Seeing

Being able to see what is in front of you is an important skill. This may seem like one of those statements that is so obvious that there is no point making it. However, it seems to be a skill that is difficult to master. Recently, I have been running into this issue a lot. As I have mentioned in other posts, I am a Teaching Assistant for an introductory biology class at U.C. Davis on Phylogenetics and Biodiversity. A large part of this class is exploring how organisms (plants, animals, fungi, microbes, etc.) are similar to, or different from, one another. This requires students to actually look at organisms and determine these similarities and differences, and here lies the rub. Getting college students to simply describe what they see is frequently a real challenge. We will be looking at an organism and when I ask them to tell me what they see, they immediately begin telling me what kind of organism it is. That is not the same thing. I am asking them to describe what is in front of them (a soft body, two openings for water, no skeletal support system) and instead they are giving me labels (a Tunicate).

And this phenomenon is not limited to college students. I have been a birder all my life and sometimes lead birding walks for various organizations. I have often asked other birders I am with to tell me what they see when looking at a particular bird. Their tendency, young birder and old, is to start attempting to put a name on the bird. Instead of looking at the bird and letting what they actually see guide them to an identification, they jump ahead and start putting names on the bird that often basically amount to guesses. Over and over again, in so many different settings, I have seen this kind of thing happen, and it is always because the people looking at the world are not able to slow down and really see it!

This need to rush to a label is really troubling for me. I know humans have a sort of innate tendency to want to put things in boxes, but surely we should be able to overcome that tendency. We should be able to look at an object and just take it in. Make note of what you see before you and let that information guide your thinking. The desire to put a label on something reverses this process. By putting a label on an object, we are biasing what we think that object will be like.

I have seen this happen in the birding world so many times! Someone will see a bird. Great! They will not know what it is right off the bat. Nothing wrong with that! So they will ask for help in identifying it. Wonderful! Then the problems start. Instead of looking at the bird are really seeing what is there to see they jump to the identification, the label. Since they did not know what the bird was, the label they jump to is often just a guess and is usually wrong. And here is where it gets weird. Once they made that jump to the incorrect identification the birders will start saying that they see field marks that are not there, but that are consistent with their jumped to label. Let me say that again. They start seeing things that are not there! How we think about the world alters how we perceive the world. By giving in too quickly to the urge to put labels a thing, we can influence how view the thing. This gets downright dangerous in the world of science.

I would like to encourage everyone (scientists and non-scientists alike) to do, would be to look at an object and really see what it has to show you. The identification of an object is the end goal, not where we should be starting. Instead, the first step must be to make careful observations. Just look at the thing and see what is actually there without making any jumps or judgment calls. Then the information from those observations needs to be carefully thought about. Then, after you have absorbed and considered what is in front of you, let that information guide you to an identification, if possible.

But really see the world! Don’t see what you want to see, or what you think you are going to see, or what you think someone else is expecting you to see. Just let yourself take a moment to look carefully, and really see.

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The Ethogram: Creature Feature: Butterflies of the Sea

Here is a link my first post on The Ethogram, our new animal behavior blog! It is an introduction to an amazing and beautiful group of organisms called Sea Butterflies, which are actually tiny planktonic snails!

Butterflies of the Sea

Enjoy!

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The Ethogram

Some of my fellow Animal Behavior graduate students and I have started a new blog called The Ethogram! An ethogram is a list of established behaviors of an animal that is being studied. This is in reference to the strong animal behavior bent to the blogs material. The aim of this blog is to make animal behavior research more available and to bring it to the attention of a wider audience. Take a look at:

http://theethogram.com/

and follow us if you think the information will be of interest!

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Northern Harrier Practicing?

I was walking along the edge of a plowed field along the Clarksberg Branchline Trail in West Sacramento a couple of days ago when I saw a hatch year Northern Harrier quartering back and forth, low over the ploughed earth. The raptor was not very far from the edge where I stood, so I was able to get a really great view as I watched it coursing along and staring at the ground intently as it hunted for its breakfast. Suddenly, it made a sharp turn, almost flipping over itself, and dove for the ground. It landed on something and after a moment standing on the ground, it took off. As it did so, I saw a small, brown object in its talons. I assumed at first that it was a small mammal, and that the Harrier had made a successful hunt, but when the bird was about 20 feet off the ground, it dropped the brown object. As the thing dropped back to the earth, I was able to see that it was not an animal at all, but was actually a clod of dirt.

What had happened here? Did the Harrier make a mistake and attack a mouse-shaped bit of dirt thinking that it was, in fact, the makings of a meal? Given how amazingly keen the eyesight that raptors possess this seems unlikely. And it seems especially unlikely given that the bird was only about 20 or 30 feet off the ground when it started the dive. Making that big a mistake at that close a range is hard to believe. So what was the hawk doing? Was it practicing? This was a young Harrier. Perhaps, not seeing any actual voles or mice at that moment, it decided to do a little target practice. I don’t think of raptors needing practice, but of course that is probably kind of silly. Young songbirds need to practice their song, and often sound amusingly bad at first. However, of the course of a few weeks, they practice and hone their vocal abilities and end up producing songs that sound like the other adults of the species. So, raptors practicing their hunting skills seems pretty understandable. The amount of skill required to be a predator is rather impressive, and even when you consider that many of these skills are hard-wired instinct, that still leaves a lot of room for learning and improvement: practice. Here was a raptor that, perhaps, just picked a particular earth clod on the ground and wanted to see if it could hit it at high speed, just to see if it could. It did, so that practice run was successful! Practice does make perfect!

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