Research Stories

by Melissa Olson-Petrie

A flurry of movements in and around the dried flower stalks of the big brittlebush in the middle of the yard catch my eye, and I wander over to see what's up. There I find a mob of small native bees flying from flower stalk to flower stalk. Individuals drop out of the "swarm" to settle on the outer parts of stems, often where other bees have already perched, their bodies pressed close to stems that they grasp with their jaws... I feel privileged to have acquired a sleeping bee aggregation in the front yard. It is an odd phenomenon that cries out for investigation...

From In a Desert Garden: Love and Death Among the Insects (W.W. Norton, 1997) by John Alcock

So began Regents Professor John Alcock's account of the sleeping bees, the species Idiomelissodes duplocincta, and his invitation for non-scientists to vicariously join every step in his investigation.

After sharing the scant scientific literature on the bees, Alcock narrates his primary research on the bees' movements and the benefits of their sleeping habits. He daubs two groupings of the bees, "reds" and "whites," with acrylic paint to track them. He modifies the brittlebush they seem to favor by moving the stems the bees repeatedly roost on to check variables, such as position. Pursuing this investigation also leads Alcock to sniff the bees, which he recounts in In a Desert Garden:

"I actually wrote a little scientific paper, not a monumental work," Alcock says. On the basis of that paper–in which he concludes that the number of bees sleeping together "diluted" each bee's chances of being consumed by a predator–Alcock incorporated the sleeping bees into In a Desert Garden.

Overall, Alcock's writing fits into roughly three categories. One is scientific articles that appear in the primary literature. For example, the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society published his sleeping bees paper. This type of writing follows the strict format and specialized language of scientific articles.

The second category of Alcock's writing, the genre he published his first book in, is textbooks.

"In the early 1970s, there wasn't a textbook for classes in animal behavior that reflected the new excitement about an evolutionary angle on animal behavior," Alcock says. "I thought that I had an opportunity to fill a niche." The resulting textbook, Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach, is currently in its eighth edition.

The third category of Alcock's writing is what he refers to as "popular science" or "natural history" writing with books such as In a Desert Garden. This is where his experience with, for example, the sleeping bees is recounted in a manner that appeals to a non-scientist's "sense of what is pleasurable about observing nature," Alcock says.

So, what is the difference between writing as a scientist for other scientists as opposed to writing for general readers? Alcock points to the textbook, Animal Behavior.

"When you are writing for sophomores, you are writing for a general audience," he says. "That was the start of my attempts to write in a way that a non-biologist could understand."

Based on that textbook, an editor at the University of Chicago Press encouraged Alcock to write about insect and animal behaviors for popular audiences. The resulting essays were published in Sonoran Desert Spring in 1985. To date, Alcock has written five more books of natural history essays, most recently An Enthusiasm for Orchids in 2006.

Alcock says his natural history writings, unlike his articles for scientific journals, often have a political agenda to advance. That agenda usually involves conservation or biodiversity. However, he avoids being too obvious as he writes.

"That could get in the way of a reader feeling that they were right along with me, seeing what I was seeing, and feeling what I was feeling, and coming to the same conclusion, ideally, that I have," Alcock says.

For example, in his book The Masked Bobwhite Rides Again, Alcock shows the influence that cattle have had on the Sonoran Desert. "I think almost every field biologist is horrified by what cows and Republicans have done to the natural world," Alcock says. "So, I try to proselytize about that in some of my books."

His most recent book, An Enthusiasm for Orchids, strikes at similar issues in Australia. "The protection of biodiversity is a hugely important thing that we should be doing so much more of, and I'm trying to make a case without being too preachy," Alcock says.

Beyond his personal observations–which bring readers with him into the Usery Mountains near Phoenix, his Tempe yard, or other locations–Alcock works with scientific papers written by other researchers on topics such as desert grasses, wildfires, and whiteflies to inform the essays he is developing.

"Often when I'm out walking in the desert, I'll see something and I'll make a note of it," he says. "I'll use that initial observation as the basis for going on to talk about other people's research that is relevant to the topic at hand. I can't speak too highly of the Web of Science [database] as a source of good stuff and the huge number of scientists who are out there working on interesting things."

Read the other articles in this series on science writing at ASU:

Stephen J. Pyne: Lending a voice to fire, ice, canyons, forests
Edward J. Sylvester: Getting inside their heads—conveying brain surgeons' experiences

For more information, contact John Alcock, Ph.D., Regents Professor of Life Sciences, School of Life Sciences, at 480.965.7304. Send e-mail to j.alcock@asu.edu