By Peter Monaghan

When you eat what you study, it pays to be discerning.

John A. Marzluff, an expert on birds in the corvid family, can attest to the pleasure of dining on crow. Once, after having tried roadkill deer, elk, and moose that he had collected for trapping or feeding ravens, the University of Washington professor of forest resources came upon a recently car-felled crow, and ate that, too. "It is very good to eat crow, you know," he says. "Especially with a fine merlot. Really, it is good—rich, exotic, not too gamey."

Giant squid, it turns out, does not treat the palate so well. Clyde F.E. Roper ate a chunk of one, once. In 1973 Mr. Roper, now a curator emeritus at the National Museum of Natural History, found a rare specimen of the mysterious sea creature. Up to 60 feet long, with unblinking eyes each the size of a human head, and huge, grasping tentacles, the animal hardly encourages consumption. This one was some days dead. Still, Mr. Roper and a colleague cooked a chunk of the hoary cephalopod and ate it, or tried. It tasted strongly of ammonia.

An equally unwise taste test wafts off the pages of Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe (University of Chicago Press, 1990). There, the paleontologist R. Dale Guthrie reported that he and colleagues once made a stew from the neck of an extinct steppe bison that had been frozen for 36,000 years into the Alaskan permafrost. "The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma," Mr. Guthrie wrote.

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Norbert Wu, Minden Pictures

Sea moths are lovely to look at, but they make lousy tea, says one scientist.

Norbert Wu, Minden Pictures

Sea moths are lovely to look at, but they make lousy tea, says one scientist.

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Aurora Photos

Red colobus monkey: Preferred by chimps and Pygmies alike.

Aurora Photos

Red colobus monkey: Preferred by chimps and Pygmies alike.

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Aurora Photos

Atlantic puffin: "Delicious" and oh so cute.

Aurora Photos

Atlantic puffin: "Delicious" and oh so cute.

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Worbert Nu, Minden Pictures

Giant squid: Tastes of ammonia

Worbert Nu, Minden Pictures

Giant squid: Tastes of ammonia

Field biologists might wisely forgo such culinary curiosities, but many say an ethos of field research almost requires that they see what the quarry of their scholarship tastes like. Trevor Price, a renowned expert on bird speciation, learned about that early in his career, while studying puffins in the Faroe Islands. The University of Chicago evolutionary biologist recalls that islanders harvested the adorable seabirds for meat, and so did he and his colleagues. "Puffin tasted delicious," he says.

A scholar in the field does have to eat, and so do local inhabitants, who are often experts in the trimmings. Mr. Price recalls a colleague who studied accentor birds in the Pyrenees: "Whenever he discussed the birds with the locals, he would be simply informed of the best kind of sauce to go with them."

Adobo, suggests John Demboski.

The curator of vertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science says that the vinegar-based marinade was favored in research camps in the Philippines. "Much of wild cuisine was prepared adobo style: rat adobo, bat adobo, python adobo, served over rice," he says.

"And it usually didn't taste like chicken."

He notes: "All of these were 'leftover' meat thrown into a stew or ramen noodles after preparing specimens for museum collections. We have always had a 'nothing goes to waste' philosophy in the field, and this was routinely enforced by the consumption of alcohol at dinnertime."

Well, would you eat huhu, sober?

Huhu is what New Zealand's Maori people call the prized larvae of a large, wood-boring beetle, Prionoplus reticularis. John S. Edwards, an emeritus University of Washington biologist who has advocated entomophagia—eating insects—ever since he began munching on huhu while doing master's work, says mature larvae are "index-finger size, soft-bodied, and juicy with a creamy veal taste. They are fine raw but better sautéed and lightly salted, with a nice dry sherry."

He cautions, however, that while butterfly or moth larvae are eaten widely in Africa and Indonesia, some are toxic. "They are OK," he says, "if they are not hairy, and do not warn of their nastiness with bright red, yellow, and black colors."

He waxes epicurean about crunchy, sautéed crickets and grasshoppers, and calls ants a delicacy. "With their formic acid they are little quanta of sweet-and-sour," Mr. Edwards says, "but you have to be careful to avoid a bite or sting on the tongue."

In some states, conflict-of-interest laws bar researchers from home packing or eating the species they study. That left Wayne A. Palsson wondering how he would taste-test one of his study subjects, the pegasid. Also known as sea moths, pegasids are Indo-Pacific fish two to six inches long, with armored bodies and winglike pectoral fins. They look like stepped-on pipefish and are used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat respiratory ailments and cancers.

"I purchased some sea moths in a Chinese apothecary and brewed them up in a tea," says Mr. Palsson, a research scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The results? "Yuck!"

In fact he discourages eating pegasids because they and other sea creatures that are considered medicinal, including sea horses, are threatened by overfishing.

In many cases, field scientists' reservations probably have more to do with overcoming cultural expectations of what is good to eat, or just common sense about what is safe.

As part of his research on the chimpanzee diet, food preferences, and the nutritional value of cooked versus raw food, Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist has gone beyond the call of duty. During his many years of research into chimpanzees, he sampled left-behind samples of one of their favorite morsels, the colobus monkey. Raw.

Mr. Wrangham, who recently published Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009), says that he sought to get inside the nature of the chimp.

You can assist his research, when next swinging through a jungle canopy. While chimps prefer the red colobus to the black-and-white, as do Pygmies in the Congo, Mr. Wrangham couldn't taste any difference, himself. Later he realized that the noxious taste might be in the skin, in fatty deposits there. "So if I get a chance to eat them again," he says, "I'll chew the skin."