. I even showed her a couple ink drawings I had drawn of wasps. Her answer was an emphatic “no” (even though the drawings were pretty good). However, along with roadside bird carcasses, there were lots of dead insects there as the result of car-bug collisions. I also found that the front grills of cars were treasure troves of dead insects. Again, problem solved.

Today, taxonomy, and an ever-increasing understanding of the diversity of nature and where those species occur is driven by collections in natural history museums around the world. Fostered by museum collections, we now can identify rare species and biodiversity hot spots and we can argue with undeniable data for the protection of critical habitats for species ranging from Spotted owls and fringe-toed lizards to Casey’s June beetle (restricted to just a few hundred acres in south Palm Springs). I still personally avoid killing creatures, but the value of those museum collections is priceless and undeniable. 

In recent years, spawned by a technological explosion, we now have new tools to document the occurrence and diversity of life without killing lots of creatures – iNaturalist, eBird, and others are internet platforms, as well as gene banks that catalogue the diversity within species, and can do so from non-lethal tissue samples. Of these, iNaturalist has become a digital collection phenomenon that has increased our understanding of where and when species occur worldwide with data supplied by community scientists of all ages and backgrounds. Anyone with a smartphone, or a camera and a computer can contribute research-grade data that are every bit as useful as collected specimens in a museum. To be clear, these digital databanks do not replace museums, but they are additive to those collections but are in some ways more useful. That added utility comes from the data being more abundant, more easily accessed by scientists, and more accurate location data. The act of collecting iNaturalist records also can be a group activity and can foster the creation of a community of naturalists, with all participants knowing that they are making real contributions to science today and in the future.

In 2020 I was the lead author on a study to assess the degree to which lizards in Joshua Tree National Park are responding or adapting to the levels of climate change they have experienced so far. I had been gifted a historical database of lizard locations, lizards collected and placed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History by faculty and students from Long Beach State University from 1959 through1972, before the effects of modern climate change had begun to be apparent.  The challenge was to collect a similar dataset from 2015 to the present, to see whether the lizards were in the same locations or had shifted their ranges to stay within the same climate envelope they occupied during conditions they experiences when the earlier, historical data set was collected. The solution was the abundant iNaturalist records community scientists had been contributing.  We were able to show that most of the lizards were shifting their abundances to higher elevations. Those iNaturalist records will be the new baseline from which scientists, decades from now, will be able to document the ongoing effects of climate change.

Nullius in verba 
Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), think like a mountain, and be safe.