[Pollinator] Citizen Science in Australia

[John Purdy]

Amazing and very interesting. I was not aware of this side of Darwin.
Thanks.
John Purdy

On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 6:10 PM Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear John:
>
> Thank you very much for the link to the memoir about Huber. His
> contributions to the life-history of honeybees was entirely new to me. Of
> course, if we wish to extoll the work of citizen scientists, the greatest
> of all is Charles Darwin. As he had almost no formal training in Biology,
> and virtually all his experimental work was performed in and around his
> house, he is the true father of experimental floral biology beginning with
> the pre-1862 research that became “On the Various Contrivances By Which
> Orchids are Fertilized By Insects.” The Drs Edens-Meir, Pemberton and I
> tackled aspects of his work in Chapters 1 and 10 of the following book…
>
> [image: 9780226044910.jpg]
>
> Darwin’s Orchids
> <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo18659332.html>
> press.uchicago.edu
> <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo18659332.html>
> <https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo18659332.html>
>
> The interesting thing about Darwin as a citizen scientist is that he
> wasn’t afraid to call out his own errors. How many autodidacts do that on a
> regular basis? His “pencil experiment” on pollinia dispersal by orchid
> flowers (Chapter 1) persists to the point that it is regularly retested
> across generations in different continents on hundreds of species over the
> past 160 years. In contrast, his experiment with muscid flies and slipper
> orchids (Paphiopedilum) led to the wrong conclusion about the biomechanics
> of diandrous orchids but he corrected his “blunder in print” (his words,
> not mine) in the second edition using an Andrena bee and an American
> Cypripedium (see chapter 10). Remember, this wasn’t his first experiment
> either. Isn’t Darwin testing Malthus in “Origin of Species” with his garden
> experiment by sowing seed mixtures to see what survives to reproduce under
> intense completion? More experiments followed in remaining books. I can’t
> speak for the ones on animals but there are the experiments on carnivorous
> plants, self-incompatibility in wild versus domesticated flowers and the
> power of motion of plants all in separate books. What people often fail to
> understand is that Darwin’s increasing success as a citizen scienctist is
> based, in large part, on his correspondence with professional scientists
> and other citizen scientists of his day. David Fitzgerald, another citizen
> scientist, in Australia convinced Darwin that self-pollination in orchids
> was far more common than he’d thought (Chapter 7). Asa Gray (Darwin’s bro’
> at Harvard) warned him that his initial experiment on flies and paphs’ led
> to a false assumption (Chapter 10). It’s the second edition that turns
> Darwin into a true pollination ecologist versus his previous  stance as
> a pioneer in biomechanics which he used specifically to defend his concepts
> of adaptation/natural selection
>
> Of course, I agree that field people we enlist must be trained to work
> from past documents not from memory or by looking to me for directions. As
> I was on Kit’s thesis committee I know she knows what to do. In my own
> case, though, despite my first 5 college years of formal botanical training
> I didn’t learn what information really belonged on a future herbarium label
> until I was a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador and I was assigned to
> the herbarium manager at a very troubled university. That was a two-year
> lesson I took to Australia for my own PhD. See the following video and note
> my response in the Comment section…
>
>  Banned from Mobot #2 - Herbarium Labels & Cheilanthoid Fernsyoutube.com
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZhgSPmhk&t=19s>
>
> [image: maxresdefault.jpg]
>
> Banned from Mobot #2 - Herbarium Labels & Cheilanthoid Ferns
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZhgSPmhk&t=19s>
> youtube.com <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZhgSPmhk&t=19s>
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZhgSPmhk&t=19s>
>
> My 32 years advising graduate students contains mixed results that can't
> be blamed entirely on what a graduate committee thought or didn’t think. I
> taught them standard methods and sometimes I was positively surprised when
> some took those methods to an even higher level while others tried to cut
> corners. You can imagine the results in the latter case. I learned that
> such people saw the PhD as the last stepping stone leading them to the job
> they wanted, a job always devoid of research and publication. While I’m
> pleased to say that all of my graduate students went on to gainful
> employment only one continued a career as a pollination biologist and his
> bright spark ended when he succumbed to a family illness. The career of my
> only postdoc, Dr. Zong-Xin Ren, is very different and we should all learn
> from him as an educator and field biologist (see link).
>
> [image: New-Featured-Images-B1-18-2.jpg]
>
> Zong-Xin Ren: “All Research Begins with Natural History”
> <https://botany.one/2025/04/zong-xin-ren-all-research-begins-with-natural-history/>
> botany.one
> <https://botany.one/2025/04/zong-xin-ren-all-research-begins-with-natural-history/>
>
> <https://botany.one/2025/04/zong-xin-ren-all-research-begins-with-natural-history/>
>
> Sincerely,
> Peter bernhardt
>
>
>
>
> On Oct 23, 2025, at 12:14 PM, John Purdy <johnrpurdy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you very much for this interesting and detailed response. I
> certainly share many of your views and appreciate the examples and the
> reference to history. Going further back, I cited the work of Francois
> Huber from 1794, which I hold as not only an example of citizen science,
> but also as one of the best examples of the application of the scientific
> method, with repeated cycles of observation, analysis and interpretation.
>
> https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PnhlAAAAMAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=Nouvelles+Observations+Sur+Les+Abeilles%27+(New+observations+on+bees)+in+Geneva+in+1792&ots=zQuMJ49XgG&sig=WZqjfT0CowxGjT6ggMj4Uz_l4vI#v=onepage&q=Nouvelles%20Observations%20Sur%20Les%20Abeilles'%20(New%20observations%20on%20bees)%20in%20Geneva%20in%201792&f=false
> I hope this link takes you to an 1841 translation of his work on the
> mating flights of honey bees and a brief biography.  What is so fascinating
> about this work is that Huber was a monk trained in theology not science,
> he was completely blind, and he conducted well planned experiments using a
> technician who was also essentially a citizen scientist. What i learned
> from this is the discipline to design each successive experiment to answer
> a question and to conduct the experiment following the plan.
> My concern with what is being done today by so many graduate students is
> that it is not well planned, and it saddens me to see the waste of
> resources, time and effort, and the heartache that bright young students
> experience when they start writing a thesis and discover an obvious mistake
> in the design that renders their work useless. The worst example is
> searching for the colour pigment in bird's feathers. Why would a graduate
> committee allow this work to start? I also see many peer reviewed papers
> that do not follow published standard methods or mention why not and do not
> validate their methods, and there are hundreds of papers that report a
> biological effect without a no-effect dose level. The results are useless.
> So this awareness, with my experience doing experiments to meet Good
> laboratory Practice (GLP)
> standards, spurs me to plan experiments in more detail and build standard
> operating procedures and validated methods into the process. I train my
> field people to work from the documents not from memory or by looking to me
> for directions; I use data recording sheets to ensure measurements are not
> missed and I do rehearsals to ensure that the system is working in the
> hands of those using it. It may sound elaborate but it actually works so
> much better in the field. It is surprising to me to find old field reports
> from the 1930's that meet the same standards of data recording. It is not
> easy to get personnel to use this GLP data recording standard in full, but
> it is very much easier to analyse and report the results.
> With this level of preparedness, it is possible to get good relevant data
> from volunteers in the framework of citizen science. I think Kit's
> commitment to good science is vital, and hope she finds this helpful
> Regards, John purdy
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 7:35 PM Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Oct 15, 2025, at 2:20 PM, Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> John:
>>
>> Citizen science has a different and older origin in Australia, especially
>> as it pertains to pollination.:Since the late 19th century, Australia has
>> enjoyed a line of gifted amateurs studying the life histories of native
>> biota. It’s obvious these people understood scientific methods and critical
>> thinking based on their publications. In particular, reading contributions
>> to "The Victorian Naturalist" from the 1920's-'60's has its rewards and
>> will familiarize you with the pollination studies of Edith Coleman, Tarlton
>> Rayment, Trevor Hawkeswood and Ros Garnet. Sometimes, these people modeled
>> their long-term research on the books of Charles Darwin. Sometimes they
>> corresponded with professional scientists. Tarlton Rayment wrote to T.D.
>> Cockerell at U. of Colorado. Edith Coleman exchanged information with Oakes
>> Ames at the Harvard herbarium. Citizen scientists persist in Australia.
>> Perhaps the greatest citizen scientist-insect-pollination-biologist today
>> is Rudie Kuiter. He has a page on ResearchGate and you might like his books
>> as he is a professional wildlife and fish photographer. I will explain the
>> contributions of some of these people in my upcoming book for CSIRO
>> Australia in 2026.
>>
>> Why do we associate so much data on Australian wildflowers, small
>> marsupials, perching birds, anthophilous insects, fungi, snails etc. with
>> people who lacked degrees in Biology? This is one consequence of
>> British colonization of countries in the southern hemisphere. How else can
>> we explain the success of the employment and deployment of the late Jane
>> Goodall to Africa? Australian settlers were confronted by alien biotas
>> while the ratio of professional (government employed) scientists in
>> Australia to native species was laughably low. As explained to me by my
>> professors at the University of Melbourne 45 years ago, botanists were
>> expected to identify and describe the habitats and distribution of native
>> timber trees and any other plant of commercial importance. Amateurs got the
>> wildflowers. Ornithologists dealt with the bigger flightless birds (emus,
>> cassowaries, bustards cockatoos and water fowl) while amateurs got the
>> doves and dicky birds. Entomologists focused on nasty DIptera and the
>> despoilers of crops and timbers. Amateurs got butterflies, Christmas
>> beetles and everything else while their children made collections of
>> cicadas. You get the point. However, the smarter scientists knew they could
>> depend on the citizen scientists and vice versa. Rudie Kuiter takes the
>> insects he catches on native orchids to my colleagues at the Melbourne and
>> Sydney Museums as I have. Incidentally, that’s why there is a Lasioglossum
>> bernhardti.
>>
>> What Kit proposes can be done with the training you suggest. Once upon a
>> time, that entomological/botanical training was available through the many
>> natural history clubs in both urban and rural Australia but I’ve noticed
>> they are on the wane.  Here in America there are even greater dysfunctions.
>> Scientists, graduate students and field technicians will have to step in
>> and educate the new generation of citizen scientists if the scientific
>> community wants dependable data and reproducible results..I agree AI is
>> untrustworthy and I certainly wouldn’t trust iNaturalist identification for
>> most lineages of anthophilous insects, would you? To date, the infamy of
>> iNaturalist identifications comes from the recent murder trial in
>> Gippsland, Australia. She found Amanita phallodes using iNaturalist,
>> dehydrated them, cooked them in a beef Wellington and fed them to her
>> in-laws with fatal results. Check it out on YouTube.
>>
>> Peter Bernhardt
>> Research Assoc. The Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis, MO
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> i
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