What is thing you wish folks better understood about your field of study?

Nature Talk
41

I think it is hard for most people, including me, to realize that recycling cardboard boxes, carpooling when convenient, and other such small lifestyle changes are not going to be enough to stop climate change.

As far as I can tell - and I am definitely not an expert in this - to stop climate change we’re going to need to do two things: stop having children and stop acquiring stuff.

Now, it’s easy for me to say don’t have kids - I don’t have any, I never wanted any, and I am long past child-bearing age. But I do understand how having kids is extremely important to most people. Sure people could have one kid instead of two, or delay having kids till their thirties, or support birth control availability, or support education of women (because that is correlated with having fewer kids), or any number of other changes - but is that enough? I don’t know. I suspect not. Aside from another and more deadly plague, what would it take in terms of reducing the global birth rate to reduce the human population by, say, 10% over the next 500 years?

As for acquiring stuff, well, let me start with a confession: I am a privileged, white, middle-class person living in the United States. I own my house and 6/10ths of an acre and live there by myself. I own a car. I routinely drive places just to go hiking and make iNat observations. I took two long plane flights this year to go birdwatching and iNatting in Arizona and Veracruz, Mexico. As much as I try to give away unneeded stuff, I still own a lot of Stuff.

People like me think nothing of buying a lot of clothes, a lot of food, a lot of entertainment, a bigger house, a fancier car, and so on. Sure, some people try hard to only buy used clothes or books, or they have a big vegetable garden, or they install solar panels or mini-splits, but is that enough? As with birth rates, what would it take to reduce the amount of Stuff that’s produced by even 10% over the next few centuries?

Well that was a long rant - sorry about that. As a (retired) conservation planner, though, I think about these things frequently, but I have no good answers. But just writing this out is making me think about what would happen if I tried hard not to buy anything for a month? I think that might be pretty hard, when I think about things like heat and electricity.

10 Likes
42

I think the general preferred terms in English now are probably “endotherm” and “ectotherm” and variants.

But as a scientist who talks to members of the public, I often still use “warm” and “cold-blooded” especially when the terms are first used by a non-specialist in the conversation. I have to decide whether I want to make the conversation about correct terminology (which is often offputting to the person or seems pedantic to them) or talk about the topic at hand which is of interest to them. So I think that they can still have their place as a commonly understood shorthand (even if they may not be totally correct).

9 Likes
43

When I first heard about the term “plant blindness” it really resonated with me because its totally a thing!! Plants really do not get as much appreciation they deserve :(( The amount of people who have told me they like everything about biology except for plants really hurts my heart :( There is also soooo much misinformation about plants flying around its scary, and a lot of people do not even know basic info about plants. Its honestly starting to become a pet peeve of mine when I hear people call things like blackberries or strawberries “berries” or tomatoes “vegetables” (strawberries technically arent even a true fruit).

I think part of the problem is the way that plants are approached in schools. When I was in elementary school, we had so many lessons on the different types of animals like mammals, reptiles, amphibians, etc and barely any about the different types of plants like vascular, flowering, non-flowering. While there is nothing wrong with learning about animals (I love animals too!) I think the lack of focus on plants in education sends the message that plants are somehow uninteresting or unimportant when that literally could not be further from the truth.

Im not saying that everyone should be as obsessed with plants as I am (although that would be nice haha), but I think if people took some time to learn a little about the plants around them, they’ll realize how diverse, captivating, wonderful, and beautiful they truly are and gain a deeper understanding of the crucial roles they play in ecosystems. Overall I just wish people showed plants a little more love lol

9 Likes
44

In my defense, just because it’s not a true vegetable doesn’t make it a non-vegetable. I (and many of my entomological friends) all call slugs, wasps, and beetles “bugs” even though we are more than well aware they aren’t true bugs.

Anyways, rant aside I have to agree. My local “native habitat” park refuses to plant anything except flashy plants and it irritates me to no end (plus the educational signs are wrong). Where’s the Asterella garden?

3 Likes
45

Sure, I totally agree. In fact, I used same unprecise language in my comment… “extreme sacrifice” is very emotionally loaded and suggests a choice on part of the mothers (which they do not have)… but it´s easier to communicate certain things :-)

My reply was specifically aimed at this factoid

But yes, all of those terms have their issues because exceptions … but cold blooded is especially misleading I think and I do tend to correct this term most times in a friendly matter a la “Did you know, that this term is misleading, as facts…” … people are usually interested. :-)

1 Like
46

Cold-blooded and warm-blooded aren’t really about how the blood stays, it means exactly what homoiothermal/poikilothermal means, it’s not like we use those terms thinking about the actual temperature of the blood.

47

I am for sure one of those persons you mention… I am a bit blind on the plant eye unfortunately… but there are certain plants that can for sure catch ones interest, such as epiphytes or carnivorous plants for me… and I recently started to adore Paramo flora… very alien, very beautyful

2 Likes
48

Theyre vegetables in the culinary sense, but botanically they’re fruits, so I guess it depends on context

1 Like
49

No, it is not the same… poiklio can be translated as “varied” or “changing” and homoio as “same” … which is not at all the same as warm or cold… Just because it is used interchangeably in common language does not make it correct and as I said… the term cold/warm lead to very precise ideas in peoples heads, that are basically wrong :-)

1 Like
50

Yeah that.

1 Like
51

Can’t say what it leads to other people’s heads, but these are used normally by university teachers and scientists because everybody knows what they mean and nobody cares about warm or cold part, and I never met a person who would take them literally, because from the first time they’re mentioned in school you need to know what they actually mean.

1 Like
52

I will say, as a hunter-conservationist myself, there can be a lot of misconceptions about the practice. I do so only to feed myself and my family, and never for sport. I do know plenty of people who care only about the conservation of select species and the environments pertaining to them, but where I am from these are about the only environments around. I will also say that being a part of a natural food chain, rather than eating meat-factory produced beef, has greatly enhanced my appreciation for the environment and its intricate components. I just wish people would see it not as me “enjoying the killing of animals”. (I have heard that one from a few certain people).

9 Likes
53

or Google autocompletes - where can I buy … a lion cub?

1 Like
54

Some of us are on both. An iNat snake identifier writes good helpful posts on FB. You have to choose your groups of FB ‘friends’ carefully. That environmental outreach to a much wider and different audience is important. iNat itself is mostly a comfortable filter bubble.

2 Likes
55

It’s not even about elementary school - I’m pretty sure we learned about things like stamens and pistil, and layers of forest plants and so on, way early in 3rd or 4th grade or so. And my mom would always stop at flowers and tell us their names when we were little kids. And yet I turned out mostly plant-blind for most of my life.
Only a few years ago I suddenly got interested in plants, first only in trees when we accidentally joined some “tree id hike” instead of a normal hike. Then after learning all the species of local trees (and it seemed so hard memorizing all 30 (!) species of them!!) I expanded to showy wildflowers, and then also to orchids and ferns and mosses and lichen and sedges and… everything :) It’s strange now sometimes, like walking past a big rock covered in polypody, and then I know I’ve hiked to that same rock 5 years ago but in my memory it was just an empty rock. I actually went back to my old pictures, and can see all the ferns growing on the rock in those old pictures, but I just did not see the plants at all back then.

8 Likes
56

That is an excellent point. I’ve had people criticize me for volunteering with Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited in the past. Their perception was that the only reason I did so is because I wanted to kill ducks and trout. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, I hunt and fish. Yet I also want those species and the ecosystems that support them to survive. I was and still am willing to put my money and effort into ensuring that trout streams and wetlands survive long into the future.

8 Likes
57

It’s very controversial. So controversial that threads which go that way often get the “no more than one post per 30 minutes” setting. The only thing I have to say on the subject is: some of the same criticisms that have been leveled at zoos are also true of keeping cats indoors.

I remember back in USENET days, I think it was a gardening forum where it seemed that the majority of questions were “How do I get rid of _______?” And the blank could be filled in with pretty much any species that the person didn’t deliberately put there.

So here’s mine, as a forager: I wish folks knew that not every unknown wild plant is deadly poisonous. Sure, when we were little kids, we learned, “Don’t eat berries that you don’t know.” But that was because our parents may not have known, or didn’t have time to teach, which ones were dangerous. In reality, there are (at least in the temperate zone) only a relatively few plants out there that would kill you, and those have been thoroughly written about and can be learned. Most wild plants, although not necessarily suitable for eating for a variety of reasons, are not dangerous.

58

The earth will go on…even if humans do not.

People really don’t get that. We can’t just keep going how we are.

Population explosions always crash…

4 Likes
59

But that ‘dangerous’ warning is protecting vulnerable species from unsustainable foraging. Especially along the urban edge, as opposed to a thinly populated rural area.

We have a problem with bark harvested from trees for traditional medicine. Carefully trained apprentices in rural areas - doesn’t translate well to more like ‘poaching for income’ along the urban edge. Ringbarking leading to dead trees.

60

For me they didnt even teach stamen and pistil until college-level bio lol. i kind of got into plants in a similar way, I started learning to id trees first and then herbaceous plants and wildflowers I started learning about much later. i definitely agree with you, I started noticing plants a lot more after I started learning about them. its an experience to learn about a particular species of plant and then start seeing it EVERYWHERE next time you go out, even to places you’ve been to a million times before and never noticed :joy: but I also feel like the more I learned about plants, the more interested in them I became

4 Likes