6A = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
MONDAY, NOV.26, 2001
Systematists: Searching land and sea
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These creatures are critical to maintaining human life, he said.
They clean our soil, they clean our air, they clean our waters from pollutants," Kristhalka said. "They buffer the land against drought and against flood. They protect us from invasions of other species and emerging diseases. They provide our food, our fuel, our fibers and our pharmaceuticals.
"Preserving biodiversity is the same as preserving human life on Earth," he said.
Entomology collection manager Robert Brooks holds a meat-eating grasshopper found near Merida, Venezuela in 1979. The grasshopper was preserved and is now part of KU's insect collection in Snow Hall.
To study biodiversity, scientists collect species for museums and preserve them for future research.
Brooks studies the systematics of bees. He said he had a level of expertise equaled by perhaps only six or seven people in the world.
He travels to three or four countries each year to collect insect specimens. During each expedition, he nets a million insects. Of those, he puts about 50,000 into the entomology museum at the university.
"When they took the forest away, the climate changed," Brooks said. "Now it looks like Utah." And with the change in climate went the ecosystem that supported an array of unknown creatures.
Brooks' voice rises in enthusiasm as he relates tales of his field work. He becomes serious when he tells sobering tales of destroyed forests. He describes a landscape that is brown and parched, the soil cracked and dusty -a one-time rain forest in Madagascar that is now desert. It once received 100 inches of rain each year and now receives only two.
"We tend to go to places where people don't go to normally in order to document what's there before it's gone," he said. "We can't stem the logging, but at least we can find out what's there before it disappears."
Studying insects became a passion for Zachary Falin when he was an undergraduate at Cornell University. The Walton, N.Y., graduate student said that Guyana, a country in South America where he had collected insects, looked like a place right out of National Geographic. To reach his collecting site, he loaded a canoe with gear and traveled upriver for six hours in a tropical torrent.
"It rained so hard you couldn't open your eyes." he said.
He remembers lying in the bottom of the canoe for two hours, wearing only jeans and a T-shirt, shivering. Abruptly,
the rain stopped. The sun came out, dried his clothes and gave him a sunburn. As soon as he was dry, the rain started again.
He then hiked five hours up a mountain to a mesa, the site of a pristine jungle where he had hoped to collect insect species never before seen by any human. But a survey crew beat him to the spot, planning for a road so that the top of the mesa could be strip-mined for aluminum, a major source of income in Guyana.
a major source.
"It was really disheartening thinking in 10 years, none of this going to be here, it's going to be shredded," he said.
ASHORTAGE OF SCIENTISTS AND SPECIMENS
Disappearing along with the ecosystems are the systematists needed to study the vast variety of life on Earth. Kristalka said.
"There are many groups of animals and plants for which there is no longer an expertise to study them," he said. "It's like the loss of a language."
The shortage of systematists is critical for the study of the animals and plants that are least understood, such as many groups of bacteria, fungi, insects and crustaceans.
"There are groups that we cannot study because there just aren't enough experts out there," he said.
Brooks said there could be as many as 100 million species of insects in the world, but scientists knew and had classified only about 1 million.
since only about "Do you know how long it's going to take, at that rate, to know all the insects?" he asked. "With the current number of systematists, 5,000 years."
Because many insects might be extinct before they are found, scientists are running out of time, said Falin, the graduate student who had collected insects in Guyana.
"Finding good forest is becoming harder and harder," he said. "Once you put the stuff in museums, they're good for hundreds of years, but you need people out collecting and being able to recognize what's new material now, as opposed to 100 years from now, when it's simply not going to be there."
Kristalka said the number of systematists began to decline in the 1970s, when universities shifted attention away from biodiversity science and toward molecular biology — the study of cellular structure and function — which has many applications to human medicine. This newer, high-tech science
AARON SHOWALTER/KANSAN
Ecology and evolutionary biology professor Daphne Fautin is one of the world's leading authorities on sea anemones. Here, she holds a paractinostola faeculenta, one of the marine organisms that keeps her scouring the globe in search of undiscovered creatures.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
was heavily funded by universities and federal agencies.
Sea anemones are enigmatic creatures that live on ocean floors and capture fish with their tentacles.
He said the National Institutes of Health received about $20 billion each year in federal funding. By contrast, the National Science Foundation, which supports all social sciences and physical and natural sciences, receives only $4 billion a year.
WORLD-BENOWNED SPECIALISTS AT KU
Falin said, "There's nothing wrong with keeping humans healthy, but humans are just one species, and if you compare that with the hundreds of thousands and millions of other species that we know nothing about, well, there's kind of a mismatch of funds."
One small lab in Haworth Hall contains sea anemone experts, including Daphne Fautin, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and one of the world's leading authorities on these enigmatic creatures. They are brightly colored animals that look more like plants, reside on ocean floors, wave their tentacles and eat fish. She said only five experts in the world were employed to study sea anemones, and only one other hailed from the United States Megan Daly, a postdoctoral fellow who studies under Fautin.
"Within the last decade, we've lost half of the people who worked on the systematics of sea anemones," Fautin said. "These people are dying out, and because they weren't replaced, there was no incentive for good graduate students to want to study sea anemone systematics."
Daly is fascinated by these little-known ocean creatures. "We can't understand them on our own scale," she said. "They don't have heads, they don't appear to do anything that we can relate to, even in the way we can relate to bugs."
Daly's fascination does not wane when she leaves the lab. She collects anemones on family vacations and once scraped a few off a rock in Florida, wrapped them in wet paper towels and brought them home in her luggage.
"Sea anemones are found in every marine environment, and we know very little about them," she said. "We don't know what role they play in ecosystems."
Fautin is naming one new anemone species after her husband, Bob Buddemeier, a senior scientist for the Kansas Geological Survey. In 1987, he found the species while the two were on a trip together in Papua, New Guinea, where she collected sea anemones and he collected rocks.
"It's a small, squishy little thing, but more than most people have named after them," he said. "It's not unattractive when it's cleaned up and in a dish by itself."
Buddemeier said this species' name was buddemeieri.
THE FUTURE OF SYSTEMATICS
The decline of systematists has not gone unrecognized. Scientists around the world have sounded the alarm for years. James Rodman, program director for systematic biology at the National Science Foundation, said of the problem, "The best that can be hoped for is stabilizing the situation. It's possible it's getting worse. The need is great and hopefully something will happen."
But KU's department of ecology and evolutionary biology, together with its museums, has remained stable. The department attracts students from around the world and has more than 50 students in the program, the most in the country, Kristalka said.
"In terms of accomplishments, in terms of funded research by national agencies and graduate student education, in educating the next generation of biodiversity scientists, we're No. 1 in the country," he said.
Brooks, the bee systematist, said he could recommend only two places in the world for a student of systematics: Cornell University and the University of Kansas. Fautin counted on one hand the university museums she considered to be top in the nation in systematics, one of which was KU's.
Rodman said KU's reputation had been proven by the grant money it received. One grant program started by the National Science Foundation in 1995 is the Partnership for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy program. It is designed to train students to carry on with research in areas that have few experts before those experts are gone. Recipients of the grant are required to record their expertise in databases and train graduate students.
Of the 21 initial taxonomy program grants, KU scientists received three. Daphne Fautin, Steve Ashe and Robert Lichtwardt each received 5-year, $750,000 grants. No other university received more than two.
Ashe, who is in Australia on sabbatical, received the grant to examine a little-studied group of beetles. His international reputation drew one of his graduate students, Stelios Chatzimanolis, from Iraklio, Greece.
Fautin's project involved making an online inventory of the known species of sea anemones, which she is now expanding to include their worldwide distribution.
"I've never been somebody who just wanted a name to put on a bottle sitting on a museum shelf," she said. "But, taxonomy, good taxonomy, was required to
get at other kinds of questions."
Fautin estimated that several hundred species of anemone had yet to be named. She has 20 to 30 unnamed species in her own lab. People often send her new specimens, asking her what they are
Kristalka said the taxonomy program was a step in the right direction, but not enough.
"It's a terrific program, but it's a drop in the bucket," he said. "We probably need 20 to 30 times the money."
Fautin said she worried about finding jobs for these new specialists.
"Because universities have tended not to replace their specialists in taxonomy, there have been fewer and fewer jobs," she said.
Fautin added that a number of systematists would be retiring in the coming years, creating some openings.
years, creating some of the most famous Fautin's lab group is spending this semester studying and naming a sea anemone that lives on the back of a hermit crab. A fishing crew pulled it from the Gulf of Mexico 15 years ago and sent it to Fautin for identification. Her students have spent hours examining its cells under microscopes to make sure it is a new species. The students plan to publish results early next year.
Fautin has had the specimens sitting in her lab for years, but only now does she have students available to take the time and give it a name.
"There's plenty of work for me and my students," she said. "In our lifetimes, we're not going to get them all named."
Meanwhile, in the entomolgy museum, Brooks said no one was available to give names to thousands of insect species stored there.
"We just house them, waiting for the time that someone will rise to that occasion," he said.
Contact Lamborn at 864-4810
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Entomology collection manager Robert Brooks found this Hercules beetle in 1979 near Maracay, Venezuela.
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