IDENTIFY CRISIS
We’re losing touch with nature
Ernest Small’s research colleagues at Agriculture Canada had a mystery. Peering at the cellular innards of a clover plant, they wondered why nothing was behaving the way clover should.
They asked Small, a veteran scientist at the Central Experimental Farm, for help. It didn’t take him long to pinpoint the problem. Their clover was an alfalfa.
“That’s just the kind of thing that happens over and over,” says Small, lamenting the lack of knowledge of what plants and animals make up our world.
“How can you do a study of forests without knowing the trees?”
In Darwin’s day, biologists travelled the world to identify and classify plants and animals. They collected specimens and named them, grouping them in related categories to show how life on Earth is organized.
The field is called taxonomy, and it has roots that stretch back for centuries.
In the mid-1700s, a Swedish biologist named Carl Linnaeus set forth his analysis of life. Beyond giving names to individual species, he organized them in ways that showed their relationship to each other. For instance, he divided the animal kingdom into mammals, birds, fish, amphibians (which generally included reptiles), insects and a sixth group that was a loose catch-all for invertebrates.
It wasn’t the first attempt to classify living things, nor the final word. Today’s taxonomy has largely different groupings. Still, Linnaeus gave a sense of how beings are related by how their bodies function as well as their appearance.
And it fits well with modern evolutionary theory, providing a framework within which species adapt, and sometimes split into distinct species, while still retaining complex relationships to all other past and present life forms. We understand life within that framework, even when the framework itself shifts with new discoveries.
Linnaeus was admired as a superstar of science in his day, and long afterward. Yet today, taxonomy is considered a backwater; biologists now focus their microscopes on how the tiny machinery inside a cell works (or breaks down, when there’s disease) more often than they step back to see the big picture.
No one denies this is vital stuff. Anyone training today in biology has to specialize in these molecular techniques, which are fundamental to the entire field. But as students can now get a biology degree without leaving the lab, this is considered a dangerous knowledge gap by some: We need to understand whole species, not just genes, if we are to solve the problems of agriculture, fisheries, insect pests, ecology and the spread of many diseases. Take agriculture. Governments are frequently scrambling to identify unknown organisms. In an era of global trade, strange insects and weeds from Europe or Asia are constantly showing up in farm fields. Which ones kill our native plants? Which ones spread disease? That depends on what they are.
Odd little creatures are constantly spilling out of bilge water from ships entering the Great Lakes. Someone has to identify which are harmless and which is the next zebra mussel.
This is tough work: An invertebrate animal in the water — perhaps not even mature — can be a slimy little thing a few millimetres long that looks like nothing in any textbook. And is it from the Indian Ocean? The Black Sea? The Amazon River? We need someone with expertise to sort it out.
Analyzing its DNA may be a precise way to verify a tentative identification, but genes are a poor starting point for telling what an organism is. And they won’t tell anything about how it behaves in the real world.
Knowing living creatures, like knowing what’s underwater on a cruise ship’s route, may only get public attention in rare cases of sudden and spectacular need.
“I know of botanists who have given evidence in murder trials based on seeds stuck on the victim’s or the suspect’s clothing,” says Ottawa naturalist Dan Brunton. “They didn’t think of that when they studied in school, but if they didn’t know this, it would all just be green stuff.”
“How can you do a study of forests without knowing the trees?”
Ernest Small, Agriculture Canada scientist
Field work on whole plants and animals continues too, of course, but it tends to take a back seat. It has fewer practitioners than lab biology, and it is seldom seen to be the latest hot public issue, even though it is central to preserving biodiversity.
“Gotta be doing DNA work or you’re not doing science. (That) seems to be the mantra,” says Brunton.
This leaves less time and funding for the study of what species our world contains and how to classify them.
This isn’t just an esoteric problem for a few people in labs and university classrooms. It affects children (and likely their parents) as much as professional scientists.
Several years ago, a British biologist measured how schoolchildren had trouble recognizing common birds, types seen daily near their homes in Newcastle. Stewart Evans of Newcastle University showed them starlings, goldfinches, house sparrows, blackbirds. The kids drew a blank. (They did recognize birds used in cartoons and advertising such as woodpeckers and robins.)
Evans, who died in 2010, blamed a lack of teaching about common plants and animals as school curricula shift to “charismatic” subjects such as endangered whales or rainforests.
He condemned this approach. “It is unrealistic to expect people to care for the local environment if they are unaware of the organisms that live in it,” he said.
His fighting words warned that universities may produce “a generation of armchair biologists who can write scholarly essays about spe- cies that they would not be able to recognize if they encountered them in the wild.”
Verena Tunnicliffe knows all about encountering creatures in the wild.
Two years ago the University of Victoria marine biologist sailed to the Celebes Sea, between Indonesia and the Philippines. Hers was the first deepsea survey there since the 1920s, “and the only (scientific) ship before that was the Challenger in 1875.”
The four-year HMS Challenger voyage found 4,000 new species and surveyed the deep ocean floor. It was the greatest voyage of exploration since Captain Cook.
More than a century later Tunnicliffe found unknown sea lilies, plants 3,500 metres down on the ocean floor.
“Discovery is an incredible process,” she says. “When you find a new species you really have discovered one of those fundamental building blocks of our world.
“And you look at it and it’s just wonderful to say, ‘Hello! Welcome to our world! You’ve been here all this time and we haven’t known it and it’s so wonderful to meet you!’ There are you, something brand new.”
She still discovers things. Tunnicliffe’s giant project at Uvic is VENUS, 43 kilometres of fibre optic cable on the ocean floor linking highdefinition cameras, lights and instruments that measure temperature, sound, water flow, oxygen and salt. A sister-project called NEPTUNE samples deeper Pacific water.
In Saanich Inlet, a short trip from Victoria, they have recently found a couple of new species in the boundary layer between water with oxygen and a “dead zone” with no oxygen. One is a sea squirt, the other an anemone.
She has found worms that she knows are new species too, though they haven’t been formally identified yet.
“There is a huge need for people who can recognize what things are,” she says.
For example, a current theme in ecology is “ecosystem recovery,” which means re-establishing a place on land or in the water so that species that belong there can thrive in it. This can mean Prairie grasslands, Ontario forests or cod habitat in the Atlantic.
To pursue this, Tunnicliffe notes, one must first understand what lived there originally, what new species have elbowed their way in as conditions changed, and whether managers are putting in the right species to help the area recover.
“There still is a recognition that we should know what we’re looking at,” she says.
“You look back at the 1800s and these won- derful eras of expeditions and discoveries, both on land and in the oceans. What that has done is help the world recognize what an incredible diversity of things there are, and a huge number of different ways of ‘doing’ life.”
Modern science has moved on to see how living things work, and that has led inside the cell. But as an ecologist, she wants to see how that plant or animal is acting within its community. Thriving? Just scraping by? Moving to new territory?
“Sometimes frankly it doesn’t matter to me whatsoever how many haplotypes (small segments of DNA) there are in the population. I couldn’t give a darn” unless this affects how the whole animal is acting.
There’s little institutional support for taxonomy, laments Brunton, who works as a private consultant.
“The ongoing Flora of North America project, which will be the bible of plant taxonomy on this continent … is largely being drafted by contributors who do these critically important taxonomic summaries of our knowledge of natural biodiversity on the side,” he says.
Understanding species is why public institutions keep millions of preserved bugs and birds and weeds and mosses and fish samples, as a reference library. But increasingly, universities that once built up collections are giving them away like last year’s phone books.
“Our field is not being really widely taught in universities anymore,” says Lynn Gillespie, a Canadian Museum of Nature botanist who also teaches at the University of Ottawa.
She has done the hands-on training, taking curious students to see the Arctic plants of Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg Islands, watching as they figure out the connections of why plant X survives in ecosystem Y.
She puts the case simply: “You really have to know what the plants are that you study.”
U of O does have one new course in plant taxonomy, as well as a professor who does similar work with fish, she notes. It’s a small resurgence, and faculty were surprised that the plant course (in third year) always draws a full enrolment of about 35 students.
Paradoxically, it’s the success of genetics that supports the new life in taxonomy, bringing new tools to decide what’s a species and how species are related.
Nothing wrong with new techniques, says Agriculture Canada’s Small. “It’s absolutely extraordinary the information you can get” by looking inside an organism’s cells.
“But very often associated with that is that people get very, very specialized. It’s not the kind of old-fashioned taxonomy where people had a very broad knowledge. … Today most young taxonomists specialize in a very narrow subject matter,” often connected with an evolutionary process rather than classifying an array of living things.
(Back to the clover that was actually alfalfa. Small found that solving his colleagues’ problem didn’t impress them much. He had used the fusty old method of knowing what alfalfa looks like, not the glitzier modern tools.)
Taxonomy “has suffered somewhat because we’re not taking kids out into the world, showing them the world,” says Tunnicliffe.
“Children haven’t changed. The sense of wonder is no different in the modern child.” But nature has to compete with TV and the Internet, and of course structured play. It’s rare, she notes, for a child to have regular chances to get muddy and chase frogs.
“When I take my students out onto a mud flat — icky, smelly, sticky mud — and they dig in the mud I just watch their faces and their sense of discovery” as they find “these beautiful creatures that are living here.
“The world has so much to teach us and it’s not through 50 other media in between. It’s being out there to touch it yourself.”