An Interview With Professor Rosemary Gillespie, Evolutionary Biologist

Professor Rosemary Gillespie

Professor Rosemary Gillespie is a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, and her work focuses largely on island ecology and the evolution of island biodiversity. Professor Gillespie has done extensive research on the Hawaiian Islands focusing on the adaptive radiation and diversification of Hawaiian spiders.  In addition to research, Professor Gillespie has been a professor and teacher both at the University of Hawaii and at UC Berkeley, and throughout her career as an educator, she  has engaged and led in outreach initiatives which seek to connect underrepresented young people with research opportunities and resources.  As one of the world’s leading arachnologists and evolutionary biologists, Professor Gillespie has held positions such as President of the American Arachnological Society, President of the American Genetics Association, and President of the International Biogeographical Society, but among the students that take her classes, myself included, she is most known and appreciated for her enthusiasm and compassion while teaching. 

LK = Lia Keener

RG = Professor Rosemary Gillespie

LK: Just to start off with, would you mind telling me about your journey as a scientist? What inspired you to want to pursue a career as a scientist? Have you known from a young age that you wanted to be a researcher? Did you ever have any other careers in mind? 

RG: I suppose I was always quite directed in that I always liked animals. I come from an area in rural Southwest Scotland, and I was often left on my own, since I was the youngest of four siblings and my brother and sisters went away to boarding school.  I had lots of cats - probably around thirteen to twenty cats at any one time, and I loved the kittens. I also kept mice - of course separate from the cats. I loved watching them, and I knew that I wanted to become a biologist and work with animals when I grew up.  Looking back, it was a rather naive thought. At the time, I didn’t really know what it meant to be a biologist or a scientist. For a while I thought I wanted to be a vet, since I thought that the vet in our village had the best job. So, I always knew that I wanted to work with animals in some way and that took me in the biology direction, and from there that led me into research. 

LK: Did you take any classes in school that affirmed your interest in biology? What was school like for you when you were first figuring out the direction you wanted to go in?

RG: So, I joined my sisters and went to boarding school when I was young. Boarding schools are very different in Scotland, they were rather old-fashioned. I went to learn about cooking and needle work. I knew that I needed to learn physics and chemistry in order to pursue biology, but the boarding school didn’t offer these classes, so I had a tutor that helped with these subjects. Then I went on to another school where I was able to take more biology-directed classes. See, the thing is that in Britain you go to University to do a specific subject. So I went to the University of Edinburgh to do ecology. As an undergraduate, you have to know what you want to do fairly early on. You do O-Level exams around when you are sixteen, then you take A-levels later which tell you which universities will accept you.  Things may have relaxed some since then, but when I was there, there was almost no flexibility. By the time you’re sixteen, you’d better have already made up your mind, because if you decide later that you want to switch directions, it is really hard to change. But I knew what I wanted to do, and never really had an urge to follow other paths. 

LK: What have been some unexpected or surprising aspects to life as a scientist that you did not anticipate? Or were there any unexpected events in your life that shaped the research that you do today? 

RG: One thing was that growing up, I loved to breed mice, so when I went out to boarding school when I was nine, I was very lonely and homesick, and they let me bring my mice to school. The mice would have babies constantly - all sorts of different colors. One time, there was a family of white and black mice, and a yellow mouse came out! I was telling my Latin teacher about this and she said that she would get her husband to come out and take a look. Her husband was a professor at the University of Edinburgh who did quantitative genetics, and so he came out and looked at my mice. He explained to me what was going on with my yellow mouse, and it got me really excited and started me thinking about doing research.

Also, in my final year at Edinburgh, like many students, I really liked birds. Certainly, the birds off the coast of Scotland are just fantastic - there are so many of them and the diversity is so high - you can just watch them forever. In my last year, I was able to do an honors project for the year, so I chose to work with a Professor that worked on birds, but he gave me a project on spiders. I thought, oh gosh, do I really want to work on spiders? I thought I was going to work on seabirds, but the interesting thing there is that once you start to look at something and you start to understand it, and you start to realize that, actually, you know what makes this organism tick, you know what’s going on, and you can really start to understand the behavioral motivation, and when you start to do experiments you can start to predict what’s going to happen. It was really exciting for me to see that I could actually generate new information, and it was really during this honors project, just getting into research, that I realized that I could generate new information. That’s what makes you want to do research, isn’t it? Rather than just learning information, you can be the authority on a topic, and you know more than others and you can predict things, and you can build from your own understanding and generate new information. That’s the big change. During high school and undergraduate, you’re learning and absorbing, you’re taking in information, but the big transition is when you’re actually using that information and generating more yourself, and that’s the exciting but frustrating part of research, I think. 

LK: I know that science and research has taken you around the world, and you have experience in and knowledge of collaboration in scientific fields in many different countries. What is it like to be involved in the international scientific community?

RG: Well, yes, I collaborate very closely with people in lots of different places in Europe. The thing is, I am British, so it really is what I am more familiar with than anything. Working internationally, every country has differences, and biogeography and evolutionary biology are very international fields.  People do work closely together. The biggest hurdle we still have to make is reaching out to more diverse communities. Evolutionary biology and biogeography, it’s still a very white and white European field. One thing we could do a lot better at is reaching a more diverse community when we work internationally. In particular, the most obvious thing is that biodiversity is mostly in the tropics, and most of the research on biodiversity is at higher latitudes, either to the North or the South. So how can we bring back the research to these sites of high biodiversity, and I think the community as a whole needs to do better at that. 

But yes, working internationally is a really fun part of this whole field, getting other insights wherever people are, the country that they come from always adds some new understanding or perspective or way to look at things.

LK: From your perspective and experience, has science become more democratic and accessible and available to people of all backgrounds over time? There have been many new things invented like iNaturalist which help to cultivate a more community-oriented scientific network, but at the same time, it seems that official, published scientific papers and works are becoming less accessible to the public and even to universities. 

RG: That’s an interesting question, you know, in the time of Darwin and Humboldt and other people, when they gave talks, they were talking to the whole community, so at that point things were presumably very accessible; everyone was speaking the same language.  I think over time, with more specialization and more sophistication, things have become more inaccessible. At the same time, there has been tremendous recognition that this is a problem and that we are not communicating, yet, how to fix the problem has not been satisfactorily addressed. 

There are ways of reaching the audience, but it takes some work to work with people that know how to do this, and it is definitely a challenge. On the one hand, you’ve got more sophistication and more specialization going in one direction, and on the other there is the recognition for the need to make science accessible. Look at all the anti-science sentiment that is going around in the country at the moment.  We can see that we’re not doing a good job. Somehow we just need to be better. Why is there so much distrust? A part of that distrust is because science is inaccessible. We are not good at communicating. We need to do a better job of explaining what science is. 

I think that iNaturalist has done a terrific job. It’s reaching a certain community and does a great job of providing really important data. And that might be something that can help, if people can see that they can generate data for science as well, then that might level the playing field and might make it easier for people to see that they can actually contribute to science and see that it’s part of the scientific process. I think that we have to use multiple avenues to connect with people - there has to be a connection, and that’s the most difficult part, just figuring out at what level to connect with people that don’t see the importance of a subject. You know, if you’re focused on making money for your family, why should you worry about the evolutionary biology of Hawaiian spiders? It is so difficult to navigate these kinds of pathways. If a farmer is worried about the return on a cow, that’s gonna be the focus rather than the damage that that cow might do in terms of CO2 emissions and methane emissions. It is so hard to communicate - it’s not just talking to people, it is incredibly difficult. You have to have people’s trust, and people have to be interested in listening to you. If you can engage people, that is one of the biggest hurdles. We need to figure this out before the world spirals out of control. 

LK: My final question is kind of a combination of multiple questions: what are some things that are giving you hope even now, when things feel and seem truly horrible, and do you have any advice for students today? 

RG: I suppose, in terms of advice, students ought to go after something with conviction. Figure out what you think is really important. You don’t have to solve the entire extinction crisis, but find one thing that you can bite off. For me, when I went to Hawaii, I went there to do behavioral ecology, and I wasn’t sure where that was taking me, but then I found this radiation of spiders, and this whole unknown group of spiders, and it was hugely exciting. It became incredibly important to me to understand the diversity of these species. At that point, I was simply thinking about it as an academic pursuit, but over the years, it has become increasingly important that we have to do something to protect these organisms. If we can understand anything about what allows them to live where they live and what we can do to protect them, we should do that. For a while I was thinking, if I could just describe them or document them or take pictures and show people how beautiful they are then that would be enough, but we need to do more than that. 

Sometimes, to be honest, you get quite despondent when you see the level of invasion of the habitat, and see that there’s been total transformation of the land. You think, what future is there? It’s just going to be taken over by non-native species.  But the thing that has really inspired me more than anything is that, while on the one hand you see that there has been total and relentless land transformation, you also see some restoration. We do a lot of work on Maui, but on the other side of Maui, there is a dry forest. When I first got to Hawaii, the dry forest was total pasture, but there were some amazing spiders there. It was pasture with just straggly and dying remnants of these incredible plant and animal species. The Nature Conservancy fenced off an area, and what happened was that the grass grew up underneath it, since the cattle were kept out. The Nature Conservancy at that point had no funds to continue management, so my friend got the local Hawaiian community and others inspired and involved to build a fence, then remove the grass, then plant fast growing native shrubs. The shrubs created an area that was more amenable for the germination of native plants, and the forest has since started to come back. It really is quite remarkable. The biggest thing is they’ve kept at it. It’s been a long-term thing, thirty years now they’ve been doing it. If you look on Google Earth and go to the South Side of Maui you can actually see these little patches that they’ve fenced off where the forest has actually come back. Paul Simon, the singer, found out about this restoration project in Maui, and he dedicated his performances to this area. You know, I think it is a little bit like The Lorax, you’re hanging on by the skin of your teeth, you’ve only got a few seeds left, but it worked in the case of this pasture in Maui. But the thing is on the other side of the island you’ve got massive invasion by non-native species, and we don’t really know what we need to do to stabilize things, we don’t really understand the dynamics of the situation. That’s what we’re trying to do in the lab, is understand the dynamics behind all this so we can actually do something. It’s kind of a balance between feeling inspired about some things and feeling terrible about others. 

I suppose the big thing though, in terms of what to do as a student is don’t try to take on the whole world, just figure out what area is really important to you. What is something you really feel that you want to change? Just take on a little part of that, where you feel like you can have a contribution, and do it well and do it with conviction.