[Pollinator] Citizen Science in Australia

Thu Oct 23 15:10:29 PDT 2025

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… 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo18659332.html
Darwin’s Orchids
press.uchicago.edu

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>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0dZhgSPmhk&t=19s
Banned from Mobot #2 - Herbarium Labels & Cheilanthoid Ferns
youtube.com

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).

https://botany.one/2025/04/zong-xin-ren-all-research-begins-with-natural-history/
Zong-Xin Ren: “All Research Begins with Natural History”
botany.one

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 <mailto:bernhap3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 15, 2025, at 2:20 PM, Peter Bernhardt <bernhap3 at gmail.com <mailto: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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