[Pollinator] Citizen Science in Australia

[Peter Bernhardt]

> On Oct 15, 2025, at 2:20 PM, Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> John:
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> 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.
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> 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.   
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> 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.   
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> Peter Bernhardt
> Research Assoc. The Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis, MO
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