So Kamath went to Florida, where she identified individual anoles and tracked their movements day in, day out. Kamath studied the anoles “in a larger area, in a longer period of time than anyone else had ever done,” says Losos, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis. But instead of revealing territorial differences, this massive dataset showed that the anoles weren’t actually territorial in the first place.
Kamath looked into the historical record to see where the idea of anole territoriality originated. It started with a 1933 paper that described frequent sexual behavior between male lizards in the lab. The authors had concluded that this lab behavior must be “prevented by something” in the wild, Kamath says, which they inferred was the males protecting territories. “The very first conclusion,” she says, “was based on a homophobic response to observing male-male copulation.” That shaky conclusion caught on, and later researchers assumed it to be true.
“Feminist” here means looking critically at the unconscious biases of researchers, who have traditionally been mostly heteronormative white males.
Kamath has adopted a feminist approach to science, which critically examines not only how women and gender minorities have been excluded from science, but also how sexist and gendered ideas have influenced the questions scientists ask and how they frame the results of their work — whether they know it or not.