Citizen science adds venom to database
It took two reptile scientists and scores of reptile-loving citizens to figure out the mysterious eating habits of snakes.
Over the past century, only about 23 individual feeding records for snakes were documented each year in Southern Africa, but now a husband-andwife team at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) has spent the past five years building up a database of information through Facebook. The approach has revolutionised our understanding of snakes’ role in the ecosystem.
A few years ago, Dr Robin Maritz and her husband, Dr Bryan Maritz, from the department of biodiversity and conservation biology, noticed that many people were posting photographs of reptiles on social media.
They soon realised that images and posts about reptilian eating habits could be a major source of information that would otherwise be lost if not collated by scientists.
In August 2015, with other reptile enthusiasts, they started a Facebook group to gather the crowdsourced posts and soon the average number of records went from 23 a year to 200.
As it turns out, a whopping 75% of the predator-prey relationships reported via this social media platform were new to science in this field.
The couple has now published their findings in the life sciences journal PeerJ.
Robin, who led the study, says: “Our interest is in understanding the functional roles of snakes in African ecosystems. From existing data we know that in the past 130 years of research, Southern African scientists have recorded and published fewer than 3,000 individual feeding records [about 23 a year]. By using Facebook, we were able to gather more than a 1,000 records in less than five years [more than 200 a year], and that is exceptional.”
She says this is an excellent example of the power of citizen science and that “the majority of photos shared on the Facebook page were taken by curious members of the public who are not researchers at all”.
She adds: “The real power we tapped into is the army of camera-carrying observers who simply snapped a photo of something that they thought was interesting.”
Bryan says the diet of an animal influences nearly all aspects of its biology, but despite this importance, there has been a paucity of information in scientific literature.
Snake-feeding information can shed light on how their venom works, he explains.
“Globally, it is estimated that close to 100,000 people die each year from snake bites and several hundred thousand more are impacted by bites that leave them physically or psychologically scarred,” he says.
“With the public’s help, we are able to learn far more about how snakes interact with prey species in the environment and, potentially.” —