Paul Meredith never leaves home without a camera slung across his shoulder.
“You never know where you’re going to find something,” he said.
And that’s been true several times since he and his wife retired to the Crossroads in 2003.
They were new to volunteering to look for Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nests when they found the first one on Matagorda Island in 2005.
After crawling up the beach in an all-terrain vehicle and squinting, they found a turtle’s inbound and outbound tracks on the sand at mile marker 20. They eagerly radioed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife employees supervising them that day. There was terrible reception.
“And they went, ‘Hey newbies, are you sure? We don’t want to fire up the boat and send someone out to the island if it’s a false alarm,” Meredith said.
But they were sure, and they’d go on to make another discovery in 2009.
Then, one of hundreds of samples the couple took from the water in Port O’Connor contained a type of neurotoxin never before observed in the Gulf of Mexico.
And last summer, although Meredith was still mourning the death of his wife, Mary, from an illness, he went outside again with his camera. There, in his yard, he found a type of fly that no one had observed since 1928 and that had never been photographed in the U.S.
Meredith is a citizen scientist, or someone who does not have a formal science background but nonetheless volunteers his or her time, effort and resources toward scientific research in collaboration with professional scientists or alone.
Citizen science isn’t new, but it’s growing in popularity.
On Christmas Day in 1900, ornithologist Frank M. Chapman proposed people count birds rather than hunt them. Today, hundreds of counts done by volunteers have led to a deeper understanding of birds, which are sort of like thermometers that help gauge the health of earth.
The internet has perhaps contributed to citizen science’s growth.
For example, according to CitSci.org, which was developed through the Natural Resources Lab at Colorado State University as way to promote citizen science, there’s been a growth of more than 6,000 percent in citizen science projects logged on its website in the past 10 years.
Meredith became a citizen scientist when he joined the Texas Master Naturalists, which extensively trains volunteers who want to learn about natural resources and conservation management.
Of the neurotoxin discovery from 2009, he said he hoped those who analyzed the samples in a lab could use it to figure out what causes harmful algal blooms and stop them.
“They haven’t figured it out yet, but if you buy into the idea that the only way to set good policy is to have good science and the only way to have good science is to have good data, then that’s what master naturalists do. We do two things, conservation and education, and stamping out ignorance is a permanent occupation,” Meredith said.
Corrina M. Holfus, an outreach coordinator with the International Crane Foundation, knows the value of citizen scientists.
This year, the foundation had master naturalists observe endangered whooping cranes on Lamar Peninsula in Rockport for 20 minutes at a time. The master naturalists wrote down every 15 seconds their behavior as well as the wind speed; wind direction; temperature; GPS coordinates; and whether the habitat was salt marsh, upland or urban.
“There’s only three of us (at the foundation in Texas), so we can’t gather all the data that we need. If it weren’t for citizen science projects, there’s no way we could understand the birds in the way that we do,” Holfus said.
Jennifer Shirk, the interim executive director of the Citizen Science Association, said she continues to be surprised when citizen scientists overcome a perceived limitation.
“At one point, we thought that health research just couldn’t be done, but people are doing it,” she said, pointing to Flu Near You, a website that asks visitors how they are feeling and their zip code to map a disease where early detection and prevention are key to stopping it from spreading.
“I would also say that not only is citizen science a way to advance what we know through more powerful data collection, it’s also helping to identify new questions to ask and questions in particular that are more targeted to the problems we are facing,” she added.
One such example of this is how in 1994, participants in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch in Washington, D.C., noticed house finches had red, swollen, runny or crusty eyes. That same year and until 2008, Cornell asked participants to specifically report to them whether house finches appeared that way at their feeders to know how prevalent it was. They learned it was a disease that in extreme cases could cause the house finches’ eyes to become swollen shut.
Some of the other citizen science projects Meredith participated in are:
- Trapping white-winged doves with then Texas Parks and Wildlife biologist Brent Ortego to justify regulating them
- Trapping invasive beetles at the Calhoun County Port Authority through the Texas Forest Service
- Reporting on the gauge in his backyard to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network.
Meredith is moving to a small city about 10 miles north of Monterrey, Calif., to be closer to his daughter and grandchildren. While he’s sad about the end of his days of sparring with the homeowners association about his yard, which has native plants growing rather than neat shrubs and flowers, he’s excited to live in a place that only gets hotter than 85 degrees five days a year.
Above all, he’s excited to learn new things about his new home, a trait one might find unique considering the man who raised him worked for Exxon, a company some environmentalists scorn.
“He never got off calling them deep breathers, bird watchers and tree-huggers, but Pop was a responsible engineer,” Meredith said, chuckling. “But he firmly believed the oil industry could be a responsible citizen.”
Meredith said that could be because his father saw firsthand how industry had contributed to subsidence in Seabrook, where the family had a beach house.
“He put the pylons 1 foot above the maximum for a 100-year storm, but by the time he sold it about 20 years later, it was 3 feet below the maximum for a 100-year storm,” Meredith said.
Meredith said his and Mary’s time living in Pittsburgh was also eye-opening.
“We saw the good and the bad sides, and we came out believing that the right side was on the environment,” he said.
Although the Mid-Coast Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists regrets losing Meredith at a time when other members have left because Hurricane Harvey damaged their homes, they met this year’s recruiting class goal of 16, said Pat Garland, the group’s director of communications.
“And they are volunteering before their class is even over and getting in some hours,” she said.
