My descent into Madness (March Mammal Madness, that is)

“I’ve been lied to my whole life!” This was the exclamation I heard from my office as my wife and kids worked on completing their March Mammal Madness (MMM) brackets on the Thursday leading up to the March 10th wildcard match. My wife was doing some research for the aardvark vs. bandicoot matchup. This was her first introduction to an actual bandicoot, which previously she had only experienced as a child through the Crash Bandicoot video games of the late 90s. Far from the danger-loving, fearless character in video games, the real organism, her research showed, is a cute, shy, mostly nocturnal marsupial. Although she ended up choosing the aardvark, the preconception of bandicoots as anthropomorphic adventurers made it difficult.

I’m sure that moments like this are common with players young and old, new to the tournament or seasoned veterans. March Mammal Madness, now in its 13th year and used by thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students in about half of all US counties, is the highlight of my spring. I stumbled upon the tournament for the first time halfway through the 2016 season and immediately knew I had found my people. The nerdy trash-talking combined with factoids about animal behavior, ecology, evolution, and genetics is peak edutainment for me and many other science teachers, students, and curious learners. In the following years, I slowly began to incorporate the tournament into my spring semester biology courses to make learning about evolution and ecology more interesting and engaging for my students. From their shouts of anger at the honey badger falling in the 2017 championship match to the squees of delight every time the pygmy hippo chalked up a W in 2018, I knew that there was something that rang true in the MMM slogan: “If you’re learning, you’re winning!”

I’ve talked to many teachers across the country who incorporate March Mammal Madness into their courses to different degrees. While some use the great lesson plans provided in the event's LibGuide, I have also seen math teachers who use the tournament as an opportunity to teach about statistics and probability, elementary teachers who have their students learn about biomes by making postcards for a selected combatant, middle school teachers who have their students make Pokemon style trading cards for the combatants, and many other levels of integration. For me, the tournament was a way to build a culture in my classroom that revolved around getting students curious and excited about biology and environmental science.

What began as simply having my students complete brackets and discuss the results of the previous day’s matches eventually led to former students coming back year after year to pick up brackets even after they had graduated and incoming students looking forward to the tournament having been initiated by older siblings who had taken my class. Eventually, most of the school became involved after hearing students talk about the tournament in other classes and seeing the bracket in the hallway outside my classroom. Overhearing a heated discussion in the cafeteria between my principal and one of the physical education teachers about whether a vampire squid could defeat a yeti crab is probably one of the funniest and most surreal moments of my time on lunch duty.

One of my favorite March Mammal Madness resources is the Phylogeny of Contestants. Every year, a phylogenetic tree of the 65 combatants is created showing the evolutionary relatedness of the tournament pool. This has been compiled into an ever-growing tree of life that includes all combatants from the past. I have used this as a way to teach my students how to read and interpret phylogenetic trees using organisms that they are actually invested in because they are familiar with them from the tournament. I have also used current phylogenies from the year of the tournament to assess students’ understanding of phylogeny. What could be a dry, boring assessment task becomes interesting once the students start recognizing species that they rooted for, or against, weeks before in the tournament. Call-backs like this are easy to insert into any lesson about evolution, ecology, or environmental science because the creators of the tournament are thorough in citing relevant scientific literature about the combatants, their habitats, and threats to the species. Lessons that used to be hard to connect to students’ interest are made relevant by substituting in organisms, places, and situations that they had learned about during the matches.

(You can read how other teachers are celebrating MMM with their students here!)

This year, the tournament features a whole division titled “Same & Different” which contains organisms that exhibit different convergent traits such as the evolution of grass eating, fig eating, grub digging, and gliding. This aligns with NCSE’s activity Nature’s Doppelgangers which features some of the diggers and gliders along with other examples of convergent evolution. Additionally, NCSE’s new evolution Story Short The Origin (and Conservation) of a Species features an investigation of what a species is and whether the Alabama sturgeon should be classified as a unique species. Although the Starry sturgeon in this year’s tournament is a different species, the connection may be of interest to teachers and students. There is no wrong way to incorporate March Mammal Madness into a science classroom, whether it’s just discussing the matches with students, or creating lessons or assessment activities based on the tournament. Have fun, be creative, ask students what they would like to explore and find a way to connect it to the standards and content you are teaching!

I could go on and on with stories about March Mammal Madness, like the first (and only) time I ever had a student flip a desk in my classroom because his chosen champion, the markhor, lost in the first round to the tiny tenrec. Or the fact that my wife STILL complains about her chosen champion, the elephant, losing to the bee in round one. Whether followers of the tournament are angry, sad, joyous, braggadocious, or fawning with adoration, the fact is they are ENGAGED! They are engaged with science in a way that is rarely seen in today’s society, where science can be viewed as elitist or as some kind of political tool.

In this way, the goals of March Mammal Madness closely align with the vision of NCSE which is that one day, students of all ages will be scientifically literate; teachers will be prepared and empowered to teach accurate science; and scientific thinking and decision-making will ensure all life can thrive and overcome challenges to our shared future. This is why NCSE was proud to collaborate with Katie Hinde and the rest of the March Mammal Madness team this year.