RESEARCH IN THE FLORIDA SCRUB

Florida scrub-jay

How do scientists study scrub? With a notebook and pencil, a broad-brimmed hat and sunscreen, and long pants and stout boots. But to really answer this question, we must first ask another question - what is science? Science is a method of study, a way of asking and answering questions about the world around us. The first and most important step in the scientific method does not require years of training and schooling, although it helps.

The scientific method requires that we open our senses to the world around us. First we must observe what is happening in the natural world. We might observe that Florida scrub-jays appear to live in groups of more than two birds or that some scrub plants bear lots of flowers after a fire or that gopher tortoises share their burrows with other scrub animals. Then a well-trained scientist or even an eager school child will ask questions about these observations. This is the next step in the scientific method.

What questions should we ask? We might ask questions that would explain what we observed, if only we knew the answer. For example, are the Florida scrub-jays that live in these groups related to each other? Do birds in large groups have more young than birds in small groups? We might also ask how often fires occur in scrub and how well do plants grow one, two, or three years after a fire. Which animals share the gopher tortoise's burrow? Which burrows do they prefer and how do they benefit from using those burrows? These are just a few of the many questions we can ask, but to all these questions we might add another...why?

Once we've made our observations and asked our important questions, how do scientists actually study scrub? Well, it all depends on the questions we have asked. The third step in the scientific method is to make a list of different observations we need to make to answer our questions. Or we might think of an experiment we would like to conduct that would help us answer our questions. Let's use scrub-jays as one example:

Example #1:

Question: How can we tell if the scrub-jays in a group are related to one another?

Research Design: To answer this question we would first need to be able to tell one jay from another. We can recognize different people and jays can recognize different jays, but we have a hard time telling one jay from another. So first, we must mark the jays so that we know individuals.

Devising methods to capture and mark birds without putting them at risk is very important. Scientists can capture scrub-jays alive in box traps baited with their favorite foods. Scientists then place a numbered aluminum band and different patterns of colored plastic bands on the scrub-jays' legs before releasing them. Each jay has a different pattern of bands. Later, when we see a scrub-jay, we can observe its bands and look in our records to see where we trapped and banded that bird. Once many birds are banded, we can determine if these groups are always the same birds. (Three permits are needed to band scrub-jays; one from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Office, one from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Bird Banding Laboratory, and one from The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.)

If we find their nests, we can find out how many young they have and if their young stay with the family or if the group is formed by other birds that move in from other parts of the scrub. We can find out if different group sizes produce different numbers of young.

By trying to find all our banded birds each month we can determine how long they live, where they go, and if jays in large groups live longer than jays in small groups. You can see that the answers to our questions are starting to help us understand why scrub-jays live in groups. But a good scientist always studies the results of his observations or experiments to see if they suggest a better answer to the questions. That is the final step in the scientific method.

Example #2:

What kind of relationship exists between scrub plants and fire?

Research Design: First, we need to know where and when fires have occurred. This means we might map every fire that occurs in our study site, enter the boundaries and dates of that fire into our computer. Then we have to find plants that are living in areas that burned at different times. When we have several different sites, each with a different fire history, then we examine the plants that live in each site. This is a type of experiment.

But, like the scrub-jays, scientists need to be able to follow the lives of individual plants. Often botanists, scientists that study plants, tie numbered markers to individual plants. They can count the number of flowers, the number of seeds per flower, the height of the plant, how many leaves it has. They can mark all the new seedlings each year and see how many are still alive the next year. Then they compare plants from the different sites. Which ones did the best? The answers to these questions might tell us a little about how frequently scrubs burned before man began to put the fires out.

Example #3

Question: What animals live underground in a gopher tortoise burrow?

Research Design: We might look into a burrow with a miniature video camera and see who is in there. Or we might carefully examine the different tracks leading into the burrow. We can measure the depth of the burrows with our video camera, find out if it is currently being used by a gopher tortoise and then census all the different animals that are using that burrow. Are some burrows better than other burrows? Why?

We evaluate the answers to our questions. Often the results don't match our expectations so we have to re-think our questions. Did we ask the appropriate question? Did we measure the right variable or conduct the right experiment? In the process of getting our answer, we usually generate more questions.

Many scientists have been observing and asking questions since they were children. We go to college to learn to ask better questions and to learn the different methods we can use to answer these questions. Since many of the questions are difficult to answer, scientists have to use many methods, some very complex. We use sophisticated radio transmitters to track the movement of animals through scrub. We use powerful computers to store and analyze data, and programs to map fires and different habitats. We use these computers to predict how animal or plant populations might respond to different fire patterns.

But often, scientists rely on a little old-fashioned common sense. To apply our common sense we have to know the lives and natural history of the plants and animals we study. Science begins with observations and kids that watch birds or butterflies or are interested in plants are really just young scientists.