Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journals

Easty, resident Terrapene carolina triunguis at Casa Adams Wedel, sometime gnawer of rat skulls, whose recent exploits will be detailed in future posts.

In Archie Carr’s encyclopedic “Handbook of Turtles: The Turtles of the United States, Canada, and Baja California”, first published in 1952, he quotes favorably and at length the observations of “Mrs. Knowlton” on the behavior of wood turtles (Clemmys insculpta) and box turtles (Terrapene carolina). The source given in the references is:

Knowlton, Josphine Gibson. 1943. My Turtles. Privately printed. Pp. i-xxxvii, 39-222, 22 figs.

Who was Josephine Gibson Knowlton? She was the author of a few other books, including “The Innocent Cause” and “Roma”; the younger sister of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and possibly one of the models for his iconic “Gibson Girl” illustrations around the turn of the 20th century; and she married Daniel Knowlton, who played football for Harvard and was later the legal counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission. Importantly for our purposes, and for Archie Carr’s, she wrote and privately published a whole book about the turtles in her backyard. At least at the time that Carr was writing in the 1950s, Knowlton had cornered the market on observations of wood turtle mating behavior. For all I know, her observations on the topic are still the most detailed available; lots of people write about where turtles are found, but few take the time to sit like Jane Goodall and watch them go through their stereotypically protracted mating sessions.

It sure as heck looks like Josephine’s quite famous older brother illustrated her turtle book; there are interior illustrations in the same style.

Archie Carr was utterly omnivorous in collecting information on the ranges, life history, and behavior of turtles, and his book cites all kinds of sources, from august scientific journals to newspaper clippings. It’s fascinating just to page through the bibliography. Anyone with more than one citation is almost certainly a professional biologist or scientist of some kind, but a lot of the one-hit-wonders, especially from the 1800s, are regular folks. This is directly relevant to a recent comment by Allen Hazen, in which he asked, “Is it worth trying the ‘experiment’ of comparing articles in the same journal published decades apart?” What follows is the example I promised to post.

While reading Carr, I was intrigued by a reference to Fisher (1887) on Muhlenberg’s turtle at a lake in New York, so I tracked it down. The account appears in the Zoology section of the “general notes”, on pp. 672-673 of the 1887 volume of The American Naturalist. Fisher was an MD, not a herpetologist, and he was just reporting on some turtle shells he found stomping around the edges of a lake. Here’s the whole publication (note that nowadays we’d call it Muhlenberg’s turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii; when I was a kid it was Clemmys muhlenbergii):

I really admire this little paper — in 165 words, Fisher laid out his methods, described his findings, raised a taphonomic mystery, tied in ornithological and botanical observations to make a biogeographic point, and cited a source, and it’s written like it was meant to be read by humans (curious non-specialists, even) and not merely to pass an editorial gauntlet. This reinforces my strong feeling that conference abstracts can and should be fully-fledged miniature papers, in conception, execution, credit received, and citeability. I will aim to hold my future abstracts to the Fisher standard.

Still, it is wild to me that American Naturalist is now one of the most prestigious journals in ecology and evolution, such that publishing one paper in “AmNat” can be a career-maker for an up-and-coming biologist, and this has been true for some decades already. But 140 years ago they were publishing letters from randos on dead varmints they found down at the lake.

More on that shift — which was certainly not unique to AmNat, and has happened at other journals within my lifetime — in a future post.