Science Communication in the Land of the Elephant Seals
Female Northern Elephant Seals. Image: Frank Schulenburg
Here on the California coast, the start of the winter heralds the arrival of northern elephant seals, truly gigantic mammals weighing many hundreds to thousands of pounds that take up residence on the beaches for a few months. In this period, they give birth, raise pups until weaning, and mate, before heading back out to sea for most of the rest of the year.
During their relatively brief annual foray onto land, the seals’ days seem to largely be spent laying about, with periodic, often very dramatic, social interactions. Human visitors flock to the beaches to watch the seals—even just laying about, they are magnificent to behold, and seeing them interact is truly a top-notch animal-watching experience. Recently, my partner and I were among the lucky humans spending a gray, blustery afternoon with the elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore. Also amidst these humans were the cheery, red-jacketed winter wildlife docents who volunteer to be out on the beaches through the winter months, helping us visitors understand the elephant seals’ biology and answering all our questions about what we observe.
As much as I love watching animals, the thought of having conversations about elephant seal biology with the docents made me nervous. As is true for many animals, biological descriptions of elephant seal behavior are filled with sexist, power-laden language—dominant males are referred to as “beach masters,” for example, and groups of females are described as being part of these dominant males’ “harems.” From my work as a scientist applying feminist perspectives to understanding animal behavior, I know that it is possible to reject the narrow constraints of sexism in favor of more expansive scientific frameworks for making sense of animal lives. However, feminist biologists haven’t yet come up with alternative approaches to thinking about elephant seal biology in particular.
That day on the beach, this gap in scholarship left me in a strange bind.
On the one hand, I felt certain that if I got into a conversation with a winter wildlife docent in which they used sexist scientific language to describe the elephant seals, I would find it hard not to counter their descriptions with my own expertise in the area of feminist science. But on the other hand, I don’t really know much about elephant seals at all, and the docents have exactly the knowledge that I lack. Would a conversation between us turn into a strange power struggle, a battle between two different kinds of expertise? I was worried that it might.
A concept that we think about a lot here at Liminal—the concept of sensemaking—offers a way out of this nightmare scenario. Within a sensemaking framework, instead of science communication being about experts imparting scientific knowledge to laypeople, it becomes about building relationships in which there is room to make sense of science together. In the specific case of the elephant seals, sensemaking offers up the possibility of me constructing knowledge about these wonderful creatures together with people who know less than I do about feminist science, but a lot more about the animals themselves.
And that is exactly what ended up happening on our visit out to Point Reyes—a docent, my partner, and I found ourselves in a conversation in which, united by our curiosity about elephant seals, we managed to meld my feminist science perspectives, my partner’s amateur naturalist curiosity, and the docent’s extensive observations of the animals themselves, a conversation in which the fact that some of us are trained as scientists and some of us aren’t slowly faded away.
Female Northern Elephant Seals. Image: Frank Schulenburg
