3 Early hints I might find animals interesting
Science was not part of my upbringing. Granted, my father was a petroleum geologist; but I had no interest in oil or rocks (except those containing fossils). Further, I was not a natural tinkerer. When I took things apart to find out how they would work, I quickly derived Ray’s First Law of Inertia: things taken apart stay apart.
3.1 A bee and a crab
A penetrating biological experience occurred when I was about four years old. Walking home one morning I spotted a dead honey bee on the sidewalk. I knew that bees can sting, and I wondered how they did that. I picked up the bee, rubbed my thumb over the tip of the bee’s abdomen, and received a most unpleasant shock. The bee was dead, but its sharp stinger was lodged in my thumb. With my other hand, I tried to pull out the stinger but succeeded only in squeezing the venom sac, making the pain sharply worse. Somehow, I managed to extract the stinger. That episode suggests that I was curious about nature even as a child, but that painful experience blunted my curiosity – at least for a while.
A year or two later, I found a hermit crab on the beach in Long Beach. I was fascinated by this clawed creature housed inside a shell. I took it home, but it soon died. I was apparently distraught (from guilt, sadness, or both?). Fortunately, my parents were hosting two young women who were visiting our church, and these women kindly held a funeral service for my crab and helped me bury it in our backyard. Now I felt better, knowing (or at least thinking) that the crab was in heaven.
3.2 Mumps, pneumonia, and tropical fish
Around third grade, I contracted mumps and then pneumonia; and I was kept home from elementary school for several weeks. I was too sick to read and quickly became bored with the radio. [We did have a television, but it was in a different part of the house and was inaccessible to a bed-bound boy.]
Then my Mom had an inspiring idea. She went shopping for an aquarium and some “tropical” fish and installed everything on a table next to my bed. Now, I could watch angel fish, mollies, and a catfish cavorting around the aquarium. My Mom later told me I would sit for hours, my face inches away from the glass, intently watching those fish.
Then one of the mollies gave birth, and the angel fish immediately started gobbling up her babies. “Nature red tooth and claw” right before my eyes! My Mom dashed back to the fish store and brought home a small nursery chamber (clear plastic with holes for water circulation) to protect the few surviving babies. The angle fish immediately went back to eating dry fish food. Peace and coexistence had returned to my bedroom.
Even though I was fascinated by these fish, I never became an ichthyologist. However, many decades later, I was visiting the University of Oregon, and a neurobiologist friend there showed me some cuttlefish that he was studying. What amazing, elegant, intelligent, kaleidoscopic creatures! Suddenly, I was a little boy again and was captivated by these mollusks as they bobbed, weaved, and changed color. But unlike the tropical fish of my boyhood, cuttlefish watched me back. I considered setting up a saltwater aquarium with cuttlefish when I returned to Seattle. I never did do but may do so when I’m infirm.
3.3 Encounters with an ugly caterpillar
Early in elementary school I had another indication that science might be in my future – though I was unaware of that hint at the time. My mother had been growing tomato plants beside the garage. When walking past these plants one summer day, I spotted a hornworm caterpillar: it was huge (almost 4” long), gaudy green, and hideously ugly. Without question, it was the ugliest creature that I had ever seen. It caught my attention and made a permanent impression.
How did this ugly monster get to my Mom’s tomato plant? None of our neighbors had tomato plants. So, I knew it could not have crawled from a neighbor’s yard.
Then where then did it come from? I knew that my Mom had planted tomato seeds, so I came to a logical conclusion: a hornworm ‘seed’ must have been hidden inside one of those tomato seeds. Thus, when the tomato seed started to grow, the hornworm’s seed would have been ‘released’ from embryonic bondage and then developed synchronously with the tomato’s seed.
This was undoubtedly my first scientific hypothesis. It fits all the facts I had observed. Having satisfactorily resolved this issue in my mind, I went on with my young life.
At some point, I finally learned that caterpillars are merely an early developmental stage in the complex life cycle of moths or butterflies, which, as adults, fly around and lay eggs on host plants. The ugly hornworm I saw was merely the progeny of a female moth that had searched the backyards in our neighborhood, finally spotted my Mom’s tomato plant, and laid her eggs on it.
When I finally learned about moth life cycles, I got a good chuckle from the absurdity of my first scientific hypothesis. I was dead wrong, of course, but I had made an observation, asked a question, and derived an answer. OK, that answer was both naïve and incorrect, but it was not a bad first attempt for a young and biologically ignorant kid.
In retrospect, I’m delighted that I was not upset upon learning that I was wrong. Young egos are often uncertain and vulnerable. Many undergrads – when they discover that their first scientific hypothesis is wrong – immediately discourage themselves from pursuing a career in science. However, being wrong is central to science. Figuring out why one is wrong – or at least, trying to figure that out – is exciting, if sometimes frustrating.
I did learn an important lesson from that experience, namely, that even if one can come up with an explanation that seemingly accounts for some observation, that explanation is not necessarily correct. I have had to relearn that lesson many times during my career.
When I got to grad school, my hornworm experience helped me appreciate the importance of ‘multiple working hypotheses’ and of ‘strong inference approaches’. Both concepts help us suppress our inherent preference for our own initial ‘pet’ hypothesis.
I eventually I learned about the importance of doing experiments to challenge hypotheses. I wonder: if I had known about the concept of experiments when I first derived my hornworm hypothesis, would I have tried to design and execute an appropriate experiment to test it? Certainly not. Summer was baseball time.
3.4 Spiders and skippers
Around fourth or fifth grade, Greg Lawson (a neighbor) and I started collecting spiders from shrubs in the neighborhood. We transferred the spiders to glass bottles and jars, stored in his parent’s garage, and fed them small butterflies (skippers). We watched our spiders construct intricate webs and were fascinated when a spider pounced on and dispatched a skipper trapped in a web. I remember being surprised to find “so many kinds of spiders” in our neighborhood. This was my first recognition of biodiversity.
That summer Greg went off to a camp, and my family went away on vacation. When we returned to Long Beach, we discovered that the spiders and bottles had ‘disappeared.’ Greg’s Mom explained that there had been an earthquake while we were away and that some of the bottles fell and broke, releasing the spiders. She proceeded to get rid of our spiders.
Had there been an earthquake? I suspected not – more likely (and understandably), Greg’s Mom just did not like having her garage full of spiders and took advantage of our absence to dispose of them.
3.5 Lobster muscles in Mazatlán
When I was in fifth grade, my family took a 3-week vacation to México (as far south as Acapulco). This was by far the longest and best family vacation we ever had. Being exposed to foreign landscapes, culture, and language was exciting. My memories of that trip are vivid and many.
Arriving in Mazatlán, we ate lunch at a restaurant adjacent to the Gulf of California. I’d had lobster only once in my young life, as it was expensive in California. But in Mazatlán, it was cheap – so my parents let me order one.
The lobster I had been served in Long Beach included only the tail, but the lobster in Mazatlán arrived whole and intact. I knew nothing about lobster anatomy and did not know where to begin. I broke off one leg and ‘discovered’ a whitish cord protruding from the inside of shell casing of the leg. When I pulled on the cord, the leg miraculously straightened. I was fascinated. I alternated between pulling and pushing the cord and then watching the leg straighten or bend. I did not know the associated scientific jargon, but I was self-discovering exoskeletons and levers. My parents soon told me to stop playing with my food.
Looking back, I appreciate that animals were part of my boyhood and youth, but they were a minor part. That would eventually change.