Pristine Wilderness to Crippled Ecosystems: A Foray Through More Than Half a Century of Herpetology1
Biology, including herpetology, has made greater strides in recent decades than in any time in history. It has progressed from a largely inductive science performed on an expeditionary basis to a laboratory-based discipline in which preformed hypotheses are tested empirically. My research has spanned that change in paradigm and an example of expeditionary biology, the study of habitat selection by amphibians and reptiles in the Darien Gap, Panama, is described. The study of Sea Snakes is used to illustrate the transition. Analysis of the offerings to two herpetological journals, Herpetologica and the Journal of Herpetology, also demonstrates changes in different topical emphases. A prominent trend in herpetology has been a shift from basic biology to conservation in the face of environmental degradation and the need to preserve the biodiversity of amphibians and reptiles. The unified biology of antiquity had fragmented into separate, specialized disciplines that seldom related to each other in more than a general way, despite the encompassing generalization of adaptation through evolution. In the past decade there has been a great melding of disciplines and a return to a more-holistic melding of disparate areas of biological endeavor.Abstract
Our nearest Choco neighbor, Tirzo, and his family, dressed for a festive occasion and decorated with the juice of a plant that turns the skin blue and takes several weeks to wear off. Most of the clothing was being worn for a festive occasion. Usually the traditional dress was the loincloth (uayuco), as worn by Tirzo in this picture. He was an avid student of herpetology until misidentification of a snake diminished his enthusiasm (see text). Rio Canclón, January 1962. Photograph by the author.
Topics of articles from professional publications on Sea Snakes (including Sea Kraits) over time; popular and semi-popular articles and papers solely on methods are excluded. “Ecology” includes natural history, trophic relations, predators, parasites, and relations to physical environment. “Morphology” includes coloration. Each histogram represents a color-coded composite, arranged from the tallest through progressively shorter ones, in a stepwise fashion to the shortest. Thus, each color extends all the way to the x-axis but is partly hidden by the other bars in front of it. These can be considered as progressively shorter histograms, moving out of the page in stepwise fashion toward the reader. Thus, all the bars embodied in a histogram, if stacked one upon another, would equal 100%. The numbers above the histograms indicate the number of papers published on Sea Snakes during the designated years. Data from antiquity through the 1980s are based on Culotta and Pickwell (1993); data from 1990s onward were compiled from many sources and differed from the Culotta and Pickwell compilation; Culotta and Pickwell ferreted out articles that mentioned Sea Snakes in any way, even if most of the article was on other taxa; I searched the literature for articles specifically on Sea Snakes, thereby lowering number of papers; the data may be incomplete for 2013.
Change over time in the proportional representation of topics in the Journal of Herpetology and in Herpetologica. The figures for the two journals are offset to align their dates of issue. The histograms are a color-coded composite, arranged from the tallest through progressively shorter ones, in a stepwise fashion. The background color is that of the topic with the greatest representation during the specified period, with shorter ones represented merely by lines at the top of their columns. As in Figure 2, they can be conceptualized as progressively shorter histograms, moving out of the page in stepwise fashion toward the reader. Note that the dominant topic throughout the entire run of Herpetologica is taxonomy and that it is portrayed somewhat differently. The upper black line indicates the total percent of papers in the journal devoted to that subject; from 1976 onward, with the advent of chemical techniques applied to taxonomy, the black part of the histogram represents the portion of the total devoted to classical taxonomy and the red part represents the portion of total taxonomy devoted to molecular taxonomy; unlike other colors, the red histograms do not extend to the x-axis, but rather the histograms showing total taxonomy are divided into the classical and molecular components.
Contributor Notes
Invited paper for the “Perspectives” series. For a further autobiographical note including early life and non-herpetological research, see Heatwole (2014).
