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June 2010 issue

Citizen scientist Aleta Karstad and her husband, biologist Fred Schueler in their home laboratory.
Photo: Ben Nelms

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Follow citizen scientist Aleta Karstad in her home laboratory. Click to view photo essay

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“You don’t need much, just a drop or two,” explains Carpenter. The smell carries for at least a kilometre. Although she rarely finds much when she checks these boxes — usually just old meat — Carpenter returns every few days. For the past three years, acting strictly as a volunteer, she has been trying to document the presence of pine martens in these woods. The animals seem to be radiating out from the confines of the nearby national park, she says, but their progress is slow. And because this swath of forest is slated for clearcutting, proving that the martens are present here matters.

Like Aleta Karstad, Carpenter has no formal training in science. She’s a tour-boat captain in the summer and sews sails and boat covers in the winter. “But I’ve been a technical assistant for a lot of scientists over the years,” she says. “I’ve listened to what they have to say, and I’ve bought their books.” That she’s working as part of a project run by the Heritage Foundation for Terra Nova National Park is important, though. The key to successful citizen science often lies in collaboration between amateurs and professionals. In fact, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which has been working with the public since the 1960s to “tackle problems ranging from global climate change to avian disease,” focuses on programs in which amateur and professional scientists work together.

For the past 15 years, University of Colorado at Boulder geographer Shari Gearheard has teamed up with Inuit hunters to monitor sea ice in Nunavut. “Working with local experts is common sense,” she says. “Whether it is an Inuk hunter or a farmer in Saskatchewan — these people know their environment, and their knowledge is extremely valuable. For me, bringing Inuit and scientific knowledge together helps to create a more complete picture of how the Arctic is changing.”

Let’s not delude ourselves— citizen science isn’t always easy. Aleta Karstad and her husband, Fred Schueler, refer constantly to the stress they’ve experienced over years of scrounging for one-off contracts to help fund their research. Right now, they’re seeking support for their 30 Years Later Expedition, a cross-Canada journey to revisit places they explored in the 1970s and 1980s to test their theories about ecological change. Or consider Mark Thompson, a young molecular geneticist who, in his spare time, runs the Northern Amphibian Monitoring Outpost Society in the central interior of British Columbia. Concerned about the dramatic disappearance of frogs worldwide, he started the non-profit in 2008 to get people to pay attention to frogs and salamanders. Despite his best efforts, it’s basically a one-man show, and he struggles to find committed volunteers willing to head out into the field.

Another challenge: ensuring that amateur data are reliable, precise and actually used. And another one: coordinating scattered efforts. And yet another: the apparent erosion of Environment Canada’s EMAN program, which once provided advice as well as logistical and financial support to dozens of diverse citizen-science initiatives. According to an Environment Canada spokesperson, “The function of the EMAN program is evolving, and the resources necessary to support these functions are being assessed.”

But those challenges fade into the background in Karstad’s living-room laboratory, where she’s holding a mud puppy (Necturus maculosus), a giant aquatic salamander with a cartoonish slit of a smile, so that I can touch its silky, spotted dark brown back. Schueler and Philip Scott, a home-schooled 12-year-old neighbour with a striking resemblance to Harry Potter, caught the mud puppy the previous night in a nearby river, where Karstad and Schueler have hosted weekly mud puppy counts with interested locals for the past 13 years.

Philip, who comes to the lab once a week to train as Karstad’s apprentice, feeds the live slugs (they like romaine lettuce, sweet potatoes and green beans) and kills less fortunate ones, drowning them in a mix of water and a foaming surfactant used in taxidermy, then injecting them with alcohol. I watch as, with tweezers and a steady hand, he painstakingly stretches out the parchment-coloured innards of an Arion slug under a microscope.

The boy carefully records his observations and sketches in his own field journal, and it occurs to me that Karstad is passing on the torch to the next generation. She prefers a biological metaphor — what I’m seeing, she says, is the natural process of amateur-scientist reproduction. Whatever imagery one uses, if Canadians care enough about this country to get their hands dirty, that’s reason enough to feel hopeful.

Toronto-based Carlyn Zwarenstein writes about science and social justice. Artist John W. Stewart lives in Montréal.