Dr. John Pickering, or “Pick” as everyone knows him, worked for decades in the fields of agriculture and health. But his first love was biology — for which he earned a PhD at Harvard University.
Born in the UK, he grew up in the English countryside, and was drawn to nature. By the age of six, he had built an insect zoo for wooly bears and ballbugs, and a few years later had been converted to the collectors’ “culture of death” — catch it, kill it, pin it, put it in a museum. Before long he was running Malaise insect traps from Canada to Panama, which is an efficient way of filling collection cabinets and freezers full of dead insects.
The first step in this process was to throw away the by-catch — moths. Little did he know that his love for nature would ultimately lead him to develop something as unusual as the Moth Party.
Natural Experiments
“I got really interested in these Malaise traps,” says Pick. “We had them in Maryland, Tennesse, North Carolina, and Georgia amongst others, and at the time we published a paper about something called the natural experiment.”
A natural experiment has multiple sites, and if some sites get drenched in a rainstorm and other sites don’t, scientists can use that to tease out what they are monitoring.
A Malaise trap is a large, tent-like mesh structure used for trapping, killing, and preserving flying insects. Insects fly into the tent wall and are funneled into a collection container attached at the highest point. One end is wide open. When insects fly in, they head up through a funnel and get trapped. The basic design was invented in 1934 by René Malaise and has no association with the word "malaise," which was formed by the use of the French word mal for bad, and the Latin word aise for comfort. Although that "vague sense of ill-feeling" may said to have been experienced by many grad students hoping to catch an elusive bug that is critical to their dissertation.
Understanding the potential of large-scale impacts, such as a polar vortex or climate change, on biological systems is not easily accomplished. It’s just not pragmatic to perform random experiments at the state or national level, and then also replicate them to either confirm or remove certain influences. Scientists will often perform what they call ‘pseudo-replication’ to take care of this. Mothing, in contrast uses natural field experiments — taking advantage of droughts or urban heat islands for example, to study such occurrences.
Pick says, “We photograph moths at lights before dawn every night. I have been doing this with only one interruption — when I suffered a heart attack I was out for four days — to identify species, document how communities change seasonally, and what happens over, say a twenty year period in response to changes in weather patterns, land-use, air quality, and other variables.”
When three polar vortexes came through in the winter of 2013 for example, two-thirds of the moth population was destroyed. If the team had enough sites they could have confirmed if it was the vortex that killed the moths — only the sites affected by the weather would have demonstrated the same level of deaths.
Mothing participants can rapidly collect and share phenomenal quantities of high-quality data from numerous study sites with modern digital photography and online tools. By collectively monitoring moth communities, this magic ‘Moth Team’ can take advantage of natural experiments to better understand, predict and manage moth populations and their interactions with other species.
Data in Exchange for Education
Mothing has a long list of scientific goals on their website but Mothing’s educational objective is to involve the public in all aspects of the project from hypothesis generation, data collection, identification, analysis, and presentation of results.”
Pick says, “You give us data, and we’ll give you an education!” Pick, and his team of mothers also developed Moth Math to teach students how to analyze real-time moth data. Consider lumping math, science, natural history and more into one exciting project, and you have it. In partnership with the Moth Photographers Group that provided 400,000 diagnostic photographs, Discover Life now provides online identification guides to 12,000 moth species customized by US state or Canadian province or territory. Pick says they hope to work this down to the county level.
“Moths are exciting,” said former outreach coordinator Nancy Lowe. “They are charismatic creatures, highly diverse, economically important as herbivores in larval stage, as pollinators in adult stage, and as important source of food for migratory songbirds in all stages. Anyone can set up a mothing site without having to travel through a tick-infested field site, they don’t bite, and they come to you!”
Identification using photos is fairly easy, with the exception of a few species. In short, they are a great way to teach and learn natural history and share science with the public.
There is a staggering amount of diversity within the moth family. “The excitement and wonder of the diversity of moths across our study sites is enormous,” says Pick. He. has photographed more moth species at his home alone, than the number of bird species in North America. Most folks, he says, even in urban areas, should expect at least a couple of hundred species to come to their porch lights.
National Moth Week was created to engage citizen scientists each summer. The term citizen scientist or community scientist describes any lay person — from kindergartner to pensioner — who participates in the collection of data for a scientific study. This includes summer mothing parties, gardens especially designed to attract moths, and even an effort to light up a white wall at every nature center in the country. Mothing encourages everyone, including natural history museums and Audubon chapters to sign up their location as a study site.
