No gold here Sir, just lizards

This is a thank you post in which I got *slightly* carried away making bad jokes about ecological field research.

My office mates and I had a conversation a while ago about all the absurdly specialized skills that one acquires during the course of a PhD. In my case, I think (1) “Expert hole digger” and (2) “Moderately skilled impersonator of a Victorian-era gold miner” will be taking pride of place on my CV.

A semi-accurate portrait of a modern herpetologist [1]

This realization of “skills” thusly acquired occurred during the set-up of the habitat enhancement experiment. Seven of the sixteen lizard monitoring grids are now in the ground. Which doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that each grid has 36 monitoring stations, the numbers quickly sum to equal one pretty large undertaking.

The grid set-up appears to resemble historical gold prospecting [2] because we are literally using a pick-and-shovel technique to break up the stony ground enough to dig in the monitoring equipment. It’s physically demanding work, but it makes a nice change from the more academic parts of doing a PhD. Also, as it happens, digging holes is rather cathartic (*Take THAT, meta-analysis chapter! WHACK!!!* [3],[4]).

Set up of the lizard monitoring grids. To be fair, you can’t see any beads of sweat, but that’s probably because of the freezing southerly wind. Photo credit: Sandy Winterton.

The reason I am writing this post is because I have had a lot of help to date with the grid set-ups from conservation volunteers and friends [5]. I hope I have adequately illustrated what the field work is actually like, because it is truly AMAZING that these people have voluntarily given hours of their time to help achieve what is a pretty hard, sweaty and unexciting task. My experience with you all has made me realize the enormous importance of citizen involvement in science. THANK YOU!

 

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Footnotes:

[1] Photo credit: This Pinterest page. I wish I could find out who this guy actually was, but I have probably procrastinated from working on my thesis spent enough time writing this blog post as it is.

[2] Which is hilarious when you consider historical gold mining in a very superficial, rose-tinted sort of way, but inaccurate if you look beyond this. For example, my fellow diggers  and I are not exposed to the, frankly, horrifying conditions and range of health risks that gold miners past (and, sadly, in some countries, gold miners present) had to deal with. Eisler, R. (2003). Health risks of gold miners: a synoptic review. Environmental Geochemistry and Health 25: 325-425.

[3] Perhaps this could be considered a ‘brute force’ approach to research.

[4] Whining about your field work on a blog is also cathartic.

[5] Which is certainly more important than expressing my personal catharsis.