SOLS Podcasts

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Peggy Coulombe: Good afternoon, this is Peggy Coulombe with the School of Life Sciences, and this is Science Studio. Today we're going to meet with Tony Gill, curator of ASU Animal Collections. Tony is also a fish taxonomist. Before you run off to top off your coffee, thinking we're going to talk about taxidermy, one grave--no pun intended--misconception about collections is, because samples are dead, that the field of taxonomy is equally stagnant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Gill is, in some respects, a detective, a time traveler, slipping through centuries of study and thought, bringing into play his capacities as a scientist, historian, artist, explorer, diver, and myth buster, in a realm that is both ancient and continually expanding.

Thanks for joining us today, Tony.

Tony Gill: Hi.

Peggy: What kind of collections are there at ASU?

Tony: Basically there are, I think it's nine collections, in the School of Life Sciences. Three are botanical collections--vascular plants, lichens, and fossil plants--and I look after the animal collections. There are six collections: fish, herps--that's reptiles and amphibians, mammals, birds, shells, and insects. In all there's something like a million specimens.

Peggy: I've suggested in this introduction that you're something more along the lines of a Cousteau or a Rousseau than a mortician. Tell me something about how you got into working with fish.

Tony: Well, I had an early interest in fish, I started keeping fish at the age of five. And I guess I was about eight when I decided that fish taxonomy was the way to go. Some of my early fish books had details of where fish lived around the world, and how they got their names, and what their names meant, and how they were classified and things like that. I also discovered a little book that had been produced by Tropical Fish Hobbyist Publications called "How to Become and Ichthyologist" and that became my guidebook that led me on until my first post-doc, actually, at the Smithsonian Institution. Then I was in uncharted waters after that.

Peggy: Or you were charting your own waters. So, part of what you do is discover new species of fish, so what was the first fish that you discovered, and where?

Tony: I guess the first new species that I found were actually in existing collections, and that was as a second-year undergrad student, working through collections of dotty-backs, which is a group I went on to specialize in. Unfortunately, I didn't get to name those species, but I made other scientists aware that there were undisclosed species there.

The first one that I actually got around to naming was a little species called Pseudoplesiops collare.

Peggy: That's a mouthful.

Tony: Yup. Well it's pretty small, actually. It is collected from very deep water in Indonesia, and it turned out there was already a specimen existing in a collection in Amsterdam, and it had been one of two specimens used to describe another species called Pseudoplesiops annae, but that species was represented by two different species. I associated one with my new species, which I had fresh material of. And the interesting thing about it is that the color pattern reminded me of a collar around the neck, a dark sort of brown color around this sort of pale pink-headed fish with a grey body, so I came up with the name "collari" as the species name.

Peggy: So, "like a collar."

Tony: Yeah.

Peggy: And you said you had a fresh specimen, so you've been to Indonesia? What are some of the other places you've gone to?

Tony: Well actually, that specimen was sent to me by one of the most well-traveled of all fish taxonomists, a man named Jack Randall, who was actually a co-author on that first paper. I haven't traveled anywhere near as much as Jack, but I've still managed to collect in a lot of different places, throughout much of Northern Australia, New Caledonia, some very isolated sea mounts off between Australia and New Zealand, Mauritius, the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and it has kind of given me perspective on diversity of fishes that I wouldn't have otherwise got, and it has kind of led me into some areas of research that I would have not gone into otherwise, in particular re-evaluating apparently widespread species. When I dived in those diverse places, I knew the names people were associating with species, but it turned out they weren't really the same thing in different places, and that has become an area of interest for me.

Peggy: So an example you gave earlier, you found a new type of fish amidst a collection that had already been made. Is that common, that there are fish within collections that people don't actually know what they are, or they're misnamed?

Tony: That's very common. In fact, the way fish taxonomy works is that people tend to specialize in certain groups of fishes, and travel around to other institutions or have institutions send material of the families they are expert in, whatever, and that way the real experts get to see the material rather than everyone having to learn little bits about lots and lots of different things. You've got to bear in mind, there are at least 25,000 species of fish, and some of them differ in very, very subtle ways.

But there are lots of things to do in terms of re-evaluating species and stuff like that, so we're constantly working on what went before, so you're always working on whatever foundation the previous expert lay, and it is kind of an intricate sort of science. And with that comes a strong respect and appreciation of the history of the science, which is kind of like any other field of biology in lots of ways. I mean, I think that, and the way names are generated, and the oldest name that is given to a species or a genus or whatever is the name that should be applied; so we have to research very old literature and previous works, more so than in other fields of biology.

Peggy: Now listeners have probably caught on that you have an accent. Where are you from?

Tony: Originally from Australia. I haven't actually lived there in 15 years, since finishing my Ph.D. at the Australia Museum. I spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution, a year at the America Museum, and ten years at the Natural History Museum in London, which has kind of given me a strange accent that isn't quite Australian, it's kind of watered-down Australian.

Peggy: So tell me, how are collections used, and how are they relevant to research?

Tony: Well there are lots of ways that collections are used. I mean, from my perspective, systematics and taxonomy of fishes, the collections are my only view or experience of reality. I mean, I look at fish, I gather details about variations in species, about their anatomy or whatever, and I apply theory to those observations, so things represent species or represent things in nature. But in reality, those are the only things I come into contact with.

But other fields treat collections in different ways. For instance, ecologists call on collections databases to understand distributions of species. Geographers certainly use the same sort of data. But there can be uses that are kind of a little out of the ordinary. For instance, someone who is interested in, say, pollutants, might go back to specimens collected in the past, extract tissues, and then extract pollutants to look at pollutant levels at that time. They can also participate in things like diet studies. An interesting--although this isn't quite just a diet study--an interesting conversation I had with a diatom specialist at the Natural History Museum in London concerned the Natural History Museum's collection of gray mullets. Gray mullets feed on diatoms. I see that collection as an excellent collection of gray mullets, but the diatom specialist saw the gray mullet collection as an excellent collection of diatoms.

So everyone has a slightly different perspective on things. And that's kind of the interesting thing about collections, they can tell you all sorts of different things, and different people are going to come with different perspectives on the collection.

One application, for instance, might be trying to understand the history of an institution. Someone who's interested in the history of science, or interactions between institutions or whatever, may look at our collections here at the School of Life Sciences. You can see which faculty participated in collection building through the decades. You can also see exchanges of specimens with other institutions, and therefore get a feeling for how this institution developed.

Peggy: Quentin Wheeler recently came to the School of Life Sciences from London, and I understand he studies slime mold beetles and named some 65 species that he discovered; and some of the names that he came up with were after President Bush and Dick Cheney, and Darth Vader, including his present wife and ex-wife. How did you choose the names for your fish? Was it strictly always about physical characteristics, or have you named them after friends or family.

Tony: A bit of each. I mean, sometimes I get kind of boring and I find something diagnostic about a given species, something that differentiates it from all other species in that genus, for instance, and if it's got red spots and nothing else has red spots I'll call it red, for instance. But sometimes you sort of come across things that inspire you a little more. A colleague from Canada described a species with me, it's kind of an olive-colored fish with a bright purple tail, and he was actually the one that came up with a name. I sat around for a while trying to think of a name, and he decided on Calitherus, which is from the Greek meaning "ripe fig." So if you imagine a fig once it gets ripe, you've got this sort of olive-green fig that splits open and you can see the bright purple flesh inside. So it's kind of fun, then it's also one of those things that I struggle over sometimes. I have a book called "Brown's Composition of Scientific Words," and every time I delve into it to try and come up with a name, I end up sidetracked, and spend hours reading through...

Peggy: The names of the past?

Tony: ... the names of the past, and I just try to find out what other people, why other people have used names and certain things.

And sometimes you find pleasant surprises. There's a South African ichthyologist named J.L.B. Smith, who some of you may know as the describer of the coelacanth of South Africa. He also named a lot of other South African and Southern African fishes, including one of them, the dotty-backs I work on. It's a little striped fish with bright red eyes and bright red lips and bright red nose, and I've never really thought about the name, but Bibulous was the specific epithet he came up with. I eventually looked it up and it meant "someone who is fond of drinking"--so the red eyes and the red nose come into play.

Peggy: I notice you're very interested in color, and that color actually plays a big role in a lot of the descriptions that you come up with, and the way that species are tracked, and you are in fact an artist. I understand you paint in gouache and watercolor and pen-and-ink, and that those things are essential to your research. Tell me why, in an age of photography and computers, that illustration with things like traditional media play such an important role?

Tony: Well there are several, sort of, aspects to why I do this. I enjoy painting and drawing, for one thing; but also it forces me to look more carefully at the specimens, so I often see things that I wouldn't otherwise see. Sometimes you're sitting there describing a new species, and you've got a few characters that distinguish it from others. Then you start illustrating it. Suddenly other things pop out that you didn't realize were there. If you ever want to see something, draw it. That was told to me when I was starting out, that's the way forward, in my field anyway. A lot of what I do is about perceiving things and having a good eye for things, so this just hones my vision in a little.

As for the painting side, it's another thing I enjoy doing. And gouache allows me to look like I'm a good artist without being a good artist. It's pretty forgiving. You can paint over. It's kind of like a watercolor with a gum in it, so it's more opaque than watercolor, but it is transparent enough that you can layer in turns on top of each other.

Peggy: Like in oil.

Tony: Yeah, so I always start out with black, and put a lot of the detail in, in black, and then paint other colors over top and build up fairly complex patterns. Again, it allows me to, well it allows me to do something that you don't necessarily do with photographs, and that is to highlight details that are important. That's the other thing with illustrating--you're not trying to just sort of show a picture of... you're also trying to show your interpretation of what's in front of you. So for me, highlighting the characters so they show up, so someone who doesn't have quite the eye is going to appreciate them.

Peggy: Be able to pick them out. I understand you painted a picture for your wife on her 40th birthday.

Tony: Yeah. She has always liked puffer fishes, and what she sees are similar things which are related, such as cowfishes and boxfishes and porcupine fishes. Up until then I'd painted her odds and ends of miniatures--that's another thing I like painting, these small sort of two-inch-by-two-inch paintings--but I decided for her 40th birthday that I would do a bigger painting and stick 40 puffer fishes and related fishes on there. It took me quite a while, actually, to find enough images to work from, because I didn't want to duplicate species too much. I was prepared to duplicate if there were different life stages of the same species...

Peggy: Like juveniles and things.

Tony: Yeah, the color patterns are quite different, and I wanted to keep an appreciation of respective size of the individuals as well, also. It was a bit of a challenge, but to be honest, the biggest challenge was keeping count with how many I'd painted. I kept having to go back and sort of recount.

Peggy: So, and I noticed on the painting that there is a red edge on most of the fish. Why is that?

Tony: That's kind of a personal joke. My wife has continually accused me of not using crimson enough around the edges of my subjects, to bring them forward, and I don't know, I guess my scientific eye tells me not to use colors unless I can see them. And I put crimson around each of the fish just to...

Peggy: Just for her.

Tony: Just for her.

Peggy: Now we've talked a lot, earlier, about how collections, how different people coming in and viewing collections can find different useful bits of them, and different ways of using them. Do you see the collections central to the future of science?

Tony: Yeah, I think they're extremely important, in terms of--well, particularly in terms of allowing future generations to really know what people had in front of them. That's one of the most important things. If you do a physiological study, say, on a frog species, and ten years from now our concept of what that species is changes, so maybe it's split into three species, or maybe we find that no one has correctly identified that species in the past, we have to certainly view your physiological study, which species did you really have.

Peggy: So people could have been doing physiological studies on three different types of species and still trying to compare them.

Tony: Well there's that. There's also that they may have been studying a completely different species to the one they said they had. So how do you associate your study with modern concepts or current concepts of taxonomy?

The only way your study can participate is if you vouch your material into a museum that can then be looked up and correctly identified. This is particularly important in survey type work where people go out and try and work out what species live in certain areas.

There is this tendency towards just going out with a notepad and writing lists. And nowadays there's an element of trying to capture character information, by taking photographs for instance which is made a lot more easy with the use of digital photography.

But still photographs don't necessarily show you as much as a specimen can. And in any case increasingly those photographs are stored in museums, in museum databases because we are the ones that appreciate the importance of character information.

So there's that sort of aspect of things, allowing museums to, allowing studies to participate in current taxonomy and to continue to participate. But there are also lots of other areas that collections are going to become increasingly important.

Particularly as we enter the sort of, with increased databasing of collections, we are pushing towards established cyber technology in sharing taxonomic information and processing taxonomic information here at ASU. Again collections, that's the source of those images.

But collections also in a way preserve cultures. Staff that are employed to look after collections often have mindsets that are quite different to people that aren't associated with collections. Stronger appreciation of history for instance, and an appreciation for what the collections are about.

So I think even that, having that presence in any institution is important. Because it helps tie the sort of leading edge of science back to the rest of science and the foundations that science rests on.

Peggy: You mentioned the sort of leading edge of science. Things that are coming into being because of new technologies, like genetics and bioengineering and I think, and we've had this conversation before, that a lot of times people who are doing work in those fields lose track of the value of collections to the research they are actually performing.

Tony: There's that and there's also, I think, an increasing lack of appreciation for the organism. People are becoming increasingly distanced from the organism. Whereas in collections you're actually, admittedly the animals are dead, but you are looking closely at them, you're understanding how they work, how they fit together.

And I think that gives a richness to biology that would disappear otherwise. It kind of troubles me that the generation of biologists coming on is going to have less appreciation for organisms and perhaps limited understanding of organisms, in terms of whole organisms at least.

I was kind of troubled at recent society meetings I've been to, where students who are actually interested in the relationships of fishes, where they've also identified their own fish instead of crediting other people for identifying their fish specimens for them so they could extract DNA from tissue samples or whatever.

I think that's pretty sad. It also troubles me too that there must be other kids out there like me that have a passion for a certain group of organisms. What happens to those kids, where do they go?

Unless there are programs in institutions that actually support whole animal stuff and teach the '-ologies' as they're often called and allow students to develop that passion into a career.

I fear their just going to be turned away at the door and go off and do something different, and we're going to miss the opportunity, or waste to opportunity of having passionate people involved in science.

I think that's where collections could play a role because its a way of exposing students to whole organisms again. Giving them the opportunity to develop that passion and direct it into an understanding of form, if you like, and diversity.

Peggy: And of course without the collections none of the other sciences would exists in some senses.

Tony: No, I mean there's a lot of things that rest on the collections. I mean the obvious thing is an understanding of the systematic stuff, biodiversity resides in collections. That's where our language resides.

The species names, genre, families, whatever. Without those we can't communicate ideas about those concepts, species or whatever. Any sort of comparative biology, cross biology. So it's critical that we maintain that link and also not just maintain it, but develop it.

Peggy: And so what role do you see regional collections playing? Because ASU is a small collection compared to say The Smithsonian. So what is the importance of these small regional collections?

Tony: Well, I've worked in a number of large international type collections. And I can tell you now you cannot do a study based on the collections at any one institution. Not a study, say, of species diversity within a genus or a family for instance.

You may get a collection that has a spattering representation of the species, but it won't tell you anything about their real distributions or anything like that. That's where the small regional collections come into play. They contribute to global collections.

So the fish collection at the School of Life Sciences for instance, has a strong emphasis on Arizona freshwater fishes, and a few of the other southwestern states. It's by far the best freshwater Arizona fish collection in the world.

So if you want to understand, say distribution of cyprinid fishes, which are well represented in Arizona, you can't do it without consulting our collection.

Peggy: And things like cyber infrastructure will link a lot of these regional collections in the future into one large global structure.

Tony: Yeah, I think that sort of sharing and streamlining that exchange of information about collections is the way to go. And I think with that should go an increased appreciation for the collections and hopefully for resources to maintain the real specimens.

The databases themselves are essentially proxies for the specimens. And it's important that we don't forget what we're really looking after are specimens. I hope this sort of new appreciation for the collections will contribute to a better appreciation of the collections.

Peggy: So completely off topic, what book do you have on your nightstand?

Tony: Well at the moment I go home to math homework. Basically one of the great things about being a fish taxonomist is I get to fly around a bit, and that's about the only time I get to read a book.

[laughter]

Peggy: And otherwise it's the math with the kids and then...

Tony: Yeah, trying to remember how to do regression lines and stuff.

[laughter]

Peggy: Well Tony I want to thank you for your time, and I want to wish you good luck on your research, thanks for joining us today.

Tony: Thanks.

Peggy: If you want to read more about Tony and his art and research he'll be featured in the School of Life Sciences newsletter released this coming January, and that's accessible on http://sols.asu.edu. Thanks for joining me and Science Studio from the School of Life Sciences on the Arizona State University.

Taxonomy rises from the dead

Transcript - [Printable PDF format]

SOLS Podcasts 2007