Adventitious knowledge

Joseph Grinnell, eminent ecologist and zoologist of the early 20th century, and founding Director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, where I was a graduate student, wrote some hilarious stuff. Google Scholar lists 376 publications in his name, most of which are actually by him, including foundational papers in niche ecology, bio-geography, museum science, and so forth. He took so many thousands of pages of detailed, elegant, highly legible, informative, rigorous, lyrical, systematic field notes that if I told you how many, I'd have to look it up again, and it is getting late here. And he is rightly revered as a founder and role model in the MVZ. But perhaps my favorite thing of all about Joseph Grinnell is his nearly forgotten, mildly disturbing, profoundly droll paper, "A Striking Case of Adventitious Coloration." I have no memory of how I first encountered this paper, other than that it was in my former life as an ornithologist at the MVZ. I have never come across another paper that cited it, and Google Scholar lists none. It is, at core, a mystery.

The whole story is available here. The first two sentences:

On February 8, 1920, I spent the afternoon with my family at a point in Moraga Valley, Contra Costa County, California, some five miles, airline, northeast of Berkeley. My son Willard undertook to exercise the shotgun for the purpose of securing some specimens of local birds such as happened to be needed at the Museum.

So ornately informal, so precisely vague, so informatively not-to-the-point, I am in love with this opening. No reputable journal would publish it these days, and that is a shame. He's storytelling, and quite well. The story strides on: Willard blasts a mated pair of Oak Titmice, both of whom have bright yellow breasts. Why bright yellow? Oak Titmice are grey, never yellow.  Grinnell rushes the five airline miles back to Berkeley, marches into the botany department with his dead birds, and tells them to figure out what kind of yellow pollen these birds have got on them. Not pollen, say the botanists. Grinnell marches into a mycology lab and tells them to figure out what kind of yellow spores his birds have on their breasts. Maybe slime molds, hard to tell, say the mycologists. Grinnell concludes that possibly bird feathers could be an important means of dispersal in slime molds! He finishes by pointedly mentioning that if anyone is interested, these two birds "and their loads of spores, constitute Nos. 40,391 and 40,392 in the bird collection of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology." He publishes the whole thing in The Auk, and that is the end of that, for almost a century. A century, by the way, is how long Grinnell said some of the MVZ's specimens might have to wait before they would be put to some as yet un-imagined use. It has been 97 years.

Which brings me to that wonderful word in Grinnell's title, "adventitious." It means something on the order of "acquired by chance" which is how those titmice presumably got their yellow, and how I came to the knowledge that in a drawer in Berkeley two spore laden titmice waited.  What did I intend to do with this knowledge? Keep it in a drawer, until, perhaps after one hundred years, it proved valuable.

Now, I unexpectedly find myself with colleagues interested in spore dispersal ecology, and somebody mentioned spore dispersal via bird feathers. Which started me rummaging around in my dusty rusty musty gusty fusty drawers of ornithology, hunting for memory of birds with spores on them. All I remembered clearly was Willard undertaking to exercise the shotgun, but eventually (this morning) I found first memory, then paper, and shared both. And by afternoon my new mycology colleagues had requested access to Nos. 40,391 and 40,392 from my old ornithology colleagues at the MVZ, so that we can collect some of the long faded yellow dust. A little bit of molecular genetics wizardry (our lab is set up for sequencing DNA from dried fungal museum specimens) and we may finally be able to discover what made Grinnell's birds so yellow. If it is a new species of anything, we must surely name it after Willard.

Tour of Science!

Walking back to the Valley Life Sciences Building this afternoon, I passed a large tour group of high-school students and their parents being led by an undergraduate. One mother, snickered into her cell phone, "they have an heeeeerb lab. They study herbs. This place is crazy. Crazy! No, no, no, the tour guide said they had a whole museum of herbs. I'm like what, parsley?!"

It took me an instant to figure out that she was talking about the University and Jepson Herbaria, a research museum dedicated to the study of plants generally, not culinary herbs in particular.

I emailed this story to the other grad students in my department. Many of them responded that they had heard the tour guides telling the tour groups all sorts of misleading and false information, including that a herbarium is a museum for studying cooking herbs.

Here are some other examples of overheard falsehoods made up by university tour guides to impress their tour groups and relayed to me by other grad students. Several of these things were independently reported by more than one observer:

- The Cretaceous display in front of the Herbaria contains extinct plants... Berkeley scientists rediscovered their ancient DNA, amplified it, germinated seedlings, and planted them there for museum visitors. (The display is of plants of types similar to those which existed during the Cretaceous, none of which have ever been extinct)

- The T. rex may be as many as 5 million years old. (It is at least 65 million years old)

- The T. rex came to the paleontology museum in a giant puzzle
box and when it got here, the paleontologists didn't know what to do with
it. One of the employees was about to get fired but he was able to figure
out how to put it back together so he was able to save his job. This man
is now the assistant director of the museum. (A complete fabrication, truth here)


- The T. rex is named "Osborn". (Sue)

- T. rex (the species) was discovered by Berkeley paleontologists. (False)

- Most of the UCMP fossils are actually in the Campanile. (False)

- UCMP geologists discovered asteroids. (False)

- The giant ammonite in the first floor south hallway is from a time on
Earth where everything was giant, even the snails. (Hilarious and false)

- The Herbaria is home to the world's largest pinecone, but they don't put
it on display because they are worried someone will steal it. (Goofy and false)

- The Herbaria has one example of every plant species known to man. (They wish)

- The plants outside the herbaria went extinct around the time T. rex went
extinct. (False)

- MVZ scientists save stem cells from each animal they capture in order to
help genetically engineer new animals to save endangered species from
going extinct. (And then we take over the world!)

- The Eucalyptus tree is native only to Berkeley, Australia, and New Zealand. (actually only Australia, New Guinea, eastern Indonesia and the Philippines)

- The Eucalyptus grove is protected by an Act of Congress and can never be
cut down for any reason. (Pure fabrication)

- Strawberry Creek used to flow all the way to the Ocean but then they
built roads over it and then there wasn't enough water so all the
strawberry plants that used to grow next to it died off. (A large portion of Strawberry creek between campus and the bay has been undergrounded. The rest is false.)

- The pterodon skeleton is hanging above the T-rex because they always flew over the T-rexes to keep them in view so the T-rex couldn't sneak up on them. (Awesomely hilarious)

All global warming is local

I got home from the lab late last night and turned on NPR. There was a voice I instantly recognized, my major professor, and the director of the MVZ, Craig Moritz. What, I wondered, was Craig doing in my radio at this late hour? Being interviewed by All Things Considered for this piece on the effects of climate change on the wildlife of Yosemite National Park.
Mean monthly minimum temperatures in Yosemite have risen by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in the hundred years since the MVZ's first director, Joseph Grinnell, surveyed the wildlife there. Apparently in response, many of the wildlife species in the park have moved their upper and lower limits thousands of feet higher than they were.

The project is described in great detail here, and a subset of the Yosemite data were just published in Science. I wasn't involved in this work, in case you were wondering.