Putting the science in fiction - Dan Koboldt, Chuck Wendig 2018
Wildlife biology
From zero to sixty (legs, that is)
By Rebecca Mowry
As a wildlife biologist, I notice a lot of wildlife-related errors in books, film, and television that irritate me to no end. In many cases, even a little bit of research could clear these things up. The pool of examples is endless, so here are just a few broad topics that come to mind.
Myth #1: Cactus wrens live in Maine
This remark stems from one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption. You know that scene where Red finds Andy’s money under a rock wall in Maine? The bird singing in the background is a cactus wren. Cactus wrens live in the Southwest. You know, near cacti.
Another classic example is the Coca-Cola advertising campaign featuring polar bears interacting with emperor penguins, which I’m fairly certain drove every zoologist bonkers. What’s the problem? Never mind the image of one of the most aggressive carnivores on the planet sitting happily next to a family of flightless birds, which I’ll grudgingly accept as a little cute anthropomorphism between charismatic megafauna. Hopefully nobody thinks that actually happens. What I can’t stand is that Coke ignored the fact that polar bears live only in the Arctic, and penguins live only in the Antarctic. Fun fact: The root of the word Arctic, arctos, means bear.
It’s really not that hard to look up a species’ habitat and geographic range before you put it in your story. People love animals—which is a great thing—but with the rise of citizen science and species identification apps for your smartphone, especially when it comes to bird-watching, your readers may know a lot more than you expect them to, increasing the odds that your lack of research will be noticed and scorned.
Oh, and to add to the confusion, lots of animals migrate. So don’t tell me about the turkey vultures circling your hero lost in Montana in the winter, because they’re only there in the summertime.
Myth #2: The geographic range and habitats of species never change
If you’re writing any kind of historical fiction, you should be aware that the range, habitats, and even appearance of a species can change over time. For example:
· Prior to the red/gray wolf’s extirpation from the eastern United States, there were no coyotes there.
· Until a few hundred years ago, jaguars lived throughout most of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and even Louisiana.
· Horses were brought to North America in the 1400s, but they actually evolved here before being wiped out ten to twelve thousand years ago.
· Recent climate change is causing all kinds of shifts in animal behavior (read on!).
Just like any other facet of historical fiction, it’s worth researching what the wildlife community would have looked like back when your story takes place. In North America, most habitats have changed drastically since the advent of Europeans (and even since the advent of the first humans, period). You can probably get away with a lot of stuff, but you want your novel to be authentic, don’t you?
Myth #3: Wildlife biologists are all park rangers, zookeepers, or tv show hosts
My friends and I all got tired of that comment in college. I was just watching an episode of The West Wing where C.J. Cregg gets a visit from a park ranger. This park ranger proceeds to tell Cregg’s assistant that he studied shrub/range ecosystems, and that it was a good thing the Park Service hired him, because he wouldn’t have had anything else to do. Headdesk.
I’ll admit that I felt this way for my entire childhood. Steve Irwin was my hero (may he rest in peace), but I was seventeen before I discovered that wildlife biology was a thing. Now, of course, I know that the field is incredibly rich and varied, and not just because of the variety of species we have to work with. There aren’t many of us in stories, which is a shame, because there sure are a lot of us in the world!
Wildlife biologists do lead tours in natural areas, arrest poachers, and educate the public on television. But they also trek into remote jungles to document rare and unknown species. They survey deer and turkeys to set hunting quotas. University professors research wildlife behavior, evolution, habitat, and threats to conservation. Each state has an agency dedicated to wildlife research and management, and there are several federal entities that do this as well (like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Geological Survey). Then there are nonprofit organizations that do their own work for species and habitat conservation, like the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Fund. They all employ wildlife biologists.
And we’re also not all tree-hugging, granola-eating hippies. Some biologists love game animals and hate predators. Some biologists love predators and hate hunters. Some biologists love everything. And some biologists are tree-hugging, granola-eating hippies.
Myth #4: We know all there is to know about wildlife and ecosystems
We’re still learning. Constantly.
For one, scientists are continuing to unravel the evolutionary history of wildlife species. Advances in genetic analysis have a lot to do with this. That’s why taxonomists (the people who classify animals) are always changing the scientific names of stuff, much to the dismay of people like me who had to memorize them in college.
More pressing, however, is the fact that the world is always changing, especially over the last century. Thanks to urban sprawl, climate change, and other contemporary challenges, a growing segment of wildlife research focuses on how these big changes will affect animals and their habitats.
Birds are altering the timing of reproduction and migration. Grizzly and polar bears may be hybridizing more often. Wildfire suppression prevents naturally occurring fire cycles to which plants and wildlife had evolved. Emerging diseases like white-nose syndrome and chytridiomycosis are wiping out entire populations of bats and amphibians, respectively. Overfishing may be causing trophic cascades running all the way down the food chain; seals and sea lions decline due to lack of food, orca then run out of seals and switch to sea otters, sea otter declines result in an overpopulation of sea urchins, which damage kelp forests, which are an important habitat for many marine organisms. And those are just a few examples. I haven’t even mentioned the epic loss of coral reefs. Okay, now I have.
We’re still learning just how important these issues are and what we can do about them.
Myth #5: There will be no animals in the future
Yikes, now that’s depressing! Sorry about that doom-and-gloom stuff. Yes, we will likely witness many species extinctions in the coming centuries, but I find the prospect of a wildlife-free Earth highly improbable.
Certain animals and plants can survive in any number of tough situations; that’s part of the beauty of mutation and evolution. I’m simplifying this a lot, but consider the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction sixty-six million years ago that killed off the then-predominant terrestrial vertebrates, the dinosaurs. Many small mammals were able to survive the extreme environmental conditions that the very large reptiles couldn’t. That ushered in the explosion of mammalian diversity, which allowed mammals to eventually evolve into many of their current forms (including humans).
Humans may be one of the most devastating forces of nature when it comes to species extinction, but don’t forget that many species thrive in human-dominated landscapes. Pigeons, feral dogs, rats, and cockroaches come to mind. There are even some that aren’t quite as cliché, like white-winged doves, peregrine falcons, red foxes, raccoons, and coyotes; in fact, I worked on a project in urban Orange County, California where we observed bobcats and coyotes making themselves at home in culverts under office parks and freeways, often denning up in people’s backyards. Granted, getting hit by cars was the primary source of mortality, but if the smartest survive—that’s evolution!
Animals adapt, and evolution is still occurring. We may not be able to predict exactly what this will mean for the future, but what an opening for creativity!
How to handle wildlife biology in your novels
Do Your Research
If you want to make your story as authentic as possible, make sure you’re describing the appropriate ecosystems and animal communities. There are tons of resources on the Internet for this: eBird.com for birds, iNaturalist.org for everything, and even Wikipedia gets things right most of the time. If only eBird had been around for Frank Darabont when he directed The Shawshank Redemption!
And for a classic example of a well-researched novel that manages to be biologically accurate without sacrificing awesomeness, read Richard Adams’ Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972).
Have Fun With It!
Because we’re always learning, there’s a lot of wiggle room for using wildlife in fiction. For example, George R.R. Martin decided to use ravens as messengers in his fictional world, and while I’ve never heard of them being used as such, corvids (the taxonomic group of which ravens are a member and includes crows, jays, and magpies) are famously intelligent. Scientists have observed crows not only using tools but using sequences of tools and showing the ability to reason. Crows have been observed using passing cars as tools to crack nuts. In Washington, researchers demonstrated that crows can recognize human faces.
I don’t expect things to be 100 percent ecologically accurate all the time, but I’d at least like your details to be believable. In The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), Suzanne Collins bred genetically altered jays with wild mockingbirds to create the mockingjay. Jays and mockingbirds are classified into different taxonomic families (which makes hybridization less likely), but I still find this to be an excellent incorporation of wildlife behavior into a futuristic story. Use your research on species’ habitats, evolution, and behavior to come up with a mind-blowing prediction of futuristic animal communities.
Contact a Wildlife Biologist If You Have Any Questions
Seriously. There are so many of us, and we’ll probably be very happy to help you and even give you fun ideas for ways to incorporate wildlife into your story. How about some chronic wasting disease deer zombies? Too soon?