Yesterday morning my deflated air mattress woke me up before sunrise. I burned my tongue on a fresh cup of coffee and walked to the beach across the street from my parents’ apartment in Honolulu. Following my morning ritual, I buried my sandals in the sand and paddled my surfboard the quarter-mile or so to the break. The waves were small. I smiled and nodded as I passed other members of the regular lineup, mostly older Japanese men. The atmosphere was light with laughter and stories. “How’s Derek doing after his back surgery?” “Pretty good, but he won’t be surfing for a while.” I always feel like I’m watching an elderly breakfast meetup out here. It’s a refreshing change from the macho, hyper-competitive lineups I’ve encountered at other spots around the island.
Just as the sun was starting to peek over Diamondhead, I noticed a honeybee struggling to stay afloat in the water. I plucked him up and rolled him onto the nose of my surfboard. He carefully buzzed his wings in an attempt to dry them, and I leaned back to push the nose of my board higher into the air. Twice, he took off only to plunge straight back into the water. You got this buddy, I thought as I fought the urge to paddle for another passing wave. His persistence finally paid off as he lifted into the air and buzzed away. I smiled.
If I had seen that honeybee in the water last winter, I would have shrugged and paddled into a wave. I can imagine myself thinking, Honeybees aren’t native to Hawaii or I shouldn’t interfere with natural selection. If this bee ended up in the water, it probably has bad genes. This was the sort of thinking I carried with me out of college and into the Amazon Rainforest, where things started to change.
“You are who you were when you were ten years old,” Sara remarked as our canoe floated somewhere in the Ecuadorian Amazon a few months before I met the honeybee. We were talking about how we were living our childhood dreams. Sara explained that when she was ten, she spent her time purposefully getting lost on her bike and collecting what she thought were tadpoles (actually mosquito larvae) from puddles. Now, here we were, as lost as you can possibly be on a river, and she was still looking for tadpoles. That didn’t seem like something adults actually got to do. I thought back to my ten-year-old self. Memories of picking leeches off my legs after hours of trudging through waist-deep mud in search of turtles and frogs made me smile. Ten-year-old Eli would’ve been glad to know that 23-year-old Eli was still getting muddy and catching frogs. I reflected on what Sara said. “You are who you were when you were ten years old.” I wanted her to be right. I wanted to be one of those proud few who live out their childhood dreams. I wanted a smooth story, the perfectly consistent character. But there was a wrinkle in my story that I didn't know how to make right.
A few months earlier, I had been in Peru studying poison frogs with a Ph.D. candidate. We had worked together the previous summer in a frog genetics lab. By the end of the summer, I noticed myself reducing the frogs to collections of individual genes and skin pigments. I decided that the test tubes, PCR machines, and Petri dishes were killing my wonder for frogs. When I started working in the Amazon though, the excitement of seeing little orange, green, and yellow frogs hopping across Philodendron leaves reminded me of why I was doing what I was doing. The memory of hearing dozens of poison frogs sing from banana trees in a light rain still makes my heart beat a little faster. Locating the calling males based on sound alone was a great challenge. Ten-year-old Eli would’ve been stoked - until he saw what happened to the frogs after they were caught. I turned them into museum specimens. I killed frogs by placing a drop of minty-smelling benzocaine onto their orange bellies and waiting until their abdomen stopped rising and falling with each breath. Then, I used a scalpel to crush their skulls before dunking them into a test tube filled with ethanol. Sometimes I could hear frogs singing outside as I worked. If this was the humane way to do it, why did it feel wrong? Museum specimens are important for conservation and a few frogs wouldn’t affect the population. It was easy to justify; our research would save thousands of frogs in the long run. Yet the killing made me wince. It was so cold. I was having trouble discerning why I was ignoring the emotions that were so clearly present. Was it because of the influence of my colleagues? I would have been embarrassed to be seen mourning the death of a frog. I was afraid of being perceived as naive or dramatic in a world that is supposed to be totally objective. With logic as your god, there is no room for emotion in the sterile religion of science. As I’ve reflected on this more, I think I placed the standards of the scientific institution on myself. For years, I trained myself to shut out any thoughts that weren’t purely scientific. I learned to detest the emotional thinking that I was now experiencing. I wanted to see myself as a scientist. Not just a nature enthusiast or conservationist, but a real scientist. I buried my feelings and dropped benzocaine onto the next one.
Sara’s comment resonated because I knew I had been ignoring my inner 10-year-old. I had a flash to when I was in fourth grade and my first ever pet toad died. His name was Holey (I found him in a hole). I took Holey everywhere with me. I remember loading his 10-gallon terrarium into the family van every time we went up north for the weekend. On one of these weekend trips, he escaped the terrarium and it took almost an hour before I finally found him in a clump of moss. That hour was the only glimpse I’ve ever had at the panic a parent feels when their child goes missing. For several more years, I watched Holey dig around his terrarium; I fed him fireflies until his belly glowed (before I learned that fireflies are toxic). He sparked my curiosity and love for amphibians. As the years passed, a cement-walled room in our basement began to fill with terrariums with more toads, frogs, and lizards. I still remember holding back tears in my fourth-grade classroom on the morning he died. Sitting in the canoe, that emotion came rushing back. It was now accompanied by the feelings from all the frog deaths that I’d experienced and ignored. The feelings that had been replaced by scientific training. The scientific literature doesn’t discuss the tragedy of a single death. Just population-level threats.
There on the river, Sara put my feelings into words. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, she made a tremendous effort to stop calling living beings by the pronoun “it.” If we clump living creatures with things, it’s easier to view them as commodities. The destruction of “it” is easier to stomach than the destruction of “her.” As we found frogs along the Rio Curaray, we got better about replacing the “it” pronoun. On this topic though, I’ll defer to Sara, who wrote a beautiful piece about names and pronouns.
Immediately following our river trip, Sara, Kira, and I joined a team of biologists on a backpacking expedition into an uncharted high-elevation cloud forest. That meant that we would possibly be finding species that were new to western science. This was exciting, but when we started finding frogs that nobody recognized, the reality of science set in. To describe a new species, scientists need a voucher specimen to compare against other specimens. Precise morphological measurements are important in species descriptions.
Sara asked whether we would kill the frog, and our teammates beat around the bush. “We need to take a specimen to use as a voucher,” was easier to say than “yes, we are killing frogs.” Whatever the words, everyone knew we were taking dead frogs out of the forest.
There were tears as we sat in smokey silence around the wet cooking fire. “Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong, this is the way the system works,” I said in a pathetic attempt to console Sara. One dead voucher specimen could lead to a new species description. A new species could justify the protection of all this land and potentially save an entire ecosystem. The point I was trying to make may or may not be true, but at the end of the day, it’s irrelevant. Sara was arguing that we shouldn’t be working within this system in the first place. Why is it that we need to name species to justify not clear-cutting a forest? Why is resource extraction the default option unless you can prove the ecosystem to be “important?” Our science stems from the way our culture views nature: as a commodity.
These conversations felt more welcome in Ecuador than they did in Peru. Maybe it was because the team in Ecuador included women. Had Sara and Kira not been there, everyone would’ve had the same feelings, but I seriously doubt they would’ve been discussed. Yet another reason that we need more women in science.
After the expedition concluded, we returned to the research station to kill and preserve the frogs. It sucked. Some visiting herpetologists gave me instructions on how to prepare the bodies in standardized ways for the museum. I was engrossed in the work. Wielding a pair of tweezers, I manipulated the frogs’ now stiff limbs to hold an eternal cactus arm pose. I felt like a real scientist, With the pull of tradition and the excitement of discovery, I started to relax. Then someone asked Kira if she wanted to prepare one of the frogs. She picked up Pristimantis bellae (beautiful rain frog), a stunning mossy textured frog that we’d been calling the Christmas frog all week because of her vibrant red and green colors. Her beauty had made me feel alive in the cloud forest. I looked at the frog sprawled out on our tray between surgical scissors and tissue paper. The earthy smells of rain and wet moss had been replaced by ethanol and nitrile. The once-perky, alert frog was now stiff with glassy eyes. Her rich skin that induced shouts of admiration in the forest had faded to drab remnants of color. At first, my scientific brain wondered why her colors had faded so drastically. I was snapped out of it when Kira started to cry. “I’m just trying to keep some feeling,” she said.
Had I lost mine?
I carried that question with me out of the Amazon and back to Hawaii. Feelings of self-doubt about my legitimacy as a scientist battled with a persistent feeling of guilt because I was a scientist. I perused copies of the Herpetological Review searching for answers. Then one morning I found myself on a surfboard rescuing a honeybee. Suddenly I saw myself as a whole. A scientist, yes, a cog in an imperfect institution that sometimes makes mistakes, but also an empathetic child of the world that falls in love with toads and hesitates while euthanizing dart frogs. Empathy can’t mean saving every salamander or every bee, but it can mean fostering compassion to help see the too often overlooked. Empathy can make me a scientist that seeks discovery without distilling curiosity to numbers. Empathy can make me a kinder and gentler person. So, with the help of my frog-finding friends and bee neighbors, I will continue to hold on to my inner 10-year-old.
Acknowledgment: I'm grateful to all of the frogs that have died in the name of research. Thanks to Sara Dykman and Kira Miller for many of the photos and wise words.
