The Mediterranean house gecko is one of several non-native geckos you can find in urban Los Angeles.
At just twelve years old, Reese Bernstein became a published scientist. All because of his observation skills and a tiny gecko.
Reese always loved lizards. He’d search for them in his backyard, at school, and on every family hike. His parents encouraged his obsession, and his dad, Will, gave him a field guide to the reptiles and amphibians of the LA area. They would pore over the book together, studying the pictures and noting the different lizards they found on their adventures.
One night at a family barbecue in Chatsworth, Reese found a lizard he’d never seen before. Its feet made him think it was a gecko.
When they got home that night Reese pulled out his field guide to figure out what type of lizard it was. The western banded gecko was the closest match.
Reese and his dad sent a photo of the gecko to the Natural History Museum’s community science project Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern California, or RASCals. Museum scientists confirmed that the lizard was in fact a gecko, but not a native western banded gecko. Instead, the gecko was from the Mediterranean. Reese and his dad went back to Chatsworth and found more of the geckos. This was an important scientific discovery—the first time anyone had found an established population of this species in LA County.
When professional scientists make discoveries like this, they share the news with other researchers by writing up their findings and publishing them in scientific journals. Greg Pauly worked with Reese and his dad to do just that. Reese and Will co-authored the research paper that described the discovery of these Mediterranean house geckos, in Los Angeles. How many twelve-year-olds have done that? Thanks to the rise of community science, people like Reese can help professional scientists like never before.
Community science, also known as citizen science, is the name for the collaboration between professional scientists and the general public as they work together to answer questions about our world. Whatever you call it, it’s as diverse as the people participating in it. In the United States, people have been monitoring stream quality and counting birds for decades. Today, some projects in Africa have people use smartphones to document wildlife in and around their lands.
The Mediterranean house gecko is one of several non-native geckos you can find in urban Los Angeles.
Community science often has a big outreach and education goal, but it’s also a research method. Projects should provide results that are published in the scientific literature or that impact conservation or management. In the best studies, the research questions cannot be answered with any approach other than community science. Consider Reese’s gecko. No biologist was ever going to find it hidden away on private property, but Reese was able to find it because he had access to the location and he had his nature eyes on.
In some community science projects, the scientists ask the question; other times, it comes from the community. The RASCals project began because Greg wanted to know what reptiles and amphibians live in Los Angeles today, and where they are found. By comparing Museum records to modern-day surveys, he can start to understand how species have shifted their ranges in response to urbanization. Reese participated in the project because he had a question about the lizard he found. While Reese’s question was answered during the process, Greg’s question needs a lot more data—non-native species are showing up all the time, and the best way to find them and track their movements is through community science.
You can help Greg and scientists like him find answers by sending pictures to RASCals, SLIME, and many other community science projects. Even if you’re not sure what kind of critter you’ve seen, share it anyway, and somebody will help you identify it. Every bit of data helps.
The Natural History Museum has multiple community science projects. You can find information on all of them and learn how to help at nhm.org.
1. RASCals (Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern California) is designed to improve our knowledge of native and non-native reptiles and amphibians in Southern California.
2. BioSCAN (Biodiversity Science: City and Nature) works with families and landowners to set up insect traps across Los Angeles, to help us understand which species live here.
3. SLIME (Snails and slugs Living in Metropolitan Environments) seeks to better understand the distribution of Southern California’s snail and slug populations.
4. Southern California Squirrel Survey aims to learn more about the distribution and behavior of local squirrel species, especially the expanding, non-native eastern fox squirrel and the declining native western gray squirrel.
5. LA Spider Survey participants have sent in almost 6,000 spiders from all over the county so scientists can understand which species live where.
When taking photos of plants, animals, or fungi for scientific identification, some angles are better than others. Mushroom gills are an important characteristic for identification of fungi.
Why did the tarantula cross the road? Most likely to find a mate. This male tarantula got his iNaturalist.org portrait taken while patrolling for receptive females.
You can get started sharing photos of any plant, animal, fungus, or other evidence of life (scat, tracks, bones) with the Museum by using #NatureinLA on social media, emailing photos to nature@nhm.org, or by downloading the free iNaturalist app.
Imagine you’re a professional scientist with the question: What nature lives here? In a wilderness area, you’d simply survey the plants and animals around you. But how do you do that in a city where most of the land is privately owned? Getting permission to go into everyone’s backyard would be very time consuming, if not impossible. Even with permission, imagine how many scientists you’d need to survey the entire LA area!
Getting homeowners involved allows scientists to build large datasets (big collections of information). When thousands of Angelenos send in pictures of creatures from their backyards, scientists begin to see trends, like which lizards only live close to natural areas, or which snails are only active during certain times of year. Scientists get data and community scientists gain something too. Reese learned more about his favorite subject—lizards. Other people learn new skills, meet friends who are also interested in plants and animals, or get a hands-on experience with real science.
In the summer of 2013, Glen Yoshida snapped a photo of a lizard hanging out on the wall above his front door in Torrance. He uploaded the photo to the iNaturalist app on his phone. Because smartphones have clocks and GPS chips, it automatically included the photo’s time and location. Those essential pieces of information are critical when researchers turn to community science to help answer questions.
Glen knew his lizard wasn’t from Southern California, but like Reese he wasn’t sure exactly what it was. At the Museum, Greg identified it as the Indo-Pacific gecko—a native to Southern and Southeast Asia. Knowing it was a species new to California, Greg wanted more information. He asked Glen to keep photographing the geckos and to record the temperature at his home each day he saw them.
All Indo-Pacific geckos are female. They reproduce using parthenogenesis, a reproductive strategy in which females produce clones of themselves without having to mate with a male.
Together, Greg and Glen made several astonishing discoveries: the geckos were active year round as long as the day was warm, and the geckos’ eggs could incubate and hatch even in Los Angeles’s colder winter months. That’s surprising for a species from the tropics.
As with Reese’s discovery, Greg worked with Glen to publish the finding, and Glen co-authored a scientific paper. Not only did they discover another non-native species in Los Angeles they also worked together to understand how the tropical gecko is surviving in Los Angeles.
Mating behavior is a fundamental component of how animals survive in their environments. But for some species, it’s difficult to study in the wild. Through community science, researchers benefit from the power of the crowd.
Take alligator lizards. Courting alligator lizards are an odd sight. The male lizard bites the female behind her head, sometimes holding her in this position for more than a day. While in this lizard love bite, the pair seems less aware of their surroundings and can end up in the open. When people stumble upon this scene, they are usually curious and sometimes take pictures.
Community scientist Xan Sonn observed these alligator lizards in a Pasadena apartment courtyard and contributed his photo to RASCals.
When the Museum first asked Angelenos to send in their lizard love pictures (on Valentine’s Day in 2016), the response was huge. Greg collected over one hundred images of mating alligator lizards. At the time, only one research paper mentioned the behavior at all, so very little was known about it. Greg had a lot of questions: What season does the mating ritual happen in? Does the fact that urban areas are warmer than rural ones cause urban lizards to mate earlier? How does the timing of mating vary across elevation, latitude, or years? Though he’s still never seen mating alligator lizards with his own eyes, with his new crowdsourced data, Greg can begin asking and answering these questions and more.
In 2007, Brian Brown, the Museum’s curator of entomology, was chatting with a donor at a dinner party. Brian boasted that he could find a new species of fly in Los Angeles, one entirely unknown to science, just as easily as he could in the tropics where he does a lot of his field work. The donor challenged him to discover a new species in her backyard.
A few weeks later, he found himself in her Brentwood backyard setting up an insect Malaise trap. Bugs fly into what looks like a tent and get funneled towards an opening at the top, where they fall into a jar filled with alcohol. Brian calls it the jar of death—not a warm, fuzzy name, but an essential tool for preserving insects for scientific study.
When Brian retrieved the bug-filled container and took it back to his lab at the Museum, the very first critter he examined with his microscope was a tiny yellowish fly—about the size of a pinhead. He compared it to known species of phorids, the tiny humpbacked flies he specializes in, but couldn’t find a match. It was a new species, unknown to the world until that moment.
Just one insect into his experiment and he’d already won the bet! After sorting through the other phorids in the jar, he ended up with this new species, a European species never recorded in North America, and an African species also unrecorded on this continent. The truth is, Brian had known he’d win the bet. Very few people study these flies around the world, and no one had ever looked in Los Angeles before.
Brian’s discoveries inspired BioSCAN (Biodiversity Science: City and Nature), a project in which people across Los Angeles allow the Museum to set up Malaise traps in their backyards. After just three months of sorting through thousands of tiny flies, Brian and his team discovered thirty new species. Twenty-seven were found in backyards, one in the Museum’s own Nature Gardens, one in a community garden, and one at an elementary school. Then they found twelve more. Then another one. A whopping 43 of 110 phorid flies in the LA area were new to science. The more they look, the more they find. LA backyards are teeming with undiscovered life.
Participating in a community science project is a simple way to help scientists learn more about our neighborhoods. Your smartphone photos of squirrels, snails, slugs, reptiles and amphibians are invaluable to scientists all over Southern California. If you have a backyard or other property, letting researchers use it as a field site is another great way to help—they might install a wildlife camera or an insect trap in your yard.
But even if you don’t have a yard or you missed the perfect shot of that lizard under your car, there are plenty of ways to pitch in. There are thousands of volunteer opportunities in Los Angeles. At public gardens like those at the Natural History Museum, the Huntington Library, or Descanso Gardens, volunteers help care for the resident plants and animals. In wilder places, many local Parks and Recreation departments, the US Forest Service, the National Park Service, and organizations like Tree People or Friends of Ballona Creek will train volunteers to remove invasive species and assist with habitat restoration. Local non-profits like Friends of the LA River and Heal the Bay host regular river and beach clean-ups, and LA Waterkeeper needs volunteers to help monitor ecological health and water quality along the LA River.
Creating backyard habitat and redesigning city parks to support native species has a measurably positive impact on wildlife. But not every animal is able to take advantage. Take the mountain lions living in the Santa Monica Mountains. The area around Liberty Canyon boasts great lion habitat on both sides of the 101 Freeway, but the dangerous crossing keeps the populations mostly separate. Some particularly courageous cats have risked life and limb to reach new territory, but they’re often hit by cars. In the fifteen years researchers have studied them, only four lions are known to have survived the crossing.
Young lions need to be able to move north in search of new opportunities, and older lions need to be able to move south, bringing new genes. Starved of new genetic material, this tiny mountain lion community could disappear in a matter of decades as inbreeding takes its toll. If we want our mountain lions to have a future, they must be able to safely traverse Southern California.
Community members and conservation groups have partnered to create the #SaveLACougars campaign. Their goal is to build a wildlife crossing across the 101 Freeway in Liberty Canyon. Once completed, it’s likely to be the largest urban wildlife crossing anywhere in the world and something of an experiment. Just about everything from butterflies to lizards to bobcats would benefit, not just mountain lions. Wildlife crossings have been built elsewhere with great success, but not in one of the world’s biggest cities on top of one of its busiest highways. This bridge will be a model for human-wildlife coexistence in heavily urbanized areas.
Getting involved in advocacy is another way to be a champion for wildlife. You can start by getting informed, signing up for local wildlife nonprofits’ newsletters, or following their social media accounts. Once you know about the issues, share them with your friends and family, attend local city council meetings, and vote in local elections. Show your support for local wildlife-friendly efforts like building new parks or redesigning old ones, or switching to less light-polluting street lights. It all helps to make our cities work better for wildlife.
Even in today’s connected world, full of billions of people and thousands of scientists, new discoveries are being made. Questions about nature still need answers, and we can work together to find them. How can a future Los Angeles work better for humans and wildlife? How can backyard habitats help our city? How will our volunteer hours affect wildlife? Answering the questions about how our city works in concert with nature is essential for the future of Los Angeles, and for cities around the world. We’re all part of a grand, global ecological experiment in urbanized living. The best part is, we can all help guarantee the experiment ends with success.
