Using All the Senses in Ecology
This chapter is about how our sensory abilities to perceive nature are essential to an observational approach to ecology. These sensory abilities are both universal to humankind and at the same time unique to different individual humans, based on their pe
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Using All the Senses in Ecology
This chapter is about how our sensory abilities to perceive nature are essential to an observational approach to ecology. These sensory abilities are both universal to humankind and at the same time unique to different individual humans, based on their personal history, abilities, and motivations. Our senses are our most elemental tools in building an observational understanding of ecological relationships, but they are often underutilized and sometimes viewed with skepticism in a scientific context. In this chapter we show how each of the senses can contribute to scientific ecology. We use the experiences of past and present ecologists to argue that the personal nature of how we utilize our senses can be an asset that motivates us to explore the natural world and opens us to new ecological discoveries.
Sensing Nature The human capacity to observe the natural world is highly diverse and it is variable through time, and therefore it can be heightened or dampened, and it can be improved through experience. Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist, has written that “the skill of observing—and it is a skill, to be honed and perfected— must be taught and encouraged. It is something that every science student must possess” (Vermeij 2002). Vermeij here puts observation at the core of scientific literacy, and this sentiment has R. Sagarin and A. Pauchard, Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-230-3_3, © 2012 Rafe Sagarin and Aníbal Pauchard
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OB SERVAT ION AND EC OLOGY
BOX 3. 1
The Importance of Sensation G E E R AT J . V E R M E I J
Scientists revel in a way of knowing that uncovers an approximation of verifiable truth through observation, evaluation, and inference. We have refined this method, but scientists did not invent it. From the beginning, living things have sensed, interpreted, and responded to circumstances that could make the difference between life and death, success and failure. Informed by their senses, organisms embody a hypothesis of their environment; and when this hypothesis is tested— when an organism’s structure, physiology, and behavior work adequately— it can be improved as the body and the environment as sensed and interpreted by the organism feed back on each other, both through immediate effects and over evolutionary time through natural selection. A profound parallel exists between adaptive evolution and the more purposeful scientific way of knowing. Environment and hypothesis converse, whether in the body of an adapted organism or in the mind of a human being. This parallel highlights the essential, and increasingly ignored, role of sensation — of observation with the brain in gear — in learning about the world. There is nothing like being puzzled by a chance observation to awaken curiosity, nothing like carefully listening and looking and feeling and smelling to conceive ideas,
been echoed by other prominent ecologists who lament the loss of natural history– based classes at all levels of
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