Narration (Rae): So in 2017, I was working at this really amazing science institution, and one of the things that I got to do at my job included this outreach program with kids, and part of it was getting these urban public school city kids, you know, into the wilderness and taking them camping.
We set up tents and had them camp under the stars. We would set traps and catch snapping turtles. We caught birds and put bands on the legs of birds so we could track their migrations.
One of the main goals was to be really inspiring and kind of training these young kids of color to, you know, be the next scientists.
And it was a small part of my job at that institution, but it was one of my favorite parts of my job there. And yet, you know, not everything was perfect.
Because a few weeks after that outdoor trip a big national tragedy occurred. There’s this big demonstration of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and things had turned violent when a car was driven into some counterprotestors and someone was killed.
And I remember the day after walking into work and being really crushed by this and distracted and confused. I sat down in my office and I looked at the news and I saw that so many, like big science institutions were releasing statements, saying that racism has no place in their institutions and, you know, it’s just words and yet it offers some like emotional support. And I kept waiting for my institution’s statement to pop up.
And like the day went on and it never did. And I found myself thinking about those kids that I was just with. And these kids were primarily like black and brown future scientists who might one day work at that institution. It was during that time I made a personal commitment to unapologetically include social justice advocacy in my science work. And I found myself emailing the president of my institution and demanding that our institution release a statement.
And it turned out that there were huge, negative consequences for that move I made.
It was like all of my credibility of being a wildlife ecologist went out the window in that moment. Like I even had my boss say to me a few days later, “You know, you’re, you’re just so passionate about these issues. Maybe… have you ever thought about just going into social justice advocacy?” I mean, I was wildly offended. I wasn’t passionate about, you know, racism. Like I wanted it to not exist so that I could do my frickin’ work and like get on with it.
My passion was wildlife ecology. The advocacy work is work that I have to do so that I can ultimately do the science that I love. And even though I wish I didn’t have to do that kind of work, I’m so glad that I’m not the only one.
Narration (Rae): I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and this is a different kind of nature show; a podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. This season, I want to share my story, but I also want to introduce you to other amazing wildlife scientists: some of my friends who study hyenas, work with lizards, and even track sharks. The animals we study are great, but who we are as people and how that affects our work is just as interesting.
And we’re gonna talk all about it. This is Going Wild.
Earyn: Don’t you run from me. Don’t you run from me, lizard.
Narration (Rae): This is a YouTube video of my friend, Dr. Earyn McGee, doing her favorite thing in the world: catching lizards in the Arizona desert.
Earyn: So what I would do normally is take a picture of the lizard right where it is.
And after that, I try to catch the lizard. So let’s see if I can get this bad boy or girl. It could be either one.
Narration (Rae): Earyn is a herpetologist: a scientist who studies reptilian and amphibian species like frogs, salamanders, snakes… and Earyn’s specialty, llizards.
Earyn’s fascination with lizards has made her a bit of a social media star. She has so much fun engaging with her followers on Youtube and Twitter, sharing her love for animals: a love that stretches all of the way back to her childhood.
Earyn: When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hold animals. So like, I just wanted to go out and do research. That’s all I still want to do. I just wish somebody paid me to go do some research.
Narration (Rae): But for Earyn, doing what she loves is not that simple, because as a Black scientist, she experiences challenges that other scientists, including other herpetologists, don’t.
Earyn: So herpetology is, you know, I’m gonna just come out and say it, and we all know, but it’s a predominantly white and male field.
I’m definitely a speck of pepper in the sea of salt . Um, and so that can be intimidating at times.
Narration (Rae): As much as Earyn would love to spend all of her time doing research, collecting data, and capturing lizards in the desert, she doesn’t have that luxury. Because being a Black scientist means it’s never just about doing the science.
Earyn: Unfortunately when you’re a Black person in non-Black spaces, a lot of the times you do have to be the representative for all Black people.
I would rather come in and be like, “Hey guys, what’s up, let’s go out and have a good time. Let’s catch some lizards!” And not even have to worry about that, but I do because it’s something that other people worry about.
Narration (Rae): And this “worry” is something that Earyn has been carrying with her ever since she was a college freshman who just started researching lizards. From day one, she knew that she had to prove herself in this field.
Earyn: I knew that when I was out in the field and it was time to catch the lizards, I was catching all the lizards, okay? There wasn’t nobody catching as many lizards as me. I saw the lizard and I got it. I would do anything. I would scale the size of the canyon walls, whatever it took to catch some lizards, I was doing it.
And of course there’s gonna be mistakes along the way, but I tried to minimize my mistakes as much as possible. With collecting lizard toes, you actually have to kind of like clip ’em with scissors and so it can be…
Rae WG.: Wait, did you just say lizard toes? Toes? Yeah. Okay. Wait, wait, wait back all the way up. What are we talking about here with lizard toes and why do they need to be collected?
Earyn: Um, so they it’s a way of permanently marking the lizards.
Narration (Rae): Okay… so a little back story here:
For her research, Earyn needed to collect data on different lizard populations in the Chiricahua Mountains, in the Arizona desert where she was conducting her study. So she would go out to the field, catch lizards, jot down their measurements, and then tag them. For a lot of animals, like the bears I study, we would put tags on them so we can keep track of them and easily identify them, but lizards are a bit trickier…
Earyn: For the ones that we were working with, they were kind of too small for tags. It would prevent them from getting into their crevices that help with thermal regulation and escaping predators.
Narration (Rae): So, herpetologists use a different method for identifying lizards: by taking toe clippings.
Earyn: So on the lizard’s feet, they have, you know, five toes on each one and each one gets a number. And so each lizard has a unique numerical code for the toes that we take. And so we only take one from each of three feet from the lizard. And then you go in with some little really sharp surgical scissors, and the problem is sometimes when you cut, the toe goes flying, and because you’re in nature, you can’t find it. So you have to be really good at like angling the toes. So that way it, if it does go flying, it goes into your lap versus just out into the air. So that was definitely a skill to build right there.
Narration (Rae): It didn’t take long for Earyn to become an expert toe-clipper, but there were other things about the field that she couldn’t get used to.
Earyn: My first field summer, I was like 18 and that’s when I was going out to catch lizards for the first time. And my undergraduate advisor was explaining it to me and he kept being like, “Yeah, we’re gonna noose these lizards and this, that, and the other. And I’m just like, this doesn’t really sit well with me…
Narration (Rae): We’re gonna noose these lizards.
Noosing is the long-standing term used in herpetology for catching lizards.
To catch a lizard you use this tool that’s basically a fishing pole with a small loop at the end, and when you find a lizard, you put the loop around the lizard’s head and shoulder area, then pull to tighten the loop.
As Earyn continued in this field, she was exposed to this word – noosing – everywhere.
Earyn: In like scientific papers and stuff like that. People talking about it on social media. It is a very much common and accepted word.
Narration (Rae): But as a Black person, this term is really disturbing. Every time Earyn heard the word, it called to mind horrific lynchings of Black people and other people of color thoughout history.
So having the word “noosing” being thrown around so casually like that is very triggering.
Earyn: It makes me uncomfortable as a Black woman where I’m in the field, in the middle of nowhere, with no service and you know, all these white people are talking about noosing things.
Narration (Rae): But there was no way for Earyn to escape it.
Rae WG.: Would you say that you ever used that word, noosing?
Earyn: Yes, I have, because that was what was expected. That was the traditional term. And I definitely wanted to fit in and, despite it making me uncomfortable, I did what I had to to get by and to do the work that I love to do.
Narration (Rae): For a long time, Earyn concealed how she felt about the word because she didn’t feel safe enough to raise this issue with anyone, even with her own advisor.
What she did know was that none of her peers seemed to have an issue with this word. And as the speck of pepper in a sea of salt, Earyn didn’t want to rock the boat.
Earyn: I already knew what was expected of me. and so one, I wanted to keep doing what I was doing and I didn’t want to get kicked out. And two, I didn’t want to ruin it for anybody else coming in behind me.
Narration (Rae): So Earyn focused her energy on her research so she could excel in her field. But the weariness kept eating at her. Earyn couldn’t let it go.
Earyn: I made a mental note and I just kind of tried to figure out how was the best way to navigate it over time.
Narration (Rae): But eventually, Earyn couldn’t keep her feelings buried, and we’ll find out what happens when she begins to stir things up in the herpetology community after the break.
Sound Design: MIDROLL
Narration (Rae): Despite the challenges she faced as a young scientist and one of the few Black herpetologists in her field, Earyn had a lot going for her.
Earyn decided to go get her PhD and continue to do what she loves most: doing research.
And what Earyn aims to tackle with her research are the seemingly simple questions that most people overlook.
Earyn: I just assumed that they were all answered and that’s not the case. There’s a whole lot that you can contribute just by asking simple questions. It does not have to be complicated. So for my dissertation, I ended up asking the question: what do lizards eat?
Narration (Rae): You’d think we’d already know the answer to this question, but Earyn discovered that when it comes to some of the small lizard species in the Southwestern United States, scientists really don’t have a clear idea of what kinds of insects they eat. So Earyn decided she was gonna find out.
But in the process of doing this diet study, Earyn once again encountered long-standing practices that she began to question.
There are a couple methods that hepatologists traditionally use to figure out what a lizard eats and they involve looking at a lizard’s stomach contents.
Earyn: Gut pumping, which is like flushing water down their throats to get them to throw up whatever they ate or like euthanizing the lizards and then cutting their stomachs open.
Narration (Rae): Even though these practices are considered standard, Earyn didn’t feel good about doing these things to lizards for her own study. She thought: why are we pumping their guts and cutting them open?
Earyn: I started to look into other ways of doing diet studies I was like, okay. What can I do that is least invasive and does not kill the animal.
Narration (Rae): And then Earyn thought about the lizard toes… Remember those? The tiny toe clippings she’d been collecting all these years.
Earyn: I started to get the idea for like stable isotopes and I was looking for like, how can I get the stable isotope data from the lizards? And I was like, well, we’re already cutting toes. So if the toes work, then that is a two-for-one, essentially.
Narration (Rae): So instead of looking at stomach contents, Earyn was going to use her lizard toe clippings and she was going to run what’s called a stable isotope analysis on them.
It’s a pretty complicated process, but it’s basically a way to measure the presence of certain elements that are found in animals’ bones or teeth, and once you have this data, you can find out all kinds of things about an animal, like what kind of environment an animal lived in or in this case, what did it eat?
Earyn: Essentially, it’s like when you’re eating Cheetos and you get that Cheeto dust on your hands, we’re looking to see if the lizards have Cheeto dust on their hands.
Narration (Rae): Earyn was able to successfully use the toe clippings for her diet study…and the best part? She was able to minimize the harm done to lizards – she didn’t have to kill or perform any invasive procedures to complete her study.
Earyn was proud of herself for sticking to her guns and changing her own scientific practices to align with her values. Earyn realized she didn’t have to follow convention just because “that’s how things are done.” She could question things and offer her own solutions. This really gave her a sense of pride in her own role as a scientist.
And so, Earyn began to question other things in the field. Because even now, in the middle of her PhD, there was still that one thing that kept eating at her: that word “noosing” that she learned years ago as an undergrad. She still found it disturbing whenever she encountered it.
Narration (Rae): But now, Earyn felt like she had a lot more people on her side.
Earyn: For whatever reason, the following and the community that I’ve built on Twitter has just been phenomenal.
Narration (Rae): Over the years, while she was studying lizards, Earyn was also building a community for herself on social media and connecting with other Black scientists online, like me.
Earyn and I were friends on social media before we became friends in real life.
And as one of the only black female scientists in our respective fields, Earyn and I were able to commiserate with each other, and it was really nice to not have to be alone in our experiences.
Having these kinds of connections online made Earyn feel less isolated in her field. It also gave her a chance to have meaningful conversations about social justice.
Earyn: As I started to learn more and, and gain the actual vocabulary to express the way that that made me feel, that is when I kind of started to wanna have some of the more of those big and you know, more nuanced conversation about this word. And where does it come from and why are we using it?
Narration (Rae): When Earyn first heard the term “noosing lizards” as a college freshman, it made her uneasy, but she didn’t really know how to talk about it. Not only she was new to the field, she also stood out in this super white environment, so the risk of bringing it up did not feel worth it. But now, here she was: a scientist with years of experience, and getting a PhD for god’s sake.
She was still unsure what kind of blow back she might receive and how it would impact the future of her career in the field, but Earyn was tired of hiding.
Earyn: And then it got to a point where I was like, you know what?I feel like I have enough community here where I can start having this conversation and it will be something meaningful.
Narration (Rae): So one day in April 2019, Earyn decided that she was ready to tell the world how she really felt. And so she jumped on Twitter.
Earyn: To my “herp people:” I am very deliberately using the word “lasso” over “noose” because as a very Black person, the word “noose” and the action being described as “noosing” by white people has always made me very uncomfortable due to the past and recent history. Think about it.
Narration (Rae): I mean this was a big deal – not just for Earyn but for the herpetology field as a whole.
Earyn wasn’t simply asking her fellow scientists to change this single word, she was confronting them with a blind spot that the herpetology field had missed all these years.
And understandably, Earyn was both relieved and nervous.
Rae WG.: Did you expect any pushback?
Earyn: Absolutely. People hold on to the things that they call, you know, their traditions and things like that. And so that was very much an established word. So I did expect further to be some pushback, but I was also prepared in that.
Narration (Rae): Earyn had had a lot of time to think about this issue, so she knew going in that she wanted to propose an alternative term for catching lizards. She considered terms like “fishing” or “snaring” and even “looping” but in the end, she landed on the word “lasso.”
Earyn: I thought about going to like the rodeo and stuff like that, like, you know, you could lasso the cow and like, I just thought that that was a word that just had some more positive connotations to it.
Narration (Rae): And on top of that, she anticipated people arguing against changing such an established term, so she had her arguments ready.
Earyn: I’m just like, well, one, this is just not a happy term in general. Maybe we can think of a more inclusive word.
If you just wanna get, you know, a lay person, somebody who has no background in science, or kids or something like that, you want to have language that is friendly to them as well.
And two, it’s not accurate to what we are doing. We are not like catching them and hanging them. We are going out, catching them, collecting data and letting them go.
Narration (Rae): And you know what? despite some initial push back, a lot of people were actually pretty excited about Earyn’s idea.
Earyn: People started to like really respond and engage in conversation with me. And I was just like, well, I’m gonna push this as far as I could get it to go. And we’ll see what happens from there.
Narration (Rae): Because as Earyn learned from this field where she spent so much time paying attention to the small things – from lizards and their toe clippings, to the tiny insects they eat – Earyn grew to appreciate how much small things can really impact the health of the larger ecosystem.
Earyn: In the grand scheme of things, is it a really big deal? The word itself where we’re just looking at it? Probably not, and that’s the beauty of it. It is not a big deal. So when people are saying, yeah, I believe that we should have more diversity and inclusion. All right cool. Do this one thing. This one thing that is not a big deal, and it weeds out the people who are really about doing diversity and inclusion work and those who are not.
The hope is that they will continue to make small changes and small changes until all those small changes become bigger changes, and they think more critically, okay, so I have this, you know, non-white student… how can I better my lab to make it more inclusive to them? So that way they feel welcome and they continue on through the program.
Narration (Rae): Earyn was serious about this. She started becoming more and more vocal about making the herpetology field more inclusive, beyond that one initial Tweet.
And I think back to that day in my office after the Charlotesville attack, when I decided that advocacy needed to be part of the science work that I do. And I realized that for Earyn, standing up against this noosing problem was that moment for her, because from that point on, Earyn was fully committed to making advocacy a part of her work. And like me, Earyn had to face consequences for that decision.
Rae WG.: Did you ever feel like there were some risks involved in that, like a professional cost to you or social risk?
Earyn: Absolutely. In academia, it’s very much about who you know, as much as it is about what you know. You have to rely on the community to get grants and to get funding. And I knew that if I was coming up here, starting a ruckus, that people could be like, oh, she’s a troublemaker. We don’t wanna work with her. Or like, if I’m applying for grants and they see my name and they’d be like, oh, well, she’s not a real herpatologist. She wants to do this, that, and the other to change the field and that’s just not what we do. So like there was definitely a concern.
Narration (Rae): And this concern of not being taken seriously as a scientist is not an exaggeration. I can speak from my own experience here.
After the Charlottesville attack, I started speaking up more openly about racism and inequity in my science institution. And I began losing the trust and respect of my colleagues. They stopped seeing me as a scientist and only saw me as the “social justice girl,” and in the end, I felt like I had no choice but to leave my dream job.
So Earyn is not paranoid for worrying about these things, especially as she became more vocal and got more involved in advocacy work, because dedicating time to do advocacy work meant that Earyn had less time to do her scientific research.
As she was working on the lizard diet study for her dissertation, Earyn was also mentoring graduate students of color doing conservation work.
And even though she truly loved working and engaging with other people of color who were interested in nature, science, and animals, sometimes the pressure of being a “real” scientist still got to her.
Earyn: I want to be seen as a scientist because that’s who I am, that’s what I am doing. Sometimes I would be like, well, I shouldn’t even be doing this work. I should just be doing pure ecology stuff. So that way, I don’t get written off as, you know, a non-scientist, I’m just somebody doing advocacy and that type of thing.
Narration (Rae): So Earyn works extra hard to make sure that people don’t discount her scientific work. Whenever she’s asked to give talks about her advocacy work at conferences, she makes sure to put her research front and center.
Earyn: I’m like, this is the science that I did, but while I was doing this science, I was also doing this other stuff because y’all could never… y’all could never do all of the things that I was doing.
So I just need you to understand that I did the advocacy stuff on top of the science. Although I do have some education in the social sciences things, I’m an ecologist.
I wanna do science and just do the science. It is a flex that I’m able to do everything that I’m able to do, but also I shouldn’t have to, but I do because I’m one of few black women in herpetology and ecology.
Narration (Rae): Earyn feels like the advocacy work she’s doing is not optional.
Earyn: I think that doing this advocacy work is also a part of the science in a sense.
So like when I say that I don’t get to focus on science a hundred percent of the time, I mean I focus on the thing that the academy thinks of as being valuable.
No matter who you are, and no matter how apolitical you think you are, your culture, your upbringing, your background, dictates the kinds of questions that you ask, dictates the kind of hypotheses that you make, dictates all of the science that you do. And that is why it’s important to have more diversity, because if we can bring in people who have different backgrounds and cultures, we can start asking a whole bunch more questions and start thinking about, you know, different ways of going about finding answers and doing experiments and stuff like that.
So for me, everything that I do is science, but I know that not everybody sees it like that.
Narration (Rae): And that’s really unfortunate because working to change the way we do science shouldn’t be optional for anyone, because Black scientists shouldn’t be the only ones doing this work.
Earyn: I wanted my life to be better in this field. And I also wanted the lives of other people to be better. And so it made taking those risks worth it.
Narration (Rae): And you know what, it is worth it, because thanks to her efforts, Earyn is starting to see small changes in her field. The term lassoing is starting to catch on.
Earyn: So there hasn’t been any formal change, but I have had people who are like professors or like doing research and stuff, telling me like, yes, we’re starting to use this term in our own like papers and stuff like that. So once it starts getting into peer reviewed research, that’s when other people are really gonna be able to be like, hey, what’s going on here? Why are you making this change? What’s going on?
Narration (Rae): Earyn sees this as a super hopeful sign, because even without a formal change, the more scientists who adopt this new terminology, the more it’ll spread and enter the vernacular.
But switching to the word lasso in scientific papers is just a start.
Earyn: I even have my own undergraduate advisor. He’s using lasso now. And so like, he’s been a herpetologist for, you know, like the last 40-something years.
Narration (Rae): This is the same professor who had introduced Earyn to the word noosing in the first place and now he’s adopting the word lasso. This was an amazing full-circle moment for Earyn.
Earyn: It felt pretty good. I’m not gonna lie, I definitely felt like yeah, I did something here.
Narration (Rae): And Earyn is hopeful, because more changes are coming.
Earyn: So there’s always gonna be work left to do, but, uh, I have seen someone recently use the word “noose” in a tweet to describe what they are doing. And somebody was like, oh, we’re not using that word anymore. We’re using this one instead. So, um, it is definitely, you know, it is making its way. It is, it is, the journey is not complete as of yet, but I didn’t expect it to be either. The whole point was to get people thinking, and now they are.
Narration (Rae): More than just thinking about it, people in the field are actually starting to make this one very small change.
Earyn: And, and when you start small, that gives you the courage to go on to bigger and bigger things.
Lassoed! Lassoed a lizard.
CREDITS
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Episode guest: Jasmin Graham
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant – Host and Writer
Jakob Lewis — Sr. Producer/Editor
Rachel Aronoff — Editor
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Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.
Special thanks to Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi and the rest of the Nature team.
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