This is scientist Zack Jud, posing with a lionfish he caught in a estuary river in 2010 — four years before 6th grader Lauren Arrington, who is now being credited with the discovery.
Jason posted about Lauren Arrington's science fair project here yesterday, and included a short update on this news, but I wanted to do a follow up post about Jud and his work. Not because I want to hate on a little girl, but because I think it's very important to make sure Jud's work doesn't get buried under an understandable impulse to appreciate awesome kids doing science. I'm sure Lauren Arrington made a great science fair project, but her work isn't new and doesn't come as a surprise to grown-up scientists. Particularly not to Jud, who published a peer-reviewed research paper on this very subject in 2011. It also wasn't a surprise to Lauren Arrington's father, D. Albrey Arrington, who was a named author on that paper, though he was not, according to Jud, directly involved in making the discovery. (Note that this is pretty normal for scientific research papers, especially those published by young scientists like Jud.)
My lionfish research is going viral…but my name has been intentionally left out of the stories, replaced by the name of the 12-year-old daughter of my former supervisor's best friend. I feel like my hands are tied. Anything I say will come off as an attempt to steal a little girl's thunder, but it's unethical for her and her father to continue to claim the discovery of lionfish in estuaries as her own.
That is a very big deal. It's awesome that a kid wants to be involved in science. And it's totally understandable that we, as a society, want to cheer her on and want to hear her story. But those things should not outweigh the fact that somebody else did this research first and that he is now in the truly unenviable position of having his work widely known (super-important for an early-career scientist) but having his name erased from it.
