Endangered Species—Endangered Science
By Christopher Mims
"In Serra Leoa, there
lives a kind of monkey not found elsewhere in Guinea;
they are called daris, and have no tail, and if they
were not hairy it would be possible to declare that
they were human like ourselves…"
—Andre Alvares de Almada, 1594
In the 1590s, a Sao-Tiago-born Luso-African trader by the name of de Almada introduced the beast now known as the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) to the annals of recorded history. In excerpts of a treatise published in a Jesuit monograph, which was translated into English for the first time only in 1984, he recorded the habits of creatures "so clever that if they happen to be captured when young and are brought up in a house, they go to the river to seek water and bring it back in a pot on their head." In 1625, British sailor Andrew Battell recounted his impressions of the same animal (alongside a host of other "monsters") in what is believed to be the first English account of the chimpanzee, in a book entitled Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, by Samuel Purchas.
De Almada and Battell lived at the dawn of an age of discovery. The desire for profit pushed the French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Portuguese to the ends of the Earth in search of new lands and new opportunities for trade and exploitation. It was an era in which, as some naturalists romanticize it, explorers couldn't turn over a rock or look into the canopy without discovering a new family on the tree of life.
This excitement about the vast biological potential of terra incognita, those same "white spaces" on the map that thrilled a young Joseph Conrad and sent him sailing round the world, inspired the dawn of a new sort of natural philosophy. Just as the Greeks classified rhetoric, and Ptolemy the stars, scientists of the day bowed to the instinct to categorize the new life forms revealed in the fanciful accounts of early explorers.
In spite, or perhaps because of, all the excitement, taxonomy remained a hodge podge of anecdotal accounts of the kind published by de Almada and Battell for some 150 years. In the mid-18th century, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish-born naturalist and father of the "binomial system of nomenclature," or the convention of a two-part name for every species, set down in his Systema Natura what was then known of the plant and animal world. (To the chimpanzee, he gave the poetic but later suppressed appellation Simia satyrus.)
In the 150 years that followed, with its peak during the Victorian era, taxonomy reigned supreme among the biological sciences. Vast collections of specimens accrued to the museums of Europe, the largest among them residing in Britain's Museum of Natural History and Kew Royal Botanical Gardens. Type specimens were dried, pickled, or stuffed, and then named, catalogued, and largely forgotten. Systematists, as they're also known, squirreled away samples of the bulk of Earth's diversity and then left it to gather dust. Technology advanced and the modern reconception of organisms as molecular machines pushed taxonomy right off the stage.
Aliens Among Us
This isn't to say that new species aren't still uncovered,
even in relatively well-studied groups. John Dumbacher,
a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Zoo
who made a name for himself by serendipitously discovering
the first poisonous bird known to science (the well-studied
pitohui birds of New Guinea), now believes that what
ornithologists once believed was a single species of
his famous pitohui is in fact three.
"The genetic data very clearly split them into three groups," said Dumbacher, whose data may also help explain how, in a process known as Mullerian mimicry, poisonous birds around the island came to look like one another—an evolutionary advertising campaign that perhaps more effectively alerts predators to avoid their kind.
Phylogenetic hair splitting aside, organisms wholly new to science also appear with some regularity. One hot day last July, a New York Times article sported the headline "A New Kind of New Yorker." The native in question, an inch-long centipede found in the leaf litter of Central Park, set off a media firestorm owing to the fact that the last time scientists found a new species in New York City, Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House.
Richard Hoffman, an entomologist at the Virginia Natural History Museum, examined the centipede before sending it to an Italian colleague who promptly declared it new to science and named it for Hoffman (Nannarrup hoffmani). In contrast to the Times' excitement, Hoffman remained unimpressed. "Talk about a tempest in a teapot! The media have gone berserk with this stupid centipede: You'd think we had a cure for cancer or AIDS," he wrote in an email correspondence. Hoffman isn't belittling the accomplishment. He's pointing out what too few in the media, and presumably the public, know: "That a new genus turned up in Central Park is simply a reflection of how little we still know."
Fifteen thousand new species appear in the scientific literature every year, and yet we have documented only something between two and 13 percent of all the things alive on Earth today. We don't know how many are yet to be discovered to within an order of magnitude. By best estimates, humankind has catalogued 1.75 million species, or 12 million fewer than the proposed total.
Insects represent two-thirds of all named species on Earth, outnumbering the next most diverse group by a factor of ten, and in so doing grant entomology the title of most prolific disgorger of new finds. Explorers questing after big game come in last place, having to settle for the discovery of a new species of large mammal once every three years, and a new large vertebrate from the open ocean every five.
Even the roots of the tree of life are not immune to the steady flow of revelations. In the late1970s, scientists were blown away by the discovery, via DNA sequence analysis, that the Archea (formerly grouped in with bacteria) represented a whole new domain of life, bringing to three the divisions of highest classification (into Eukaryota, Eubacteria, and Archaea). In 1995, Reinhardt Kristensen and Peter Funch found a new phylum living on the mouthparts of the Norway lobster. The phylum is currently made up of Symbion pandor—a tiny epizoite (an organism that lives on the surface of another living creature) with a complicated life cycle and bizarre body plan—and its discovery brought the number of known animal phyla to 34. Within Archaea, many of which live in difficult-to-study habitats (for example, miles below the Earth's surface), new phyla are discovered at the rate of one a month.
By comparison, about 15,000 newly documented species appear in the scientific literature every year. A new large mammal is documented once every three years. A large vertebrate from the open ocean every five years. An entirely new phyla is discovered once a month.
Scientists have named about 80 percent of all the plants
and large animals on Earth. Unfortunately, these taxa
represent only a tiny fraction of our home planet's
biodiversity. As for the rest, we have cataloged only
ten percent of all living insects, 20 percent of fungi,
and less than one percent of all bacteria and viruses.
If biologists are right about what is still only conjecture,
and every species of multicellular life big enough to
be visible to the naked eye has endemic to it at least
one species of parasitic nematode, protozoan, bacterium,
or virus, it could send species counts through the roof
.
According to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould,
there are more species alive right now than there have
ever existed at any other time on Earth. So why, when
faced with a diversity so vast, and an extinction rate
so catastrophic, are we recording and analyzing Earth's
diversity at a pace so leisurely that it will take nearly
600 years to complete even a preliminary catalog of
life?
The Taxonomic Impediment
Taxonomists are the workhorses of species collection
and identification. When a biologist finds an organism
she believes to be new, she brings in an expert, or
mails the sample to one of the few people in the world
who can, like a patent clerk buried in the annals of
mother nature's inventiveness, search the literature
and tell her if she's right. Even after a species has
been recognized as new, it can take years of comparison
and study to identify where it belongs on the tree of
life. It's tedious, difficult work that requires enormous
patience and equally generous hoards of experience and
knowledge. Without taxonomists, cataloguing new species
would be impossible.
Yet the Invertebrate Conservation Trust, a nonprofit organization based in the United Kingdom, concluded that, "Systematic biology is virtually dead." Scientists in the field have euphemistically dubbed this phenomenon the Taxonomic Impediment. The term encompasses many issues, but the most obvious to outsiders is the paltry, and dwindling, number of taxonomists.
This decline has been ongoing since the 1950s, and calls-to-arms have been sounding for at least that long. Meanwhile, even the last bastions of systematics research, nonuniversity institutions like the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the United Kingdom's Museum of Natural History and Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, are cutting staff. According to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (or ITIS), NMNH alone has lost 30 federal science positions over the last ten years—most of these in taxonomy. Currently in Britain, an estimated 1,400 professional conservators care for humanities' collections, while fewer than 20 safeguard natural history collections.
Taxonomists' inability to thrive resembles the tales of woe befalling the endangered species they are often called upon to identify. Thanks to a loss of habitat (on average, the number of university positions reserved for taxonomists halves every year) and a failure to reproduce (no one wants to get a Ph.D. in a discipline that offers virtually no employment opportunities), taxonomists, and all their art, are slowly going extinct. A 1990 survey revealed that 63 percent of taxonomists were over 46 and only eight percent under 35, inspiring one wit to observe, "if the same demographic trends were found in a newly discovered lemur, specimens would be brought into a zoo and a captive breeding program initiated."
Hoffman, our reluctantly famous centipede specialist, agrees. "Here's a prediction," he offered, "In 25 years, there will be no more museum or university research in taxonomy. Museums will become static dead tombs, sealed in nitrogen, with all taxonomy done by amateurs. We'll have come full circle to the 18th century, and society will no longer support professional taxonomy."
In a way, the slow erosion of human capital in taxonomy is merely a symptom of its unshakable association with the Victorian era in which it thrived. Pure, old-fashioned observational taxonomy is very much an antique science, perhaps the only one remaining that requires the same techniques and predispositions it demanded of Charles Darwin, who devoted eight years of his life to a four-volume study of barnacles.
"What we need is good old-fashioned 18th-century taxonomy," said Hoffman, dismissing the usefulness of advanced techniques of genetic sequence analysis when applied to previously unknown species. "That's the way knowledge progresses, we go in and do the trenchwork first. We can't skip over it. Someone's got to get the raw material into a form in which it can be cataloged and examined in detail."
It is the seemingly inescapable nature of preliminary work in taxonomy—the rude, repetitive struggle to simply get samples into collections and form hypotheses about the phylogenetic history of the novel ones—that escapes outside observers. The public and funding bodies alike tend to view taxonomy as boring, unimportant, and obsolete; the purview of graying dinosaurs pouring over dusty graveyards of disintegrating specimens (which, in a double irony, the field is fast becoming). Belying this, the NMNH adds almost half a million new specimens a year to its collection, according to the museum's Scott Miller, writing in the journal Science.
Nor do funding bodies grasp that taxonomic research cannot be experimental science as Western civilization has come to worship it. Just this year a special committee on the crisis on taxonomy reported to the British Parliament that "many systematic biologists view the Research Councils' funding policies as contributing to the demise of systematic biology. In particular some systematic biologists felt that it was difficult to obtain this funding, primarily because the Research Councils do not understand that systematic research cannot always be framed as an hypothesis."
Taxonomists have countered this negative stereotyping by arguing that their field is an "enabling science," like star surveys and the Human Genome Project, both of which amass war chests far in excess of the scraps occasionally thrown to systematics researchers. The U.K. Research Council's rejoinder was that, unlike the enabling sciences previously cited, "alpha taxonomy [naming and describing species] is ‘unusual' in that there are not users out there clamouring for significant increases in alpha taxonomy."
Deliverables and Other 21st
Century Conceits
Ninety percent of described species have never been
included in regional accounts of biotas, identification
manuals, or modern monographs. Thus, 90 percent of the
output of taxonomists is for the consumption of other
taxonomists, and appears only in low-circulation journals
hidden away in specialist libraries. Rarely has taxonomic
research resulted in the kind of attractive (that is,
accessible and useful) "deliverables" that grant-making
bodies demand of applicants.
What's more, many of the "new" species that taxonomists describe are not after all new. Estimates of synonymy rates range as high as one-third of all new species described every year. (On average, every organism has been given two "official" or synonymous names, and in the case of plants, the average climbs to five.)
In part, these issues are due to the headaches inherent in taxonomic work. Every reference to a species must acknowledge its first christening in print, no matter how ambiguous or unhelpful that centuries-old manuscript may be. On average, taxonomists spend one fifth of their time searching collections and literature. As their ranks thin and extant researchers are forced to shoulder new burdens, such as grant writing, teaching, curation, and administrative tasks, the amount of time available for research has shrunk to the same proportion, about 20 percent.
Worse, funding priorities, as well as the predispositions of taxonomists, have skewed the distribution of taxonomists across kingdoms. There is one plant taxonomist for every 366 species of plants, but only one viral taxonomist for every 5,000 viruses, and one mycologist for every 3,000 species of fungi. These trends hold true for every "attractive" and "unattractive" taxa; there are, for example, too many vertebrate taxonomists and too few entomologists, relative, of course, to the size of the groups.
Finally, the legacy of an imperial past is that taxonomists aren't deployed where the species are. Only about six percent of the world's scientists live in those countries that house 80 percent of the Earth's biodiversity.
In Search of a Killer App
None of this would matter if taxonomy were merely the
satisfaction of its practitioners' obsessive philatelist
leanings. Indeed, few would be aware, and fewer still
would care, that the accumulated knowledge of generations
might stop being passed from scientists to students,
if it weren't for the fact that conservation is so dependent
on taxonomy.
For reasons of convenience, the species is the de facto unit of biodiversity. The species is also the de facto object of study in taxonomy. Biodiversity is what conscientious humans worldwide wish to conserve, and so to accomplish conservation we must study biodiversity—and that can't happen without taxonomy.
Out of necessity, governments and non-governmental conservation organizations have begun to attempt the resurrection of taxonomy. They are demanding that the nearly comatose discipline accomplish what has rarely, if ever, been attempted—comprehensive surveys of whole ecosystems. According to E.O. Wilson, "fewer than one percent of named species have been subject to the kind of careful biological studies needed to undergird ecology and conservation biology." If taxonomic records are, by analogy, the map of our DNA extracted by the Human Genome Project, then the interpretation of that data for assessments of biodiversity constitutes the Earth's proteome (the proteome comprises all of the protein molecules that are coded for by the genome). By adding this extra layer of description, taxonomists can help to inform the value judgments made by conservation policymakers.
Taxonomy Goes Big Science
It is with this imperative in mind that many international,
national, subnational, and one-person crusades have
been launched. Collectively, these groups aim to bring
to heel the staggering load of information present in
the sum of all life on Earth. Their task is not unlike
that faced by computer scientists at the European supercollider
CERN, who must cogitate mightily in order to create
a system that won't drown researchers in data.
The solution has so far been more grass roots than a great leap forward. Institutions all over the world are racing to make their data available in the only place where everyone can access it: the Internet. The Netherlands recently put all of their type specimens online, complete with digital pictures (a type specimen is the original example of an organism, to which all subsequent references must compare). Mexico has its CONABIO database; Australia has its ERIN system, exceptional because it integrates species with geographical data, allowing researchers to examine distributions and changes through time.
At the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History we have EMu—the Electronic Museum—a first attempt to put the world's largest collection of biological specimens online. This galaxy-eating leviathan will catalog the museum's 125 million items; however, funding limitations dictate that only 5.5 million will make it into the first iteration of the program. This information will be integrated in novel ways, for instance via live-mapping functions that place different kinds of data in a single geographic context.
The federal government runs its own racket, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS), a partnership between the Smithsonian, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies, which recently paired with the Species 2000 database to form the Catalogue of Life. As the name implies, the Catalogue of Life is a grandiose attempt to encompass the whole enchilada. By directly linking to nearly every species database on the web through common protocols and systems that extract data from natural-language sources, Species 2000 has succeeded in making available half the catalog of known species through a single portal. Many of the databases that it relies upon for data, such as Fishbase and Antbase, were begun and maintained by university professors, and exist solely on the good will of the organizations that shelter them.
Yet not even the Catalogue of Life can compare to the monumental (by virtue of technical savvy) All Species Foundation. Founded in 2000 by a consortium of San Francisco new-economy types (including Stewart Brand, founder of the online community known as the Well, and Kevin Kelley, a founder and now editor-at-large of Wired magazine), this organization has managed to forge a dozen scattered databases into a single Jovian implement.
The Foundation's goals are much bigger than simply building the biggest database of species that has ever existed. In its original charter, it aimed to do nothing less than catalog all Earth's species within a single generation (25 years) by using technology to accelerate the pace of new-species discovery. These technologies include three-dimensional digital imaging of specimens, artificial-intelligence systems for sorting data and comparing samples, and new uses of genetic sequence data.
Unfortunately, when the tech bubble burst, the All Species Foundation's hopes of riding the new-economy gravy train hit the skids. "We have been pleased with our ability to garner partners," said Julia Berger, Director of Special Projects at the All Species Foundation, in reference to their agreements with Species 2000 and the National Science Foundation (NSF). "But we've not been as pleased about the current economic environment in terms of ability to raise funds."
Despite being in a holding pattern, the All Species Foundation has managed, through its media savvy and sensational goals, to bring a modest amount of attention to the crisis in taxonomy. In this capacity, it has perhaps accomplished the most, because without fundamental changes in the way that all institutions supporting taxonomy do business, no amount of technology will save the field.
"There needs to be kind of a real sea change in institutions and academia to value taxonomy. It's only going to happen through education, and it's not going to happen overnight," said Berger.
Solutions
The National Science Foundation, long the only place
to garner funding for projects with limited sex appeal,
has not been deaf to the low drone of dissatisfaction
issuing from those close to the field. Responding in
the only substantive way possible (with money), the
NSF set up the Partnerships in Enhancing Expertise in
Taxonomy (PEET).
Matthew Hooge, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Maine, is a typical PEET participant. He's everything the government wants to encourage, everything that's lacking in the current corpus of taxonomy: He's young, he's an expert in a little-studied group, and he's making his work accessible to the public and other researchers via computerized databases and the web. In conjunction with his advisor, Seth Tyler, he's also working on new techniques for examining the strange animals he calls a life's work: Interstitial meiobenthic fauna, or tiny organisms that make their home in between grains of sand on the bottoms of lakes, rivers, and oceans worldwide.
By infusing his worms with fluorescent dies and illuminating them under laser light, Hooge has managed to generate impressions of an invisible universe littered with other-worldly beauty. "We've been able to correlate what we've found using morphological characteristics, with patterns of muscles, with molecular work we've done," said Hooge, who uses the images he generates to determine the relatedness of different meiobenthic nematodes. "We're essentially trying to concentrate on the old-school way of homology analysis."
At the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, Paula Depriest uses her PEET grant, one of several at the museum, to explore the phylogeny of an equally neglected branch of the tree of life. "Even among fungi, it's a small group that studies lichens," said Depriest. Her work on the Cladoniaceae, which includes the British soldier lichen, so called because their red caps resemble those of King George III's troops, has taken her and her students to Paris and Uppsula, Sweden, in search of type specimens. In examining these fungus/algae symbiotes, they have used DNA sequencing technology, microsatellites, phylogenetic analysis, and statistical analyses of population and community-level data to reveal such subtleties as the lack of codiversification of fungus and algae partners. "Fungi are picky about which algae they form a symbiosis with. They can shop around in the environment for whichever seems to work best."
Despite the success, scientists have had in using PEET grants to generate monographs, disseminate taxonomic data via the world wide web, and train students, the program's greatest weakness is that, as a limited-term grant, it ends. "The PEET program is another example of federal shortsightedness," said Hoffman. "Why get five years in taxonomy of some group if, afterwards, there's no hope of a job?" "It's not about how many systematists we place in the next generation, but how we keep this field vital," demurred Depriest. "Of the students we trained, maybe only one will ultimately have a job like mine. But we will have four or five students that think that systematics is an OK thing to do; who might advise their students to do this…. Hopefully some will become grant funders."
Either way, PEET remains a drop in the bucket, a few percent of all the money spent on taxonomy in North America. Increasingly, taxonomists and their parent institutions are coming to realize that if they want to carry on, they need new sources of funding and resources.
One creative solution, arrived at independently by both Patrons of Biodiversity (Biopat) in Germany and the Nature Discovery Fund in Canada, is to allow donors to have a new species named in their honor. Biopat has had more success, with nearly 80 patronages so far, including an orchid named for former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (Maxillaria gorbatschowii). By asking $2,600 per patronage, Biopat has managed to raise nearly $300,000. Even so, according to Joern Koehler, coordinator of Biota East Africa, "the real costs [of collecting and naming a new species] can be expected to be much higher than the amount provided by Biopat."
The Nature Discovery Fund in Canada, founded through a collaboration of the Canadian Museum of Nature and author Margaret Atwood, has so far only accepted 15 donations of $300 each. Caught in a funding catch-22, its member scientists are so busy with their own work that they haven't the extra time for working on the Nature Discovery Fund's pro bono assignments.
Some argue that the real solution lies not in throwing more money at taxonomists, who require $500,000 spread over ten years to become fully trained, but in training amateurs to take their place. Smithsonian scientists have taken to the idea, training and working with parataxonomists on projects in Papua New Guinea and in Gabon. The Smithsonian's Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program (MAB) in Gabon—a collaboration with Shell Gabon, Shell Foundation's Sustainable Energy Program, and Gabonese counterparts—is assessing the biodiversity of this rich biological area of Western Africa, and the environmental impact of industrial activities in Gabon's Gamba Complex. The complex holds Shell's primary oil reserves in Gabon.
Smithsonian entomologists Scott Miller and Yves Basset had worked with parataxonmists before Gabon and, with some 12,000 insects coming to the complex's processing center each week, it was decided that parataxonomists would b e essential personnel. Parataxonomists work alongside taxonomists, collecting, sorting, preserving, and analyzing plant and animal specimens. Of the insects processed each week at Gabon, approximately 600 specimens had to be prepared and stored. They recruited eight enthusiasts for the study, selecting local assistants with no prior experience. Intensive tutoring and full immersion indoctrinated these assistants into the world of insects and taxonomy.
Parataxonomists are typically trained in the field and subsequently do field and laboratory work locally, staying in touch with the scientists after they have returned to their home institutions. Parataxonomists often have knowledge of the local plants and animals from years of experience within their environment, something scientists often rely on and upon which they hope to build their own knowledge. So far, the Gabon team has identified 280,000 insects, and prepared some 13,000 specimens.
In East Africa, the National Museum of Namibia came up with a unique way to digitize its enormous collection of insects. It sponsored a contest, called Insect@thon, across dozens of grade schools for the team that could enter in the most data on its collections. The kids, many of whom had never touched a computer, received training and computers for their schools, while the museum accomplished a digitization effort that would have been impossible otherwise.
The Future
A comprehensive, universally accessible catalogue of
all extant taxonomic data may prove useful in ways now
only dimly glimpsed. Already, scientists at the San
Diego Supercomputing Center are linking taxonomic data
with models of geographic distribution in order to predict
where species are likely to live—even in areas
that have never been sampled except by satellites and
weather stations. Taxonomy's most starry-eyed boosters
imagine a future in which the entire genome of a new
species is sequenced in a single afternoon, and systematics
becomes a discipline dependent on comparing the DNA
of organisms rather than their bodies and habits.
In such an era, the vast untapped trove of species Mother
Earth has yet hidden from us will be probed via gene
sequencers and databases, algorithms and well-equipped
amateurs. The same tools now used to probe the DNA of
Linnaeus's Simia satyrus (chimpanzee) will
be used to uncover an assortment of creatures large
and small, many more wonderful and strange than even
the most outrageous phantasmagoria from the bestiaries
of de Almeda and Battel's age of discovery.
—Christopher Mims does freelance writing from his neurobiology lab bench at Emory University.
ZooGoer 32(3)
2003. Copyright 2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
