Dynestee Fields

Dr. Jeffrey Mohr is an Associate Professor of Biology and the head of the environmental studies program at Southern Wesleyan University. This is his second year teaching at the University. His specialties include: Herpetology, Zoology, Ecology, Wildlife Behavior, and Animal Behavior. He has been working with reptiles and amphibians for nearly twenty years.

ME: Where are you from?

MOHR: Oh man, that’s a hard question. So, I grew up in Wisconsin. So, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin is where I grew up. [I] lived there for about nine and a half- ten years. Then my dad got a job in Florida. So we picked up and moved down to Tampa Bay, Florida. This was when I was about ten years old, and then I lived in Tampa Bay from ten to eighteen, and then went to college up here in Greenville, South Carolina. And so I went to college in Greenville, South Carolina and did a master’s degree in Oklahoma, and moved back here to Carolina to do my doctorate. And so I’ve kinda been here since 2004, except when I lived in Georgia from 2010-2016.

ME: What were your interests in your early years?

MOHR: I loved animals. That’s always been a passion. The outdoors and the critters that run around the outdoors have always been a passion. [I] caught turtles as a little kid. Frogs and toads, caterpillars, and we always brought them home and kept them in little aquariums and cages.

ME: Do you have a memory that sparked your interests?

MOHR: I don’t. It was just a part of life. When I grew up in Wisconsin that was part of life. We went to my grandparent’s house. They lived on a river. We’d go catch crawfish in the river. Go fishing. At my house, we lived on a lake, we caught turtles. Part of my childhood was catching animals and playing with them. So I don’t have a memory that flipped it over; it was just that was what we did.

When I started talking to other people as we got older, it was not everybody’s background. I was like “You didn’t catch toads as a kid?” “No.” “What! Everybody catches toads.” I guess it was probably my father who sparked that [interest], because from an early age he’d show us things outside and we’d do stuff outside.

ME: Do you have a special area of interest within the field of biology?

MOHR: Yeah! It’s animals for sure. Mostly those underrepresented animals. My biggest passion is reptiles and amphibians. So, I’m really a reptile guy. An amphibian guy. And I would say that snakes are my focal animal. Both my thesis for my master’s and my dissertation for my PhD. were focused on snakes.

ME: So what distinguished snakes from other animals for you?

ME: For me? Most people are really afraid of them, and I’m not afraid of them. And so, it’s one of the few animals out there that people will just kill. You never hear of people like “Oh look at that squirrel running along. Let me run it over with the car.” Or, “Look at that deer over there. Let me go kick it.” But you see a snake, and people will say “I saw a snake crossing the road, so I ran it over.” Or, “I saw a snake in my garden, so I chopped its head off.” I felt they were the underdogs. And so, the other side of it is that I like to educate people about them. So I wanted to educate people about what snakes are.

The other real reason is that I can catch them. I love a fox, and I love a hawk, but I can’t catch that. But a snake I can run up and catch. So I like sharks and fish and other things, but you just can’t catch them just as easily as walking up to a frog, or a toad, or a lizard, or a snake. So it was an animal I can have in my hands and look at.

ME: What method did you use to catch the snakes?

MOHR: So as a little kid I would catch them with my hands, but it was all the nonvenomous snakes. All the garter snakes, and the black snakes, and racers, and water snakes are common and nonvenomous. As I got older and began to learn more, I’d find things like the copperhead and the rattlesnake, and those are a lot more dangerous, so I use snake tongs to handle those. But in my younger, foolish years I’ve been able to catch those with my bare hands too. So, I won’t do that anymore, but when I was younger I would.

ME: Have you ever been bitten by a snake?

MOHR: I’ve been bitten by hundreds of nonvenomous snakes. I have never been bitten by a venomous snake. It’s just a nonvenomous snake never bothers me. I’m less careful because I want to catch the snake and don’t want it to get away.

A venomous snake, I’ve got to be careful. I’ve lost many of them because I’m careful. Because I have to get tongs; I have to get the proper tools. And then I go catch it, and sometimes they slither away. Whereby a nonvenomous snake, sometimes they could bite me, but it’s not a lethal bite. So, as soon as I see it I catch it.

ME: So did you have the tongs around your house, or?

MOHR: Yeah, I had one in my car. Yeah in most of college and grad school I had tongs in my car. I still do. That way, any time I see a snake, or I go hiking, I carry it with me. So if I see them, I can grab them.

ME: What do you do with the snakes once you find them?

MOHR: For my research I’d catch the snakes, bring them back to the lab, and I’d actually surgically implant a radio transmitter in them. And so, once we’d put the radio transmitter in and sewed them back up, we could follow the snake anywhere in the environment. So that was both my master’s and my dissertation work.

ME: At what point did you begin to learn about different kinds of snakes?

MOHR: I don’t know. Probably thirteen, fourteen I started to catch more and started to really want to learn about them. I think I was fifteen or sixteen when I got to buy a boa constrictor, and then I started learning more about boa constrictors and some of the pet store snakes you’d see and those kind of things.

ME: So, what research and projects have you conducted in this area?

MOHR: Well, like I said, I did my doctoral dissertation on rattlesnakes here in the Upstate of South Carolina. I did my master’s thesis on rattlesnakes in Oklahoma. I’ve helped out with dozens of other projects working with snakes. And my first publication ever was an amphibian publication on frogs. So, I’ve been working with reptiles and amphibians for almost twenty years now.

ME: So what was the publication about, specifically, with the frogs?

MOHR: With the frogs, I was an undergraduate and I set up with my advisers automatic recording systems that would turn on and start recording, and we put them out in an environment where frogs were, so when frogs were calling we could listen to what frogs were calling at what times of night, [and] what times of day. So we had this automated recording system that would go on for, I think it was a minute. It did a minute like every half hour so we could get the calls. And we did this at two different wetlands, and then we could compare the wetland [and] what frogs were there, because going out sometimes you can’t see them. Like looking for frogs, you may not see them, they’re hiding. If you have a recording system you can start hearing them because they call at night. And so that way I didn’t have to be out there at three in the morning. I could just have my system out there.

ME: As you began to study the snakes and the frogs did you find that people know more about them than you think they do or less?

MOHR: Less. They know far less than what I think they should. It surprises me actually, how incorrect people are with how they think about frogs, and toads, and snakes, and reptiles in general.

ME: What do you think causes people to just hit the snakes when they see them? Is there anything…?

MOHR: You have some people referring back to Genesis where, you know, the snake is cursed and some people say it goes back to that. I think it really goes back to if you don’t understand something, you fear it. People fear what they don’t understand and what’s strange. People fear new foods. If you put a new food in front of somebody, and if they haven’t ever seen it, they’re like “I’m not going to eat that. It’s weird. We don’t eat that kind of stuff here.” And I think snakes are one of those [things] that nobody understands. And people have dogs, people love cats, there’s people that have birds, and I think that one of the issues especially with snakes is that snakes can kill you. There are venomous snakes that can kill you. People have fear of bears, though a lot of people have never seen one. But people are like, “I’m afraid of a bear.” But have you ever seen one? “Well, in zoos.” But you’ve never seen one in the wild? “No.” But you’re afraid of it. “Yeah.”

I think it’s that built in it’s a big giant animal, so I’m afraid of it. And I think with snakes it’s an animal I don’t understand and it’s different than an animal I do understand.

ME: And do you think the stereotype precedes the snake?

MOHR: Oh yeah. I think so. And I think it’s very learned. When I do educational shows with snakes and I go to kindergarten and first grade, three quarters of the class will run up and touch the snake. Kids love to see it. But almost always, the teachers are fearful. As I get up in age group, start getting to middle school, more and more of the kids are now fearful. By the time I get to the high school most of the kids are fearful. I don’t think it’s because any of them have been bitten by snakes. I think it’s because people in their life: their friends, their family, their parents, their grandparents, have told them stay away. So I think as a little kid you’re naive. I mean we talk about this with all kinds [of things]. I mean little kids don’t see differences in skin color, in male or female. I mean little kids just see those kind of things. And so they see an animal, they see an adult like me holding it, and they say “Oh, it must be OK to hold. So they go up there to touch it. But then someone in their family as they get older says snakes are bad, and then they get this idea: snakes are bad.

ME: So do you ever face any opposition from presenting these animals in classes?

MOHR: Not usually. Most of the teachers want me there. They want me to educate their students. But, you’ll hear people especially if I do public things like boy scouts, [or] do things out in the public where people are like “No, get that snake away from me.” Those kind of things. Or, I’ll have people argue with me why it was right for them to kill this snake in their yard or it was OK to kill this snake on a nature trail.

When I try to talk to them, I’m like “You should have not killed that snake. The only thing that snake can hurt is a fish. It eats fish. So, if you’re a fish, I could see why you’re afraid. But it’s not going to hurt you. You’re a human. It’s a fish eating water snake.” But, you know, I’ll try to have the education conversation, like “You just killed an animal that the only thing is does is eat fish. So, it’s not going to hurt you. It’s not venomous. If it bit you nothing would happen.”

But I do get people who then tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Especially here in the upstate. I get people arguing with me about the different snakes. We don’t have cottonmouths, or another name for cottonmouths is water moccasin, we don’t have those here in the upstate, but people will argue with me that we do. And that’s hard, because we don’t. They’re not here. People will argue with me all the time that they are.

ME: Even with your degrees?

MOHR: They don’t care. They know. Their Grandpa So and So’s told them, and they’re here, and they’ve saw one, and that’s just how it is.

ME: Do you see a similar thing with frogs and toads?

MOHR: Now, most people don’t care one way or another about frogs. Snakes are one of those things where they will wantonly kill it. Like that is a goal of humans. But frogs and toads, they might be afraid of them but they’re not going to go kill them. They’re just like “I don’t like frogs.” And they just let the frog hop away.

But snakes people will go after and go kill them. They’re like “I don’t like snakes,” and they go grab a stick and try to hit it or throw a rock at it. But lizards, or frogs, or turtles, I don’t see that same behavior.

ME: So are humans a danger to snakes? I mean, you know, is the population going down?

MOHR: For the first year of my study at Table Rock State Park when I was doing my dissertation work, the first year the number one predator, the number one death of my snakes, was people. People were the number one killing the snakes in my study. Even though we were in a state park in a protected area, people were the number one [thing] killing the snakes.

ME: How many of those snakes were nonpoisonous?

MOHR: The ones I was studying were all rattlesnakes, so they were venomous. And actually no snakes are poisonous. They’re actually all venomous. Poison is something you ingest, whereas venom is something injected. So snakes are venomous. Every one of my study animals was venomous. I’d find dead water snakes that are harmless. We’d find those as well in our study. And that’s just people seeing a snake and killing it.

ME: So what do you hope to achieve through, I’m guessing, your studies? You say you want to educate people not to harm these animals?

MOHR: Yeah, one of my goals is to show people the magnificence of God’s creation, and how all these critters have a place in the ecosystem. That we need these critters because they’re meant to be here. And most of them are not here to harm humans. And most snake bites only occur if you try to go get the snake. Very rarely do we get what we consider legitimate snake bites. Or somebody doesn’t see it, somebody actually steps on it, and gets bitten. That’s rare. It’s almost always somebody’s trying to kill it, somebody’s playing with it, somebody’s doing something. Those are the people that get bit.

ME: So do you think that people, do you think that Christians in particular care a lot about stewardship of the environment or not?

MOHR: No. I think some do. I would say that most, I don’t know, maybe not most, but I would say that a large of Christians seem ambivalent. They don’t care either way. And then you have a portion of Christians that believe that you know, God created the world for us and that we’re stewards. And that means that we need to do everything for us as humans, and if that means exterminate an animal or that means cut down a forest, as long as we’re doing it for us as humans that’s OK. So some people don’t have an environmental component to their Christianity. They think that God created everything, animals and plants, for us to use, to eat, chop down, those kind of things.

And then you have another side of Christians that realize that when we poison a river, that when we send our manufacturing overseas like we do, our phones, all our plastic stuff, all our cars, most of them are built overseas. And now places pollute those environments, and those environments are where people get food and water. And so, some argue that it’s our Christian duty to not do those kind of things. That, you know, Jesus instructs that you know “what you do to the least of these you do to Me.” I’m paraphrasing, but the idea [is] that you need to be that person. So, if we let the people in China manufacture our cellphones, then all that sludge and toxic goes into their river and kills their animals, and those people try to fish in that river and they’re getting poison fish and eating them, and they’re getting poisoned. Some of it’s on us, because we bought the phone. Because they can’t afford the phone, they send it over to the United States.

So if we can help some of the poor people, and I teach this as one of the components of an environmental science class I teach, where we talk about the ethics of that. By curbing the environmental problems, we are actually helping what’s known as the least of these. The people who are the least. The poorest people outside of civilization countries like Europe and Japan and the U.S., you know our poor people can get food usually at a food bank or a church or places like that. Poor people in Africa, poor people in South America, poor people in Asia, they’re poor and they’ve got to do gardens, and they’ve got to fish in the river, and they’ve got to get food that way.

And so, if we destroy the environment, we destroy those people’s livelihood, and essentially destroy them in some way. So some Christians believe it’s our duty to be environmental stewards because it helps humans. And so Christianity and environmentalism runs the full gamut to where some people believe God gave us plants to kill and eat, some people believe that he gave us trees to cut down, and some believe that we’ve got to take care of the environment because it helps people, and we’re commanded to love one another. And so it’s interesting. In some of my classes we get into the ethics of those different situations.

ME: So do you think that there’s a possibility that any of this will ever end up in church, in sermons?

MOHR: Well I’ve seen it. There’s churches, especially some of your more, you know, liberal churches, you’ll see it sometimes. You’ll have pastors who talk about it from the pulpit: Like it’s our duty as a church to take care of the poor, and when we do a missions trip, one of the things on our missions trip is environmental activism. Like we need to, you know, think about that as a component of our ministry. Not just digging a well. Environmentalism is a component of it, because it will help people. When you tell the big company to stop polluting this lake because all of these people are getting fish out of this lake and all their kids are sick, when you stop buying your plastic junk from this company [it] is going to start saying “Let’s stop selling plastic stuff. Let’s do something different. Let’s make a nice biodegradable thing.” So the companies get on board. So, I think to an extent, Christians should be involved.

And I’ve heard different preachers talk about it. That [they] are starting to recognize this. And then you have the other side of it, some people say the United States’s problem with gluttony and obesity is a problem of let’s go destroy this forest so we can have more cattle. More cattle gives us more red meat. More red meat we can eat for every meal of the day. And then we’ve got cholesterol problems, and heart problems, colon problems, and obesity problems, and some people are like that is not living to God’s ideal either. We’re not supposed to eat ourselves to where we’re so big we get all these health problems. And so some people take the environmental thing and turn it into a health thing as well. That if we were more conscious about what we ate, the environment would be better off. If you clear, let’s say a thousand acres, you can feed more people if you grow vegetation than if you grow cattle. Because the cows eat the vegetation, and then there’s like five cows, whereas if you had all the corn or whatever and it went straight to the people, you could feed more.

Now, I like meat, so I’m not advocating no meat. I’m thinking that humans though, especially wealthier Americans, need to pay attention to how we do things, because everything does go back to the environment when you start thinking about some of it.

ME: So everything’s connected.

MOHR: It is, and that’s one of the things I try to teach people in my classes; the whole ecosystem of it. We drink out of a plastic bottle, we through away the plastic bottle, it goes into the ocean, and then a fish, you know, eats some of the plastic, and then the fish gets eat by a human, and then a person is getting some of those toxic PCBs and these other things. Um, BPA used to be a big chemical that now has been outlawed in the United States, it’s still in other places. But we get these PCBs, we get these chemicals that are connected. I mentioned PCB, and that’s one of the ones that came out of the textile industries that went into Lake Hartwell and some of these other places. And we can’t, if you read the regulations on eating fish out of Hartwell, you’re not supposed to eat very many, because they’ve got toxic concentrations of these toxins that are bad for humans. And that’s an environmental problem, and again, poorer people in general are the ones who are going to live off the land, so to speak. Most of your wealthier people are not out there like “Well, I’m going to go catch a fish to eat tonight.” Most of your wealthier people are [going to] restaurants and that sort of thing. But, poorer people, it’s literally sometimes like “A bucket of worms costs $2.00 and I can go catch some fish. I can’t get $2.00 worth of food at a grocery store, so I have to go fishing tonight. I have to go.” And you see that in the low country a lot. That is how they get they’re food that day. They go fishing that day, and they catch fish. Ad they’ll have fish and maybe a little bit of rice.

ME: So the Christina Faith and science actually work together well.

MOHR: I think they do. I think if we truly lived out some of Jesus’s, you know, words: Love everybody, I think if we understood we’re hurting people in some of the environmental things we do, I think we’d change it. I think that’s what the education’s about. If I can start showing people by you buying this phone or this plastic thing or this, you’re actually supporting this group in Thailand where these people work twelve hour shifts and then try to go home and catch an animal out of the river that they’ve dumped the sludge in, if you can start making those kind of connections, I think that Christians would be like “I don’t won’t the slave labor. That’s bad. I don’t want the poisoned fish. That’s bad. I don’t want…” If you can start educating, you’d see a lot, and you’d see things in the industry labeled fair trade. And that’s where there’s a company over there in China or Thailand that does what’s called fair trade, they pay the people a fair wage, they try to not pollute, they do things to try earn this listing of fair trade.

Organics [is] becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. Well, organic is no pesticides, no herbicides. People are realizing that not only are all those pesticides and herbicides bad for the environment, they’re not good for us humans to eat either. We’re starting to see an increase in organics, and fair trade, fair wage, fair labor, those kind of things, and I think that a lot of that goes along with, you know, love your neighbor as you love yourself, and if you consider humans your neighbor, humans in Africa and Asia in these poor little factories, they’re our neighbors. We should stand up, and I think that part of that is environmentally.

ME: So what led to you becoming a professor?

MOHR: There was a long, winding road, but I loved animals, and I really liked observing them and learning about them, and then I really like teaching people about them. So its been very enjoyable to teach people.

It wasn’t a direct route. I did my undergraduate and my master’s, and I got tired of school. So once I got my master’s, I left and I taught middle school for a while. I worked in a zoo. I did construction work. I did roofing work for a little bit. And then, teaching middle school it was hard, because I did not feel I was reaching a lot of the students. I had thirty students in the class. I had troublemakers who would then ruin everything for everyone, and so a lot of times I ended up doing busy work because if you give students a little freedom often times I would see the problem students would start causing trouble, and then the whole class would be focused on the problem students instead of learning. So, the more busy work, quiet work, you gave them, the more easier it was to manage the class but then they’re not really learning. So, I felt more like a cop in a class instead of a teacher. And then I felt that God was calling me to go to a slightly more older age of college students. Combined with that I felt the pull to go get my doctorate so that I could start teaching college kids. because college kids are just a little bit more mature. College is an elective kind of school. I can kick a kid out of my class if I want. I haven’t had to do that at SWU obviously, but you could if you get someone who’s disrupting you too much. That can be done. You know, and people in college are typically people who want to be there. So they want to learn. They might not want to learn every subject at college, but they want to go to college, typically. And I feel like I can have a bigger impact with college students too, because they go tell their friends, tell their parents, and as they get older if they have kids, they’ll teach their kids, and I think that’s really important.

ME: I’m not sure if you told me this already, but what was your undergraduate in?

MOHR: Biology. Almost not. I was a computer science major, but I hated being in the computer science labs because I missed going outside, and I ran into a professor that says “Well, why aren’t you a bio major?” I was like, “Aah, because I don’t want to study the human body.” “There’s a whole other side of science that you can study.” So he really changed my life with showing me that I could be a wildlife biologist. [That] I could study that side and become a professor.

ME: What was your master’s degree in?

MOHR: Zoology. And my doctorate was in fisheries and wildlife. I guess they called it wildlife and fisheries biology. That was the official name of it.

ME: So what’s your favorite class to teach here?

MOHR: Man, I got a lot of favorites. I would have to say my, probably my top three, are the intro classes, either intro nonmajors bio, or what we call the intros for major, part two, it’s the organisms one. Those two classes are really enjoyable because I get to give a broad overview about what science is. So I usually teach freshmen and it’s nice to get a chance to teach young minds and have them eager out of high school to kind of see college, see what college class is like, and learn about things. Those are really fun, and then I love teaching the stuff in my specialty. Like a zoology class is a lot of fun. Next spring, I’m teaching a herpetology class which is on reptile and amphibians, and I’m really looking forward to that one, because that’s my specialty. And so organismal specialty.

And so another fun thing that I really enjoy teaching is study abroad courses, anything with a field component where I get to take students out to go see stuff. I find that very enjoyable. I’ve got two field trips in April where I’m taking students to the coast for one trip and to the swamp for another trip. I love taking students on field trips.

ME: What’s the purpose of these two field trips that you have planned?

MOHR: This term I am teaching an aquatics and wetland biology class. And so we’re going down to the coast to observe ocean, wetlands, estuaries, and Barrier Island. That part of the aquatics side of things. And the other trip to the swamps is to show students a swamp, a black water river, and then some Carolina bay wetlands. And so it’s to teach them. I want students to get out there and stand on the edge of the river. I want them to put their hands in the river. I want them to see the critters in the river. I want them to appreciate what a river is.

It’s like you can’t teach a music class without hearing music. I don’t feel you can teach a environmental or a organismal biology class without really seeing the animal. I mean, if I put a PowerPoint up there about a bear, people will be like “Oh, there’s a bear.” If we see a bear walking through the woods alive, that’s completely different. It changes your entire outlook. If I put a toad on a PowerPoint, or if I have a dead toad in a jar, people or gonna go “Oh, that’s a toad,” but if I make you come into the wetland at night with a headlamp, and you spotlight a toad, and then reach down and catch it; totally different idea. So I like getting hands on.

ME: So have you gotten a lot of biology recruits through your classes?

MOHR: Oh yeah, I get a lot. I’m head of the environmental studies program here at SWU, and so I really try to pull them in for environmental studies. But I’ve got a lot of biology people too, because biology students need a couple of environmental courses as well. So yeah, we get a lot. I’m hoping to get more. That’s one of the things we’re going to be working on over the next couple of years; is bolstering our program, and recruiting, and letting students know “Hey, this is what we do here.”

ME: Is there any other program that you would like to add to the SWU curriculum?

MOHR: Not really. The environmental studies [program] is a great one. It started up three years ago, maybe? Maybe four. It was started right before I came here. This is my second year. So right before I came, they started an environmental studies program. It was going for a couple of years, then the guy who used to have my position kind of shut it down a little bit. Then he left. And I’ve started it back up, so it’s kind of like a new program, because it really hasn’t been advertised and recruited specifically for.

So that’ll be one of my goals to get that one going, and if that one’s very successful, one of the things that we may look into is a master’s program, possibly a Master’s of Science, or something like that. We’ve talked about certificates, like field biology certificates as another possibility down the road, where people would come and do an online course and then do an intensive field trip, and earn a certificate in wildlife, you know, reptile identification or something like that. So teaching those type of courses. Not necessarily a program.

ME: How could you accomplish this online?

MOHR: A lot of my online study abroad, let’s say we’re going to Costa Rica, so if we’re going to Costa Rica for a couple of weeks, let’s say that we go in May, we start in January, you know I give you a species list, you know, here are some of the creatures you’re going to see: sloth, white faced capuchin, spider monkey. And so the students have to learn the animals we’re going to see. Here’s some of the habitat’s that you’ll see of the animals, here’s their behavior, here’s what they eat, here’s some of the trees you’ll find them in. And so students learn all these things and how all that works. What the rainforest is. Here’s wire rainforest. See that stuff is online. That way when we set foot in the country and point up in the tree, it’s like “OK, you guys already learned that this is an cecropia tree. What kind of birds do you see in the cecropria?” Hopefully, they’ll think back, “I remember toucan like cecropia, and I remember sloths like this.” So they’ll be able to piece things together they’ve already learned and then see them for real. That would be kinda how we do an online course. So there would have to be a real component, because most sciences have a lab component. It would just be an online course with the lab component at the end, and a big field trip.

ME: Do you have a unique story about going out and studying wildlife that you would like to share?

MOHR: Ah, man. I’ve got so many unique stories. One to share, umm. I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of unique stories. A lot of fun stories, going out and catching stuff. I mean, I’ve been diving with manta rays; caught a whole bunch of different snakes. Um, been lobster diving, swimming with penguins in the Galapagos. I don’t know, there’s a whole bunch of unique stories. I can’t think of just one that’s any cooler than the rest though. They’re all kind of just fun get out there and see stuff.

ME: What’s the rarest animal that you’ve ever seen?

MOHR: The rarest animal I ever seen is a lizard I caught while I was in Costa Rica. It was only the third time the lizard has been caught by humans. It was the third one ever caught, so it was pretty rare. It’s a arboreal lizard, which means it spends most of its time in the canopy, up in the top of the trees. [Which is] one of the reasons it’s so hard to catch. It’s awesome, this lizard falls and hits the ground right in front of me, and I run up, and it starts running to the tree, and I run up and I grab it, and I look at like “What in the world!” And I get back, and I look through the field guides that you know show you, and I could not find, I could not find, I could not find, and I talked to some other people and they’re like “I’ve never seen it before,” and finally we found an obscure thing that said this is such and such lizard. The type specimen was caught in this research station years ago. And the type specimen is the first time its ever been caught. That’s what a type specimen is. And it said that one other one had been caught. And so, I was the third time that this critter had ever been caught.

So that was kind of neat to have a lizard that was probably, and if you consider native peoples you know catching it, maybe half a dozen people have ever held this lizard before. Maybe less, maybe native people have never held the lizard before. I don’t know. So to be a human that has seen and captured an animal that I don’t know maybe less than ten people in the world have, I’m sure native people have caught it and were like “I don’t know what this [is],” and let it go. But to be one of three scientists to every catch an animal is pretty, pretty cool.

One other neat experience that I’ve had is at Table Rock State Park I caught a ringneck snake. Which I measured, and is the world’s largest ringneck snake. So, I hold the record for the world’s largest ringneck snake. Up until that point the largest was eighteen and a half inches, which wasn’t that big. But the one that I caught was twenty and a half, and missing part of its tail, so it was even bigger than that. So that was kind of neat. I always joke with people that I’ve caught the world’s largest ringneck snake, which is only twenty inches, but still it’s the world’s largest. That’s kind of a fun thing.

ME: Are they only native to this area?

MOHR: They’re native all over the U.S. So I just happened to have the largest one ever, so. There’s different species in the U.S., but this is an eastern ringneck. So, it’s cool to say I’ve caught the largest one ever. I took some photographs of it, let it go, so it’s still out there. Could be larger now, who knows.

ME: So is there anything else that you would like to share?

MOHR: Not really. You’ve asked some good questions. I have a lot of stories if you talk to students in my classes. One of the ways I teach is through stories. To tell students about this type of moss, and then to show them a picture and to say I was in Peru where I caught this type of moss, and I’ve got pictures of me in Peru taking this type of moss and squishing it, and showing the students. On my trips I often take videos and pictures of stuff to use in my classes. Some I’m constantly thinking about [it]. I never get far away from my work, but people say, and its true to a large extent, that if you do something you love, you’ll actually never work a day in your life. And in many ways I do feel that way like that. I feel like at Southern Wesleyan I’ve been blessed to be here. And its really a great feeling to walk into a class and teach students about something I actually love. I mean you hear all the time, people like “I can’t wait till Friday,” and I don’t feel like that. It’s fun.

It’s what I do in my spare time. I’ll go walk around the woods and take a picture of an animal, and talk to people about it in my class. So I am blessed, and I think students really need to spend some time in college thinking about those things. A lot of students come into college and they’ve got ideas of money. You know, I want to get a job that will make some money, and that’s what I’m going to do. And the problem is we all need money. I mean you can’t get around that and current today’s society works on money. Sometimes, especially students I see in the sciences, they want to be a doctor because they make a lot of money. But they don’t have that passion to be a doctor, and I think some of these guys will get burned out. And some of them way before they even make it to be a doctor.

If you don’t have the passion to be a doctor studying about mitosis or meiosis and genetics and everything to get there, you don’t have the passion anymore to study. And so those students generally don’t do well in my class, because the passion is not there. One of the things I do for my students when they’re in my intro classes, I’ll have them write down their name, their major, and what their passion is and what their dreams are. Because I want them to think about their dreams and then think about their career and see how close they are.

ME: Do any students ever leave after this?

MOHR: I’ve had them leave and go to other majors, and I’m fine with that. One of my duties at a school such as SWU is to do what I feel God’s called me [to do], but also to help you grow, and to do what you feel God’s called you to do. If you sit down in this chair here in my office and you’re one of my bio majors, and you say “I’ve never felt like I should be a bio major, I’ve always thought I should be something else,” my job is that if you feel God pulling on your heart that you should listen to that. I’m not trying to keep them a biology major, I’d like to see them develop. I mean you could log into the web page at SWU, and if you get on the front web page, as soon as you look at the web page it talks about everything that we do. “A faith filled community, dedicated to inventive learning, a Christ centered…” And I think if you are following what God is calling you to do, he’s going to provide for you a way to make money, and have a life, and those kind of things.

I mean you’ve got be reasonable with it like anything in life. Jesus says several times “Have I not taken care of the sparrows? Has My Father not taken care of the flowers in the field? You’re so much more important. Of course I’m going to take care of you.” But you can’t just sit on the street corner and say, “I’m going to be a movie star,” and not do anything to become a movie star. And then if you start doing, you know, going to auditions and you’re not making it, not making it, not making it, then I think it’s time to start praying “Is this my dream or is this God’s dream,” right? And then if it turns in to be more of your dream, well maybe that’s why you’re struggling a little bit. Maybe you’ve got to look a little more to what God is telling you to do. And I feel without a doubt that He’s called me to teach students about the world around them, and help mentor students whether it’s med school or environmental consulting, or something else. I feel that’s where I need to be. So I love it. I love doing what I’m doing.