MEET THE FAMILIES — BIANCA NOGRADY
Australia’s undiscovered species and the race to find them
Each year in Australia as many as 1000 new species are named, but it’s the great tragedy of taxonomists to know that thousands more will vanish before they’re discovered. In a country where 70% of the flora and fauna remains completely unknown, BIANCA NOGRADY talks to those on the frontline about the thrills of and threats to the field.
IT’S A WARM SPRING DAY in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Whipbirds slash the air with their distinctive whip-crack mating call, competing with golden whistlers and a low-level insect buzz.
There’s an intense discussion going on about yellow.
“Processed cheddar yellow?”
“Yeah, like a Kraft single.”
“Egg yolk?”
“But you know the spectrum of egg yolks; yellow right through to orange? It certainly does have orange.”
It’s here I make my greatest – only – contribution to taxonomy. “It’s free-range-chookegg-yolk yellow.”
In the end, egg-yolk yellow wins the day.
We’re clustered around a plant by the side of a quiet road near the village of Mount Wilson. The tall bush is a riot of yellow flowers, and it’s the reason Dr Matt Renner has travelled all the way from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney today.
Renner is a taxonomist. He doesn’t look like what most people would imagine to be the part; the pith-helmeted, butterfly net-wielding adventurer of old. Granted, he is wearing sturdy walking boots and gaiters, but we’re supposed to be doing some bushbashing later – so that’s sensible.
The plant whose tiny egg yolk-yellow flowers he’s puzzling over is ostensibly the smooth bush-pea – Pultenaea glabra; a native pea found only in the Blue Mountains, and which is listed as Vulnerable on account of its limited distribution and threats from habitat loss and disturbance.
Except this plant is not Pultenaea glabra. Under the close scrutiny of someone with a keen eye for plant morphology, some key differences become apparent. The lack of hairy ovaries, for example, and the way the flowers on this plant erupt along the length of its branches rather than gather around the tip.
Splitting hairs? Perhaps, except the correct taxonomic classification of this plant – and possible identification of a new species of bush pea – could impact conservation decisions, and even influence development in the area.
Taxonomy is the starting point for all the biological sciences. Taxonomists draw the map that all life scientists use to navigate their way around the tree of life, says Dr Kevin Thiele, former curator of the West Australian Herbarium and director of Taxonomy Australia.
“Taxonomy produces the framework for understanding species and their relationships, that we can then use to ask – and hopefully answer – some of these big questions about the evolution of life on Earth,” he says. “Imagine being on a planet where you didn’t have any species with names or an understanding of what’s what and how they are related; you wouldn’t be able to see very far.”
It is by standing on the shoulders of taxonomists that other life scientists can see so far.
What they see has not just environmental and conservation implications. There are also significant economic implications; for example, in correctly identifying a potential new agricultural pest, conserving the habitat of a marine worm that is the main source of food for an important commercial fish species, or establishing which native mosquitoes might act as hosts for emerging human pathogens.
But taxonomy – like an increasing number of the species it works on – is under threat. This most fundamental of life sciences is largely invisible, forgotten and neglected. Funding is dwindling, and a generation of taxonomists is retiring with relatively few younger colleagues to pass their knowledge, wisdom and experience on to.
The museums, herbaria and institutions that house collections of Australian native flora and fauna – going back to specimens from Captain Cook’s first voyage to Australia – are racing time and a rising extinction rate to classify the estimated 70% of Australia’s native flora and fauna that still remains undiscovered, unnamed and undocumented.
The library is burning down, and we have only catalogued around 30% of the books in it.
INTO THE WILD
Dr Kym Abrams doesn’t often get out in the field, so it’s a particular treat when she gets to see her favourite insects – the schizomids, or whipsprickets – in the wild.
“We get a big pile of leaf litter, put it into a sifting tray, and then you sift through it,” says Abrams, a taxonomist at the University of Western Australia, and research associate at the WA Museum. “It’s lots of patiently looking and sorting; sometimes you can pick up 10 different bits of leaf litter and still not find anything you’re interested in, and other times you’re lucky and you get lots.”
Most people will go through their entire lives not knowing that, in the dark soil beneath their feet, the whip-spricket is hunting. Whip-sprickets are in the same family as spiders – the arachnids – and Abrams describes them as looking a bit like a cricket viewed side-on. When Australia was thickly forested more than 30 million years ago, they would have been found on the surface, but successive cycles of aridification over the millennia have driven them underground to protect their exoskeleton from drying out. Instead of eyes, they feel their way around with a pair of long, delicate front legs that they tap in front of them.
But don’t let their size and appearance fool you. “They’re tiny but they’re actually really fierce little hunters,” Abrams says. They tap-tap-tap around until they detect something that might be prey, then they freeze, and pounce.
Before June 2019, 53 species of whip-spricket had been identified and named in Australia. Then Abrams led a team studying whip-sprickets in WA’S Pilbara region. In an heroic taxonomic effort they discovered at least 56 new species. Worldwide, there are only around 350 known species of schizomid, so Australia can now lay claim to one-third of them.
In some ways, field work is the easy part. The hard work is the careful photographing, dissecting, analysing, preserving, documenting, researching, classifying and reporting of the many new discoveries that comes after the specimens have been collected in the wild.
Dr Bryan Lessard, also known as “Bry the Fly Guy”, is an insect taxonomist based at the Australian National Insect Collection at CSIRO in Canberra. His passion is – you guessed it – flies. “You think flies are really basic, and there’s one species that’s boring and black, and it spreads disease, but they are so biodiverse,” he says. “Once you put a fly under the microscope, you can see how beautiful these animals really are.”
Flies are also essential: if it wasn’t for them we would be knee-deep in decaying flesh. “The larvae, the maggots, they get a bad reputation but they’re really good at eating organic waste, and turning that into nutrients that can be used by other plants and fungus in the soil.”
Like so many other living organisms in Australia – particularly insects – relatively few flies have been taxonomically classified and named. Lessard alone has named 50 new species just of soldier flies and horse flies, and he’s only getting started. Like Abrams, he often goes out in the field armed with insect traps, collects as many specimens as he can find, then brings them back to the lab and tries to identify what he’s got under his microscope.
“We have identification guides, or taxonomic keys, that are kind of a step-by-step, ‘choose your own adventure’ to identify the species,” he explains. Does the fly have a pale yellow band on its leg? Yes? Okay, go to the next step. If this process lands on a known species, the newly-collected specimen is compared to the holotype of that species – the original specimen that the species description and name is based on – in the collection, to make sure.
If that fly doesn’t resemble anything else in the collection, a whole new adventure begins.
“You play a really scientific game of ‘spot the difference’, comparing how it’s different in its morphology – its appearance – to the species that have names,” Lessard says. “You might also even remove a leg and sequence the DNA of the new species to get a genetic fingerprint to identify it that way as well, and then you take high resolution images of the new species as well, so other people can identify it.”
Next, a scientific description is written up in a scientific paper and submitted for review by other independent experts in the field. If those experts agree with the assessment that this is indeed a new species, the paper is published and the new species makes its official debut. The whole process can take years.
With the current rate of new species discovery in Australia being around 1000 per year, Thiele estimates it would take Australian taxonomists more than four centuries to discover, classify, name and document all of Australia’s biodiversity. “That’s obviously not good enough,” he says.
OLD ARCHIVES, NEW TRICKS
While the traditional image of a taxonomist is someone who goes traipsing into the wild to collect hitherto undiscovered specimens, a significant amount of taxonomic discovery actually takes place in museums and collections. Some taxonomists have never laid eyes on a living specimen in the wild of a plant or creature they might have spent much of their life studying.
At CSIRO’S Australian National Herbarium in Canberra, Dr Ulf Swenson – a plant taxonomist from the Stockholm Museum of Natural History in Sweden – is visiting to delve into the herbarium’s extensive collection of plants from New Guinea – the largest of its kind outside New Guinea itself. Many of these dried, pressed samples were collected in the 1950s and 1960s.
In just one month riffling through the collection, he’s discovered 15 new species in the family Sapotaceae, a flowering plant that includes species from which shea butter and a type of latex are derived. Dr Brendan Lepschi, curator of the Australian National Herbarium, describes the collection as priceless, but worthless.
“You can’t sell this stuff,” he says. “They’re not actually worth anything – but in terms of the scientific record, it’s beyond price.
“It is a record of Australia’s biota over time and in space. You could go back to all these places and
“You play a really scientific game of ‘spot the difference’, comparing how it’s different to the species that have names”
collect the same things again, if they’re still there, but you can’t go back in time.”
Each ‘voucher’ – a set of dried, pressed, labelled samples – is an independently verifiable record for all time, says Matt Renner.
“That’s one of the beauties of herbarium specimens; anybody can access them and verify for themselves the inferences that have been made on that body of material.”
Computers and the internet have also revolutionised how taxonomic collections are used.
“When I started my career we did everything by hand,” says Dr Penny Berents, a marine taxonomist and senior fellow at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney, whose work has focused on tiny marine crustaceans called amphipods. “We wrote in big ledgers, we wrote on 3" x 5" cards, we wrote on labels, and everything was done manually.”
While this was the standard of the day, it made it difficult to search the collections. “If someone had said to us, ‘What lives in Sydney Harbour?’, you couldn’t do that other than flipping through 3" x 5" cards looking for ‘Sydney Harbour’.” In a collection that now numbers more than 20 million natural history specimens, to flick through each one would take approximately eight months.
With the information and communication technology revolution, taxonomic collections are now just a few clicks away. While this has made specimens more accessible, it has also increased the pressure on collections to be more comprehensive.
“In the old days, collections were solely based on the taxonomic group someone was working on, so if you had a person working on crabs, you’d have a good crab collection, but you wouldn’t have a good lobster or barnacle collection,” Berents says. “Once we had this accessibility of our collections, I felt that we really needed to have collections that were representative.”
Berents instituted annual field trips up and down the east coast of Australia, collecting as many specimens as possible, sorting them with the help of an army of trained volunteers, and incorporating the new finds into the Australian Museum’s collection. “The numbers of papers and species that have been described and documented as a result of those collections is actually quite amazing.”
The Australian Museum’s marine invertebrate collection now contains more than 511,000 specimens, making it one of the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. Even a single workshop on amphipods, which Berents and a colleague ran in 2005, documented 112 new species in a couple of weeks.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Naming approaches are one of the more delightful aspects of taxonomy, and one that regularly captures media attention. The first fly Bryan Lessard ever named was a rare golden-bottomed horse fly that he named in honour of American singer, songwriter and actor Beyoncé. The specimen of Scaptia beyonceae had been collected back in 1981, the year that the singer was born, but had sat, unnamed, in the collection until its shiny gilt abdomen caught Lessard’s eye during his PHD. “I wanted to do something playful and memorable for my first species, so I named it Beyoncé because I’m a massive fan,” he says. He did try to make contact with the star to let her know of the honour, but never received a formal response.
Kym Abram’s naming of new whip-spricket species is a nod to darker heroes, namely famous vampires in literature. The trend started when her colleague Mike Harvey named a newly-discovered schizomid Draculoides bramstokeri. Since then, she’s planning to name one “Nosferatu”, another “Claudia” in a nod to the young female vampire in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series. “They’re little predators that live in the dark,” she explains.
Apart from the rule that taxonomists can’t name a new species after themselves, the guidelines are pretty broad, says Dr Marco Duretto, manager of plant diversity and senior research scientist at The Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, and an expert on the flowering plant genus Boronia.
“It has to be unique, so it can’t have been done before – that’s the critical thing,” he says. “And part of the recommendations is it has to sound okay, which I always think is quite cute.” The naming of plant species is governed by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, while animals are governed by the International Code Of Zoological Nomenclature.
But apart from following certain nomenclature conventions, it’s open season. Duretto has named one new botanical species after a colleague in
Cairns, where the specimen was originally collected. Another was named after his mum, because it was collected close to where she grew up.
Visit the Sydney fish market and there’s a good chance some of the octopi on sale will be undescribed species
“I had a little rule with Boronia, which I worked on a lot and of which I’ve named nearly 100 species, that I wanted to use up every letter in the alphabet,” Duretto says. “I got my ‘z’ a couple of years ago.”
Sir David Attenborough has numerous species named after him, and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was recently honoured in the naming of a new beetle species. There’s even a proposal to name a species of blind, serpentine amphibian – like a giant worm – after Donald Trump. The naming rights were won in an auction, and were intended as a protest against Trump’s environmental policies.
“Entomologists and taxonomists do have a sense of humour,” notes Lessard. “You have to throw subtle shade.”
BORDER PATROL
Is taxonomy nothing more than stamp collecting? It’s a difficult misconception to shift.
“I think there is, in general, a lack of understanding as to why taxonomy – not only marine, but terrestrial – is so important,” says Dr Pat Hutchings, a marine taxonomist and senior fellow at the Australian Museum Research Institute. “You hear people say, ‘But we know all the species of birds and mammals’, and you say ‘Yes, but there’s only three or four hundred species of birds in Australia’.”
But visit the Sydney fish market and there’s a good chance some of the octopi on sale will be undescribed species. Among the marine worms that Hutchings has spent her career working on, the beach worms and blood worms collected and sold as bait are treated as though they’re one species, “but there are several species involved, and each of those species have a different reproductive strategy so they need to be managed as independent species”.
Taxonomy is the infrastructure that the life sciences is built on. Unless that infrastructure is maintained and invested in, it can start to crumble, and things can slip through the cracks.
Maintaining Australia’s precious biosecurity has long been the strongest economic argument for investing in taxonomy. Taxonomists are the frontline sentinels for invasive species that could wreak havoc on the country’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry.
On a tour of the Australian National Insect Collection, after marvelling over tray after tray of iridescent beetles and giant butterflies – the collection houses more than 12 million insect specimens in total – director Dr David Yeates shows me a small vial containing a dead insect that looks like a dark grain of rice.
It’s a Khapra beetle – Trogoderma granarium; one of the world’s worst grain pests.
“If we ever got it here, we’d lose our clean, green image for our grain and a lot of countries would just stop taking our exported grain,” Yeates says. “It would stop a $6 billion industry overnight.”
The problem is Australia has its own native Trogoderma beetles that happily live on decaying organic matter in the wild, and don’t even glance at our granaries.
“When you’ve got a ship coming into port and you’re beginning to load grain on it, you do an inspection and there’s members of this genus on the boat; are they native ones that just blew in or is it the Trogoderma that will get into the grain you’re exporting and then could potentially stop export trade?” Yeates asks. “You’ve got to be able to tell the pest from the rest.”
While there are plenty of economic arguments in favour of taxonomy – which are outlined in detail in A decadal plan for taxonomy and biosystematics in Australia and New Zealand, released by the Australian Academy of Science and New Zealand’s Royal Society Te Apārangi last year – Kym Abrams argues the need for taxonomy shouldn’t just be pinned to its benefits for humans.
“I know most people think that everything that exists should have a purpose for humans,” she says. “I believe that things should be protected because they have inherent value, because they exist.”
TAXONOMY’S FUTURE
Charles Darwin was an expert barnacle taxonomist. “All sorts of grand figures of science were essentially taxonomists,” Kevin Thiele says. It’s a science firmly rooted in the past, but which also enthusiastically embraces the future.
In contrast to its old-fashioned image, Thiele says taxonomists have always been early adopters of technology. One of the first uses of microscopy was for the study and classification of microscopic creatures, and taxonomists have also pounced on new scientific technologies such as genetic analysis and 3D scanning.
On the Pultenaea glabra excursion, Matt Renner not only collects whole branches of the bush for flattening in a wood-and-cardboard press whose design hasn’t changed in centuries, he also takes samples from the plant’s shooting tips for genomic study. The DNA analysis will look at anywhere from 2500-6500 single-nucleotide polymorphisms – single-letter variations in the plant genome – that could help differentiate between species and determine how they are related.
There’s also increasing recognition of, and engagement with, the taxonomic knowledge held by Indigenous Australians. “Indigenous Australians are the first Australian taxonomists,” Bryan Lessard says. “If a species is new to science, it doesn’t mean
that it hasn’t been known for thousands of years by Indigenous communities.”
Western scientists are now starting to work more closely with indigenous scientists. The Australian Marine Sciences Association, of which Penny Berents is president, has a growing program of Indigenous engagement, particularly with the sea country people of tropical regions.
“It’s just starting,” she says. “The awareness is growing on both sides; Indigenous people wanting to engage with western scientists and western scientists realising that there is a lot to be gained by Indigenous engagement.”
Australia and NZ taxonomy’s decadal plan highlights a need to understand and recognise
“the deep connections Indigenous peoples in both our countries have with biodiversity and biodiversity knowledge”, and calls for respectful partnering with Indigenous communities for a “mutual exploration of biodiversity”.
It’s ironic that just as technological advances open up whole new avenues of taxonomic investigation, and accelerating extinctions and globalisation demand even more from taxonomy, that its workforce is dwindling.
“I can’t see myself getting a long-term taxonomic position,” Abrams says. The biosecurity issue may be driving renewed demand for taxonomists, but these jobs are often contract positions. “We can’t publish very high-ranking papers so we can’t get good university jobs, and we can’t get high-impact grants,” she says.
Around one-quarter of the taxonomic workforce consists of people who have retired but who still come in to work as volunteers.
“We’re losing the expertise of people like me,” says Pat Hutchings. “Who is going to replace us? Where’s the next generation?”
Taxonomists are often characterised as scientific loners; focused, determined individuals who spend a lifetime exploring just one tiny branch on the tree of life. But it’s actually a very collaborative profession. Renner names at least five individuals who have been intimately involved in the effort to reclassify this new Pultenaea species; the citizen scientist who spotted the plants and deduced they were different, several other taxonomists who have studied the bush pea, or who have been involved in the molecular studies, and Renner’s partner – a biologist who donates her time as his field assistant.
But with fewer and fewer taxonomists, the chances to collaborate and debate important taxonomic decisions – like choosing the best colour description for a bush-pea flower – diminish. Duretto feels that loss keenly.
“I wish there was someone else working in my group, so we could have an argument.”
The strange thing is that Australia shouldn’t need so many taxonomists. Its incredible biodiversity is a global anomaly. There is a decreasing gradient of species richness from the lush tropics to the frozen poles. And yet Australia – particularly Western Australia – stands out. No one really knows why we enjoy such extraordinary biological riches. One theory is that Australia got off relatively lightly in glaciation cycles that acted as a biodiversity bottleneck for other parts of the world, wiping out huge numbers of species and resetting the biodiversity count.
It’s one reason Matt Renner – who originally hails from New Zealand – finds it easier to switch off his taxonomy antennae when he’s off the clock: there’s simply too much to see otherwise. He used to walk around looking down at everything. Now he just takes in the scenery.
“Because I did a lot of vegetation survey work in NZ, where I was responsible for identifying everything at a plot level, I would look around and I would think there’s nothing in this forest that I don’t know,” he says. “Here’s just so much I don’t know.”
But for a nation like Australia to only know less than a third of its living organisms is problematic, Thiele says. There are 200-300 unnamed species of mosquitoes, for example, any of which could act as vectors for emerging diseases. What we don’t know could, literally, kill us.
“We have no idea what they are, what they do, what roles they play, what opportunities they can bring, what risks they pose,” he says. “How the hell do you manage a country sustainably when
70% of the species in that country are completely unknown?”
BIANCA NOGRADY is the author of The End: The Human Experience Of Death and editor of the 2019 and 2015 Best Australian Science Writing anthologies. She worries that there are not enough hours left in life for all the science stories she wants to write but she’s burning the candle at both ends to give it her best shot.
“If a species is new to science, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been known for thousands of years by Indigenous communities”