Science isn’t always pretty. In fact, more often than not it’s kinda disgusting. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories of the less glamorous side of science.
Part 1: In order to score extra credit in her high school anatomy class, Amy Segal embarks on a journey to build a cat skeleton.
Amy Segal works in finance by day but by night finds herself drawn to storytelling shows on the Lower East Side. She is a Moth Story Slam winner, has been featured on The Story Collider podcast and is the proud recipient of 200 one-dollar bills from a One Up! storytelling competition. She is developing a one-person show, the beginnings of which she performed at the MarshStream International SoloFest in 2020 and 2022.
Part 2: Dave Coyle goes on a smelly mission to find the endangered American burying beetle for his undergraduate project.
Dr. Dave Coyle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation at Clemson University. His Extension Forestry program focuses on forest and tree health and invasive species management in natural and managed landscapes across the Southeast. Dave’s research program focuses on the biology and management invasive plants and insects. Dave completed his B.A. in Biology at Luther College, a M.S. in Entomology and Forestry at Iowa State University, and a PhD in Entomology at the University of Wisconsin. Dave is Past-President of the North American Invasive Species Management Association, is on the South Carolina Invasive Species Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Committee for the South Carolina Exotic Plant Pest Council. Dave lives near Athens, GA. He is married to an amazing woman and they have two young boys. He grew up on a farm in Harmony, MN, and spent most of his time in the woods. He was an active member of the Carimona Cruisers 4-H club and once had a pet cow named Kari. Together, then won a trophy at the 1986 Fillmore County Fair. He still loves cows but thinks horses are shifty.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I grew up in Phoenix at a time when girls took Home Ec and boys took Shop and nobody protested. So while the boys were taking apart engines, I was preparing meals that were visually pleasing. And though I never took apart an engine, I took apart a cat, in exchange for 150 extra credit points in Ms. Fangman's Anatomy and Physiology class at Arcadia High School.
Now, just to be clear, this was not a cat dissection. This was a cat destruction, because the assignment was to build a cat skeleton. In order to do that, you needed a set of bones. And in order to get a set of bones, you needed to get a euthanized cat from the pound and boil it for hours, until the skin and the muscles and the tendons and the ligaments and the organs melted away.
Now, when Ms. Fangman, who had a shock of red hair and was obsessed with science, announced this project, she did so with an enthusiasm that was slightly unnerving because there was a disconnect between her zeal for the project and what we were going to have to go through in order to get it done.
But six of us took her up on the challenge. Because we were juniors in high school and because she was such a strict grader, the only way to get an A in her class was to do this extra credit project. And I was hell-bent on getting an A because I wanted to get the hell out of Phoenix.
This was the mid‘80s and Phoenix was a cultural wasteland. I mean there was nothing going on. And my ticket out was a school on the East Coast that required good grades.
Even so, I had misgivings because I like cats and I had a cat at the time. And under no circumstances did I want to be responsible for the demise of one. So I decided that rather than call the pound in advance and tell them what I needed because I thought somehow this would incentivize them to euthanize a cat who wasn't otherwise scheduled, I was just going to show up unannounced for however many days it took until one was available even if this set us behind schedule.
Amy Segal shares her story at Low Tide Motors in New York, NY in April, 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.
And when I say ‘us’, I mean me and Nancy who was my partner in this project. It was done in teams. So Nancy and I were on a team and then the other two teams were all guys.
While there wasn't overt competition, there was a sort of underground current, because this was a time when there were still a lot of stereotypes around girls and science. Nancy and I were hard chargers. I mean I was running for president of the National Honor Society. She wanted to be a doctor. So we set out to dispel this stereotype and we only had three weeks to do it.
Now, because she was on the track and field team and they had practice every day after school until after the pound closed, we decided that I would go by myself to pick up the cat.
And so I'm driving over there thinking, “Okay, this is all in the name of science. It's all in the name of science.”
I arrive and I tell them what I need and they just hand me a dead cat, frozen in a garbage bag. I'm startled by the heft of it because I somehow wasn't expecting it to be frozen. I'm also startled by the fact that they didn't ask me any questions. I didn't have a note from the school. My parents weren't with me. I'm just this teenage girl asking for a dead cat. For all they knew, I was part of some animal ritual cult.
But I loaded it into the trunk and I stopped at the hardware store and bought an industrialsized aluminum pot, like a 40gallon pot. And I headed over to Nancy's house where we were setting up our lab in her backyard.
Her parents were out of town but we decided we needed to get started right away because we didn't know what we were going to do if it started to defrost.
And so we filled the pot up with water and we eased the cat in. We lit the gas grill in the backyard and we boiled it for hours. The stench was just horrific. I mean it was some combination of sulfur and rotten eggs and that sewage smell you get sometimes when you're knocked back by a steaming manhole cover in New York. And even the dogs in the neighborhood agreed because they were howling.
And we're poking and prodding it with this metal skewer to sort of help it along. And I said, “Do you think Steven Spielberg did this project?” Because he went to our high school. And Raiders of the Lost Ark had just come out and all I could think about was that scene where the tomb door opens and everybody's face starts to melt away. I was like, “I wonder if he got inspiration for that scene from this project.”
Finally, we decided that it had softened enough for us to start to extract the bones. But it was late and it was dark and it was too hot for us to handle still and so we were going to wait until the next day to do that.
But we couldn't leave it out on the grill overnight because coyotes and raccoons come out and we figured they'd want to feast on this, so we carried it into the shed and stored it there.
Amy Segal shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY in October, 2022. Photo by LiAnn Grahm.
The next day after school, we put on Nancy's mother's rubber, yellow dish gloves and we started to poke and prod and pull and push to get the bones out of this morass. And the larger ones, like the femur and the ribs and the cranium, they easily sunk to the bottom. But the smaller ones, like from the feet were still stuck in there.
And when I say small I mean tiny. The bones in a cat's foot are tiny. And we couldn't really get a good grip with these rubber gloves so we removed them and just used our hands.
We didn't have the internet back then so we didn't have much to go on, but we knew that there should be about 240 bones in a cat skeleton as opposed to 206 in a human skeleton. The reason we weren't sure exactly is because it depends on how long the tail is.
But we laid them out on a paper towel until we decided that we had a complete set and so we were able then to throw out the rest of this detritus.
But the problem was that some of the bones weren't clean, like the cartilage was still stuck to them. So we asked Ms. Fangman the next day how we were going to get that off and she just sort of smiled and said, “You girls will figure it out.” She gave us no guidance.
So we turned to the upperclassmen, the seniors because Ms. Fangman had been assigning this for 15plus years. And they said, “Muriatic acid.”
And we were like, “Oh, yeah. Where do we get that?”
And they said, “A pool supply store. It's used to take grime off a pool tile.”
So we went to the pool supply store and got some muriatic acid and, once again, no questions asked.
An hour later, we're in Nancy's backyard with the swing set in the distance handling acid. And it worked and so then we started to assemble our skeleton. We built a frame with a piece of plywood and these wooden dowels and then we stacked books up to support it while we wired and glued it together.
But the glue that we had wasn't working. It just wasn't adhering to the bones. So we went to the hobby shop and got a second type of glue. And when we applied that, these tendrils of smoke started rising.
And we're like, “Oh, my God. This is going to explode.” So we doused it with water, which is not what you're supposed to do when there's a chemical reaction.
And so our bones were wet again and so we had to lay them out again to dry out in the sun. But, finally, we assembled our skeleton. We loaded it into a box and we took it to school and we put it next to the other two skeletons.
We were standing there like peacocks with our feathers on full display. We were so proud. And Ms. Fangman circles around the first one and circles around the second one and then she circles around ours and pauses and says, “The feet are on in the wrong position. You have them at an 85degree angle instead of a 45degree angle. This is carpal hyperextension.”
And we're like, “What?” We were mortified because we were expecting these accolades to roll in. Instead, we were embarrassed in front of the whole class and especially in front of these two teams of guys who were standing there sort of snickering.
And I'm thinking, “Am I going to get enough extra credit points to do well in this class?”
And we whisked that cat away back to Nancy's backyard. We broke its feet and we reset them, along with our egos. And we took it back to the classroom where we left it there for the rest of the semester.
Then when the semester was over, Nancy and I alternated between keeping the cat at our houses. When it was at my house once, my cat jumped up onto the shelf, knocked it off and it shattered everywhere. That time we did not reset it.
Now, I don't remember after all these years if I got an A in that class, but I do remember that I got the hell out of Phoenix.
Part 2
So I grew up in southeast Minnesota, which is about a farthest cry you could think of from where we are today. Nothing but fields, woods, and cows pretty much surrounded us. This was back in the early ‘80s where after breakfast and after chores, your mom just kicked you out of the house basically for the rest of the day. You could come back for lunch if you wanted. If you could find some food, you do that. But kids are pretty much on their own.
So I spent my time riding around my red BMX bike just all over the place. There was a state forest nearby. There was a stream. I would just ride around and look at stuff outside and I got really interested in insects and bugs. So I was just always looking at these things. It became like a hobby.
We went to that was in Fillmore County Fair. We took a cow to the fair. My pet cow Kari won a trophy. I don't want to brag but we did win a trophy.
Dave Coyle shares his story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in August 2022. Photo by Rob Felt.
But I also took a bug collection to the fair. My mom and dad got me this little yellow insect guide, a field guide that I still have to this day. It's super worn but it was written at about a seven eight-year-old level. So I had this.
I knew that thing backwards and forwards. I knew my bugs. Stuff would fly by. I knew what this was and I knew what that was.
Fast forward a little bit. We moved. When I was going into sixth grade, we moved to the next town over.
Now, I already had glasses. I already had braces. And if you want the fast track to not popular, come in as the new kid that also liked bugs.
So I pushed all that down for a while, did the sports thing, but I was always interested in insects. We'd be practicing and if I'd see one fly by I'd be like, “Oh, there's a so-and-so,” but I kept it inside.
I ended up going to college at a small college in northeastern Iowa called Luther College. I went there because it was close to home and I could play football, so I did that. I was very much into athletics and all that but I never really gave up - the entomology was still deep down inside.
The good news about college is it was freaking awesome. I completely blossomed, probably not in a really conducive way to getting good grades. Like I had a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but I was not a good student and I would be the first one to tell you that.
I went through a couple of majors. When I got there I thought, “I'll do Elementary Ed. That sounds like fun and kind of easy.”
And I remember that first course we were making something with construction paper and I thought, “What the hell is this? This is ridiculous. I'm not going to do that.”
And then I thought, “Well, I like numbers. Let me try a Math major.” I took a Calculus class and after a week they straight up stopped using numbers. And so it was just all these weird symbols and that clearly didn't work out.
When I was a sophomore, my advisor, I got a new advisor and his name was Dr. Kirk Larsen. Turns out he was an entomologist. So I thought, “Holy crap, you can like, do something with this.” So the spark was reignited. I thought, “Yeah, man, I'm going to be an entomologist.”
Unfortunately, my grades said otherwise. They were just not great.
A lot of students, college kids that are getting advanced degrees, they do undergraduate research project. This is super common nowadays. Back then, and this is pushing 30 years ago, you did an undergraduate research project if you were (a) a super overachiever, or (b) you straight up needed help to get into grad school. I was B by a long shot.
So Doc Larsen and I got this idea that we can do an undergraduate project. We are going to look for this endangered beetle, the American burying beetle.
Dave Coyle shares his story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in August 2022. Photo by Rob Felt.
This is a type of beetle that basically is nature's recycler. It's a great big thing, an inch, inchandahalf long. These bugs go and they find dead stuff. They dig underneath it. It drops in. They bury it. They lay their eggs on it. Problem solved, right?
It's not a stretch to say if we didn't have this group of insects, that there would be carcasses everywhere.
So we were going to search for this beetle that was supposed to be extinct or at least not seen in Northeast Iowa for almost 100 years. We set out to do this project. I was going to look at these four different spots.
So we thought about, “Well, how are you going to find this thing?”
And I remember these beetles eat dead stuff. So the key is going to be, if you're having a bait, it's got to smell.
I'd grown up on the farm so I had some connections. So we thought, well, we'll do dead pigs. I can get those from home. So I go home. I bring these dead piglets back.
Then I went to the local fish hatchery and we got dead fish from them. I knew those guys there and so I could do that.
And then we wanted two more, because this was science. We had to have some tests so we thought about chicken and beef.
Where I went to college is a small town, like there's basically one grocery store. So it was super awkward as 21yearold Dave walking in. They knew who I was. Like, “Hey, can I have your rotten beef livers and some old chicken wings?” That's what I need. And they were gracious. They gave them to me.
The problem is if you just have these things, they're not really that smelly by themselves, so you got to really get them ripe.
So what we did was we got these Tupperware containers, these big tubs and we put the stuff in there. Then we set it on top of this thing outside the Biology Department, this big container thing, and you let them cook for about a week.
And if you've not been to the Midwest, some people think, “Oh, that's North. It must not be hot.” It's hot as blazes but just for like a couple months out of the year and that's when we did this.
So I had all this dead stuff in these tubs sitting on these outside the big fantype things just cooking.
And it's interesting, if you're at home and you're making a soup at home and you get the consistency just right where it kind of sloshes, you're like, “Awesome. This is going to be the best.” But if you're actually cooking dead things and it reaches that sloshy consistency, it's just horrible. Absolutely horrible.
I mentioned I grew up on a farm. I've seen some things and I've smelled some things in my day. Without a shadow of a doubt, the first time I took the lid off that first container, it was the worst thing I'd smelled hands down. It stopped my breath. It burned my eyes. There were just tears and snot coming out. It was the worst thing in the world.
And even worse yet is, now, I have to load it up in my little Ford Festiva, which is a glorified roller skate, and we got to go on off to all these study sites.
So the way you catch these beetles, you dig a hole in the ground and you put a fivegallon pail in. Then you put your bait into this glass jar and it just sits down in the middle. And then the beetles smell it. They walk around the ground and they fall in there and you catch them that way.
So I spent ten weeks doing this. Every bump I hit with my car, I just wince because I knew what was going on in the back hatch.
Every time you carried it out, you carry it so, so carefully, just like, please, don't miss a step.
If your clothes got stuff on it, I just chucked them. Most of my outfits that summer were just flat out disposable because the smell was just not coming off.
So we did this whole project, went through thousands of beetles at the end of the summer and, holy crap, I freaking got one.
So entomological fame is going to be mine. I'm going to punch my ticket to glory. And so flying high, right?
So I put a poster together, as we do at this stage, and I went to this national entomology meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. There's this thing we do called a poster session where all the people with their posters stand by it. You stand there and then people come, will walk up and they will talk to you about it.
Dave Coyle shares his story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in August 2022. Photo by Rob Felt.
So I'm standing there. I got my new tie and all that type of thing, feathers all puffed out because I found this friggin’ beetle, right?
And so we were there not too long and this this fuzzy little fella comes up. I say fuzzy because, basically, from the neck to the top of his head was the same length of gray hair, just like all over.
He takes a look and he's like, “Oh, that's not it.”
In my head, I'm thinking, “What is this dude? Like the world's expert on burying beetles or something?”
Then when he introduced himself, he was actually the world's expert on burying beetles, so he knew that it was not that.
So for an hour and a half, I had to stand by this stupid poster at that point. Prior to that, I had thought if I don’t do science for a career, I was just going to work with my best friend at his roofing company. We were going to just roof for the summer, make a couple grand, go to Europe, blow it, it was going to be awesome.
That being said, I did not want to become a roofer because I had basically done manual labor my whole life: farming, construction. I knew I could be a roofer but, God, that sounds freaking horrible.
But at that point when he told me that’s not the beetle, in my head it was like, “Shit, I’m going to be a roofer now.”
So I stood there and my mentor at the time, Doc Larsen, came over and he gave me a little bit of a pep talk. It didn't work at all. He was talking. He had his hand on my shoulder trying to console me. In my head I was just thinking like, “I'm going to be a roofer and this is like my life blows at this point.”
So a little more time passes, at the end of that poster session, I'm just completely mentally zapped, this other fellow walks up. Turns out he's a professor at Iowa State. And we start talking about stuff and we start talking about grad school and I was like, “I mean I would love to but I don't really have the grades for it.”
He said, “That's okay. We'll bring you in on probation.”
I was like, “Oh, so there's a chance now.”
So I went to Iowa State and I got my Master’s.
I always think back because, now, I'm an assistant professor. I actually did what I thought I would do. And I think back to when I was seven. We had to do this thing in school where you had this little journal and you had to write what do you want to be when you grow up. Most kids put farmer, fireman, policeman, all the standard stuff, but I actually wrote, “I want to be an entomologist.” Spelled it right and everything. My mom still has that to this day.
And I think the second call I made after I got offered that job at Clemson was to Mom. I was like, “Mom, you're never going to guess what I did, but I did it.”
Thank you.