{"id":336105,"date":"2024-07-11T07:20:25","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T05:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=336105"},"modified":"2024-07-11T07:20:28","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T05:20:28","slug":"knowing-nature-ourselves-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=336105","title":{"rendered":"Knowing Nature & Ourselves (Part 1.)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Jennifer Marohasy<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0By\u00a0jennifer<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am very privileged to have some wonderful friends, who still take the time to observe nature.   Once upon a time we found these people in universities studying the natural sciences, now we are perhaps more likely to find them in film school or at iNaturalist<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best ways to know something about the underwater world, including Great Barrier Reef ecosystems, is to strap an air tank to your back and step into the Coral Sea.   If you take a camera, you may have a permanent record of what you observe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is the beginnings of being a marine biologist.   Observation is fundamental to science; science begins with gathering information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be a real biologist you must make your own direct observations about the natural world.   You can\u2019t be a biologist and rely on the observations of others, they must be your own.    If you relied mostly on the measurements of others, then it would be like claiming to be a photographer but only republishing photographs taken by others.   You may be a publisher, but not a photographer.  It would be deceitful to claim otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people are like this.  They take the work of others and claim it as their own.  It may be measurements, or it may be photographs.   Of course, some photographs can be transcribed and understood as numbers, or they can be a direct measure of something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photographs have tremendous value in science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I knelt next to that giant coral on the sandy sea floor in the Garden of Porites at Myrmidon reef some years ago, and when Stuart Ireland took a photograph of me beside it, for sure we already now had a permanent record of the size of that monster coral.  At one level I functioned as a yardstick of its size.  From knowing my height, it would be possible to calculate the height of the coral.  In fact, we went on to measure the height and width of that same coral with a tape measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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