Feathered Black Boxes and Licking Rocks

I can't recall if I've posted my musings on this particular topic before, and I'm too lazy to go back and check. Apologies if this is duplicate rambling.

In my last post, I wrote about helping with day zero blood draws on dairy cows in a nutritional study. I just got an email from Jean asking if I could drop by the barn every morning and push hay back into the feeders. It seems the cows push it out overnight. And she asked if I could sub in now and then for her grad student who oversees the evening feedings. Fairly menial tasks, sure. But it positions me well for the calving to come! I of course told her I'd be happy to take care of those tasks.

Visiting the cows every day is a great opportunity to learn more. In fact, over the summer, I made sure that every day I spent time in every pen with the chickens in my feeding trials. The chickens were feathered black boxes, the interesting chemistry churning away inside them. At the time, I observed subtle changes in feeding and excretion patterns that I only later understood when I was in the lab analyzing the tissues.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Animal science is a lot like geology. Let me list some of the reasons.

Black boxes. Rocks and animals don't speak. You must learn to use all of your senses: what you see, hear, feel, smell, taste, all can be important. What? You've never licked a rock?

Data. In the world of geology, you never have enough data, you never have it in the right location, and the data that you do get is in half a dozen different formats with extraordinarily variable scales (nanometers to thousands of kilometers, nanoseconds to billions of years). Except for the parts about kilometers and billions of years, animal science seems to put you in exactly the same position. 

Remote sensing. I'm using this term quite loosely. Besides what you observe, a geologist has to collect other data using tools and machines and computers. You may not have to design and build these things but you need to know how they work in order to use them appropriately. You can't transport yourself down to the bottom of a 20,000-foot deep well to see what is going on in the reservoir; even if you could, you'd need special glasses because what is going on is on a microscopic scale anyway. It's the same for animals. We can take xrays and ultrasounds and run blood tests but they are similarly small windows that are still at a remove from the whole organism.

Integration. As geologists, we make measurements in the field or collect samples or interpret data, and none of it makes any sense until we start building maps and other integrative displays, adding bit by bit until patterns emerge. Animals are the same. We can observe and record our observations but true understanding doesn't come until we start putting all the bits together. Interpretation requires rigor and method, integration requires creativity.

It was a risk but I included a very brief summary of this idea in the personal statement I had to write for the vet school applications. I am of course not saying that if you are a scientist of flavor x, you can willy-nilly start doing science of flavor y. I am drawing parallels between two specific types of science because I thought that the similarities were unexpected and interesting. I suspect that as I learn more about animal science, I'll find many differences that are just as unexpected.