Arts & Sciences Magazine

BY ABBY VAN SELOUS (COM`24)

When Sinlan Poo (CAS’07) met fellow herpetologists Umilaela Arifin and Itzue Wendolin Caviedes Solis at the World Congress of Herpetology in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2020, the three women talked about their experiences breaking into herpetology — the study of amphibians and reptiles. During their early careers, there were very few women and people of color in the field (in 2010, less than 30 percent of herpetologists were women, according to a survey by the U.S. Census Bureau) and they recognized how helpful it would have been to have had role models to look up to.

“Rather than talking about it, we wanted to do something, especially something that we think would have been helpful for us early on,” said Poo, who majored in biology with a specialization in ecology and conservation biology, and is now the curator of research at the Memphis Zoo and an adjunct assistant professor at Arkansas State University.

         And, just like that, Women in Herpetology: 50 Stories from Around the World was hatched — a collection of portraits of women and people of marginalized genders who study amphibians and reptiles.

Originally, Poo and her co-editors aimed to find a few herpetologists to write narratives about their experiences, Poo said, but as the project progressed, their ambition grew — around the globe.

“We thought, well, why don’t we do 50 countries and regions?’’ Poo said. “There are about 200 countries in the world, so let’s do a quarter of those and have one person represent each country or region. We thought, let’s have them write something that intersects their cultural background, their education, their gender, their experience in our professional field.” 

Contributing authors included women of all ages —  the oldest graduated college in 1960 and the youngest is still working on her PhD. They came from different regions, different cultures, different family structures, different ages, and different types of careers, to name a few.

Some were mentors and colleagues of Poo and her co-editors; others herpetologists they admired; and still others women they found through publications or discovered on online platforms and forums.

The contributors were given creative liberty to write their own accounts, telling the stories they wanted to share — about their life journeys, their relationships with peers, or how and why they became herpetologists — all in a way that would be accessible to everyone. 

One of those contributors was Karen Warkentin, professor of biology and women’s, gender & sexuality studies at Boston University, and one of Poo’s mentors.

Warkentin (they/them) tells the story of growing up in Kenya from age six and what led to their discovery of escape hatching, which occurs when an animal — in this instance, frogs — hatch early to evade danger. Warkentin writes about the twists and turns of their life, such as their childhood interest in biology and its relationship with living in Kenya, to starting college in 1979 intent on research and field biology but feeling that many opportunities were inaccessible to them.

Warkentin was in environmental education for several years — a career that they loved — before deciding to return to graduate school and get back to research. They did their PhD research in Costa Rica and then started working in Gamboa, Panama, as a postdoctoral researcher in 1998. Warkentin came to BU in 2001, and, since 2003, has been bringing students back to Gamboa to conduct fieldwork at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Over the past 20 years, they have brought around 80 students, including Poo.

“It’s really exciting to participate in this project, because of that possibility of reaching a really broad audience, which could be just helping people to know cool stories, but also shows a more expanded concept of what a scientist is and who scientists are, and of what we do,” Warkentin said. “It was a very different writing process than any scientific writing that I’ve done. The editors were really clear and careful about writing for a general audience.”

For Poo, Warkentin was a teacher and mentor, inspiring her to pursue her own career in the field.  “Gamboa was my first real experience doing research, being in the field, and seeing a different way of life that I had not been exposed to before,” Poo said. “That kind of started my trajectory. I went on to do fieldwork in biology, and I went to get a PhD.”

As Poo and her colleagues worked on Women in Herpetology, they realized that to enhance the stories and exemplify the diversity between the contributing herpetologists they could include illustrations of the authors and species they studied.

“We wanted everyone to see what these people look like. We want the readers to see people of different skin tones and different ages who work with different species,” Poo said. “We went on this journey of contacting 100 and some female artists from around the world because we wanted the artists to come from the continent of the people that they’re illustrating.”

These artists included some that were well-established and some that were students, all using their own art styles and color palettes, often influenced by the regions where they grew up, to incorporate unique elements into their illustrations.

“We gave each artist the story that these authors wrote. Then we gave them photos that the authors provided of themselves and the animal that they work with,” Poo said. “And a lot of times the artists came up with these ideas of how they were going to weave them together.”

Each author’s illustration is at the beginning of their story, adding depth by putting a face to a name and showcasing the diversity between the contributors, according to Poo.

Poo and her colleagues plan to put the proceeds of the book towards scholarships to give students who are women or marginalized genders and come from underrepresented regions the chance to present their research at international conferences and make meaningful connections with other herpetologists.

Creating scholarships is especially helpful because herpetology is often overlooked, especially for women, according to Poo. Herpetologists have found more difficulty in publishing their research than studies concerning birds and mammals. Women in Herpetology gives these researchers the opportunity to showcase their projects, share the challenges they have faced, and present the various careers that exist within herpetology.

“In some sense, the animals we study mirror some of our own challenges of trying to have recognition or be established,” Poo said. “It’s a nice parallel between the organisms and the authors in the book who study them.”

Women in Herpetology can be purchased by following this link: www.womeninherpetology.com
 

TOP PHOTO:  “Treefrog Pool Party” by Brandon A. Güell (GRS`23), who served as a biology pre-doctoral research fellow in the Warkentin Lab. This photo was one of the 2022 winners of Wildlife Photographer of the Year.