I want you to do something for me.

Close your eyes.

I'm going to say a word and I'd like you to, as quickly as you can, come up with a mental image to go with it.

The word is conservationist.

Okay, so what did you picture if you were able to come up with anything, that is?

Did you see images of animals first?

When your mind got around to picturing an actual zoologist, who did you see? Was it Charles Darwin? David Attenborough?

Maybe Jane Goodall? For Scientific American Science quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. You're listening

to the third episode of our Fascination mini-series on The New Conservationists.

Today we're going to talk about who actually does this kind of work and how that's changing.

Our guide for this adventure is Ashley Pap, an animal scientist turned storyteller.

And to tell this particular story, she'll take us out to an island off the coast of California,

and later onto the African savanna, to meet two conservation researchers who are breaking those dusty old molds and changing the field for the better.

The Argentine ant is one of the most invasive species in the world.

It's found on every continent now all over the world except for Antarctica.

They're probably just in my backyard here.

That's Isak Aguilar.

He's a graduate student in the geology division at the California Institute of Technology.

Before starting this chapter, he spent plenty of time outside as a field research assistant on San Clementi Island, off the coast of Southern California, watching ants.

We hike around and find where these infestations are, we bring our GPSes, kind of take

data points of where we see then,

and then we can come back to these areas and treat them so that we can apply these pesticide beads

...