Imagine, biologists very often travel to those they study. For practical reasons, of course. But all the same, the title sounds awful, but once you dive deeper into the topic, everything falls into place.
In most cases:)
In 1972, primatologist Richard Wrangham conducted research with chimpanzees in Tanzania. Surrounded by their sounds and smells and living in their habitat, he found himself yearning for an even deeper knowledge of their lives. So he asked project manager Jane Goodall if he could try eating like a chimpanzee, at least for a little while?
With the blessing of Goodall, Wrangham went on a "chimpanzee diet." Most of his diet consisted of "plant foods that tasted so bad I couldn't fill my stomach with them," Wrangham admitted. But one day he stumbled upon an unusual snack left by a chimpanzee: raw colobus monkey meat.
Chimpanzees eat two types of colobus - black and white and red - however, they prefer the latter and hunt it most often. Wrangham decided to find out the reason. So when he came across the remains of colobus monkeys, he took a bite from each species.
“Their meat looked the same to me,” he writes. "I came to the conclusion that there is something special in human nutrition." This ultimately inspired him to write a book on the role of cooking in human evolution.
We tend to think of biology as a visual discipline. Researchers count populations and observe behavior. They track anatomical structures and physiological responses. If they want to get a closer look at something, they use a microscope.
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But as Wrangham discovered, there are other forms of knowledge. In some situations, tasting subjects (or eating what they eat) helps researchers identify species and solve logistic puzzles. In other cases, this allows them to defend their principles or immerse themselves in many different mysteries. Sometimes you just need to eat a piece of the notorious apple - or a mushroom, or a tadpole, or aphids, or a tunicate.
Identification
If you don't know exactly what something is, taste it. In mycology (the science of mushrooms), taste is "an integral part of the taxonomic process," according to Kabir Gabriel Pei, a Stanford University professor of mushroom ecology. Taste and smell are often key characteristics that help field researchers to distinguish between species.
For example, in California, according to Pei, there are two species of Lactarius (Miller) that are very similar. Both are small and reddish and give off a white milky sap when broken. “But one of them, if you dry it, smells and tastes like maple syrup,” Pei says. "People add it to ice cream and cookies." The other has a pungent taste. “In the field, knowing this feature allows you to determine the type of mushroom to taste,” explains Pei. (Important: If you are going to taste unknown mushrooms, make sure you spit them out afterwards rather than swallow them.)
Often the same goes for plants. “I constantly eat the leaves to identify the species and for fun when I already know what kind of plant it is,” says Kevin Vega, who studies urban ecology at the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich. Scientists in other fields have their own versions of these tests: at least one geomorphology textbook recommends "slowly passing … the soil between your teeth" to distinguish silt from sand and clay. And paleontologists know that if it is actually a piece of bone, then it will most likely stick to your tongue, while a piece of rock will not.
Solving mysteries
Other biologists, like Wrangham, are faced with more complex mysteries that their languages can help them solve. In 1971, zoologist Richard Wassersug convinced graduate students to eat eight different species of tadpoles to see if the slow-swimming tadpoles were developing a bad taste to deter predators. “None of them were sweet and tasty,” Wassersug told NPR reporter Jesse Rack in 2015. But the slowest of them did have the worst taste.
Likewise, herpetologist Chris Austin has been trying for years to figure out why some species of skink have green blood while others have red. As Austin stated in an interview with NPR, he once ate a few raw skinks to determine which species tasted best. Both were terrible - Austin likened them to "spoiled sushi." He's still working on the problem, but at least he has another data point.
Biologist Karl Magnacca has been researching the Hawaiian yellow-faced bee, an endangered species in the United States. While most bees use the hairs on their legs to carry pollen, yellow-faced bees swallow it, fly to the nest, and then regurgitate it. “If you catch a female carrying pollen back to the nest … she will vomit it on your fingers, which serves as a defense mechanism,” says Magnacca.
At this point, you can place the vomit under a microscope and find out which flowers the bees prefer. Or, if you don't have time to wait, you can eat it and try to identify it by taste - at least, that's what Magnacca has done more than once. Unfortunately, bee vomit tastes like lemon honey, so microscopes are more useful in this regard. “Bees pollinate native plants almost exclusively,” says Magnacca. "This is a big limiting factor."
Sometimes the taste itself gives rise to curiosity. Stephanie Gertin attended the University of Rhode Island and worked in a laboratory that studied lobsters. The experiments involved stressing some lobsters. They were placed in tanks in pairs and exposed one of them to chemicals that made him think that the other lobster was much larger than it actually was. Due to a policy that forbade the release of experimental animals into the wild, the scientists had to eat the lobsters.
“After eating enough lobsters, I noticed that sometimes they tasted differently,” says Gertin. - I began to pay attention to whether this or that lobster was the one who was frightened or not. Oddly enough, lobsters that were stressed … tasted sour. Friends, whom she asked to try experimental lobsters, agreed with her. And while Gertin didn’t investigate the matter more closely, tests in pigs, rams and turkeys showed that the stress caused by chemicals affects the taste of animal meat.
Logistics
In some situations, eating (or ingesting) a sample is a purely logistic solution. One aphid scientist wrote that eating research objects made it easier to count. (Also, if they chewed on the leaves of cabbage plants, they tasted like mustard.) Another man told the legend of the first scientist to investigate parasites and discover a new type of intestinal worm in Africa. He knew that permission to import it would take too long, so he decided to swallow it, believing that in this way he could transport it to the States.
Leslie Ordal told the story of a field research trip to Siberia, during which she and her colleagues studied golomyanka, a fish from Lake Baikal. In fact, people do not eat it, and in the Western scientific literature at one time there were many myths associated with this: "Previously, it was described as transparent and quickly dissolving in sunlight," Ordal writes. The team was unable to bring formalin from the US to preserve the samples, so when they got to Russia, they "bought a box of cheap vodka to use as a preservative and a box of expensive vodka to drink."
Ordal said they ran out of good vodka one night. “Some of my tougher colleagues decided not to stop there. They made their way to a field laboratory and took bottles of dead fish, she writes. “They took several sips from one bottle, and then it dawned on them that someone would certainly notice that one bottle would contain less vodka than all the others. So they went and drank about the same amount from all the other bottles."
The fact that the fish samples survived everything that splashed around helped the team to disprove a number of misconceptions about their fragility, according to Ordal. (They also realized that after drinking too much vodka in the morning you will have a hell of a hangover.)
Pedagogy
These stories may make you smile, but none of them are overwhelmingly surprising. Biologists spend too much time thinking about their objects, and this may make them want to eat them or eat like them. "Not all invertebrate laboratories have this tradition, but many of them taste experimental samples if possible," says Lindsay Waldrop, associate professor of invertebrate biology. Waldrop just roasted some tunicates, Styela plicata in particular, for one of her students last week.
While the tunicates Styela plicata are a delicacy in some places, including Chile and South Korea, Waldrop and her student are more used to seeing them on the autopsy table. “They taste terrible,” Waldrop says. "Very leathery." Her own career has been full of various mouthwatering rites of passage: at a field station on San Juan Island in Washington, D. C., she and her colleagues chewed on everything from shrimp and worms to sea urchin. “We ate a lot of different objects - though we avoided those that might sting or make you feel bad,” she recalls fondly. "I think this is probably not 100% security, but it's a good tradition."
Meanwhile, in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), eating samples is a vital part of the scientific process. Much of CLEAR's research focuses on how plastic pollution affects food species in and around Newfoundland. Most of the specimens are obtained from local hunters and fishermen.
In the Civilian Conservation Research Laboratory, the study and consumption of different species are closely intertwined.
To make eating samples part of the protocol, the lab had to change some of the rules. “According to most university animal care protocols, animal tissue itself is a hazardous waste,” says CLEAR Director Max Liboiron. "The first thing we did was abolish the principle of respectful treatment of animals." Now that they've done their research on cod, hake, ducks and geese, they eat as much of the leftover as they can. If something cannot be eaten, they put it back into their habitat. “We are clearly a feminist and anti-colonial laboratory,” Liboiron says. - When we talk about ethics in the laboratory, we mean a good relationship. Eating animals means we are on good terms with animals."
The creatures that humans eat for science aren't always tasty. But in each of the cases described here, the level of understanding of these particular relationships made the experience worthwhile. Wrangham has not yet repeated his experiment of eating raw monkey meat, but if given the opportunity, he agrees to return to the "tasting" trail. “I suspect it's not the meat but the skin of the black and white colobus that tastes bad,” he says. I have to try again.