Assistant Professor and Research Fellow University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
Abstract: Invasive species are an urgent problem in a globalizing world. Despite the ecological and economic harm these non-native species cause, ethical concerns around how to study and manage them have only multiplied as the discipline of invasion biology has grown. While some raise concerns of biocultural homogenization that might erode local biodiversity, others embrace the novel ecosystems we might expect if we cease to manage invasive populations. Faced with the pressure to act, we must also reckon with the troubling parallels in the rhetoric we use to describe invasive species and human immigrants. Rather than beginning from the present conflict over how to manage invasive species, I aim to historicize the cultural and biological discourse around one invasive species: the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). I draw on archival material to reanimate nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns about invasive species, as well as trace how biological theories of invasion interact (or don’t) with contemporary social theories of borders, immigration, and multispecies justice. Specifically, I—as an evolutionary biologist and a scholar of science & technology studies—tell the story of the starling. In turn of the twentieth-century Manhattan, NY (USA), the starling captured the interest of two elite New Yorkers: Eugene Schieffelin, self-stated man of leisure and acclimatization enthusiast, and Frank Michler Chapman, banker turned prominent ornithologist at the city’s American Museum of Natural History. How these two men spoke for the starling reveals a struggle for authority not just in preserving American biodiversity but also in safeguarding biological expertise. At least in some circles, the invasive starling has become infamous for its ties to Shakespeare and its unimpeded expansion, and yet both myths have been disproven in recent years. In this talk, I follow how popular stories have influenced biologists during the century-long residence of the starling in the US, and suggest how critiques of the stories that persist might help refine biological hypotheses yet to be tested (with particular attention to the role of migration in the starling’s expansion).
