SOLS Podcasts

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Peggy Coulombe: Hi! This is Peggy Coulombe with the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, and welcome to Science Studio.

With us today is Quentin Wheeler, former curator of the Natural History Museum in London, now vice-president and ASU Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a professor in the School of Life Sciences.

Quentin discovers and studies new species. He's what you might call a biodiversity expert, a 21st-century species explorer, a scientist of taxonomic proportions. Welcome, Quentin.

Quentin Wheeler: Glad to be here.

Peggy: I use the term "21st-century species explorer". This brings to mind all the tools that we have today. The Internet, iTunes, robotics, videography--heck, even photography.

What was involved in exploration and species discovery before the advent of cyberspace--say, way back 300 years ago in the days of Carl Linnaeus, who is, for those of you who are not aware of it, the person who came up with a system of naming organisms, and what we still use today, genus and species.

Quentin: Well, actually, the heyday of species exploration followed Linnaeus. Once we had the rules he had given us to efficiently discover, describe, classify, and communicate our findings, species exploration really flourished.

And it came along at the same time in history when some of the great European powers were exploring the world broadly. So naturalists were able to board ships through the 18th and 19th centuries and deliver lots and lots of exciting new plants and animals back to the major museum centers of Europe, where they'd be described.

Today we're still largely using those same techniques that have been tried and true for a couple centuries. And you're absolutely right, that the digital revolution is beginning to completely reshape how we think about discovering and dealing with new species.

Peggy: Let's say you're roaming around in the jungles of Madagascar, and you come across what might be a new and flamboyant beetle. Now, I use beetles because it's Quentin's favorite thing. How do you actually know you've found something new, and what does it take to really verify that it is new?

Quentin: Well, that's an excellent question, and it's not as easily answered as one might hope. Just a week ago, in the popular press, it was noted that we've reached the benchmark of one million names of plants and animals being accessible in an electronic database. We think that's a little more than halfway to capturing all the species that have been described since Linnaeus. The last 250 years, there are about 1.75 million.

So we still are not at the point where one can go on the Web and reliably know you've accessed all the species that have already been described in a particular group. So what that means is that a scholar has to learn 250 years of literature, visit dozens of museums, and over a period of quite a few years of intensive study, gain enough expertise on a particular group to know with confidence that a new species has shown up.

Peggy: So, in some senses, finding a new species and verifying it means many, many hours and a lot of money.

Quentin: Absolutely. And especially in terms of labor, the costs associated with that labor, that indeed you have to not only study intensively as much variation within this thing you think is a new species, but also all the variation within all the species it might potentially be confused with.

Peggy: These techniques and processes are still being used today. With the advent of new technologies like genetics, though, for example, and DNA identification, what makes taxonomy, the kind that Linnaeus started, still relevant?

Quentin: Yeah, that's an excellent question. It turns out that, at least given contemporary capabilities to deal with DNA evidence, that in fact, one needs a background library of knowledge of the range of variation within species in order to place a particular individual you might encounter in the field with confidence in one or another species.

Most of that knowledge of variation within species exists in the form of museum specimens. So our knowledge of morphology primarily characterizes those species known to date, whereas we're beginning to discover new species, will also characterize those, and taxonomy has always embraced the full range of relevant data it could get its hands on. So taxonomists have been, from the very beginning of the DNA revolution, incorporating molecular evidence, along with fossil evidence, intragenetic evidence, morphology, and so forth.

Peggy: And with only 10% of the species discovered, I think that's what E. O. Wilson said, taxonomy becomes an important part of knowing about what's coming that's being new, that has no information. Is that correct?

Quentin: Absolutely. Humanity is finally recognizing its responsibility to be good stewards of the earth. But in order to make certain that we have sustainable ecosystems that are providing valuable services, and that we're sustaining agro-ecosystems that can continue to feed us, and so forth, assumes that we can recognize the components of those complex systems.

And, as you point out, nine out of ten pieces in those complex systems are unknown to science. That makes it very difficult to know if a potential pest or vector of a disease has been introduced into a geographic place where it doesn't belong, because we lack the baseline understanding of what species exist, and where they're distributed naturally, if you will.

Peggy: You're about to head up a new institute at ASU, the International Institute for Species Exploration. Tell me something about how you intend to take taxonomy and species exploration into the 21st century.

Quentin: Well, through two primary innovative steps. First is to build partnerships internationally. As I've said, most of what we know of biodiversity exists in the form of museum and herbarium specimens. We're not trying to reconstruct those vast collections that have taken centuries to build here at ASU, but rather to partner with the great herbaria and museums around the world, to expedite ways in which those existing specimens can be accessed and explored.

That second component will be built on cyber infrastructure. We can envision that the next wave of inventions associated with the Internet will involve digitized instruments, image libraries, all 250 years of existing literature digitized, openly searchable and accessible.

So that taking advantage of these new digital tools, it's possible to vastly accelerate how taxonomy's done and to link experts around the world that typically have worked with very fragmented, widely distributed resources, trying to get a complete picture of a taxon. Now, suddenly, we have the hope of linking all those resources into a seamless research tool that teams of taxonomists can use to work much faster.

Peggy: My other understanding is things like cyber infrastructure can also democratize things and cut some of the expense out so that everyone has more equal access to the materials.

Quentin: That's a great point, and I think a very exciting aspect of moving taxonomy into a cyber sphere is that in the past, to work efficiently in taxonomy, one needed access to great libraries and great collections. If you're a student working at a smaller institution, or if you're a scientist working in a developing country that may not have those comprehensive collections and libraries, suddenly you're on equal footing in terms of species exploration.

And we have the capacity to virtually repatriate at least knowledge of biodiversity to the countries of origin by making specimens, images of specimens, and associated data openly accessible to anyone.

Peggy: Very cool.

Now, how are you going to back up your cyber infrastructure? This was bothering me, so I was just curious.

Quentin: Back it up--in terms of backing up my claims, or backing up the data?

Peggy: [laughs] Are you going to have a second server for all of this, or...?

Quentin: Ah, yes. I'm assuming, for most of this, there will be mirror sites distributed around the world, because you're right. Enormous amounts of work go into building this data and interpreting the data. One wants to make certain that those are accessible. Even if a server is down for a number of hours, if we build this international network dependent on these resources, we'll want to make sure that there's always a backup online in case a crucial decision needs to be made.

Peggy: And things like Linnaeus' original books, that go back to, what, 1758? How will you archive those?

Quentin: A great deal of energy is already going into digitizing historic literature. Cornell University, a number of years ago, with a grant, digitized what they called the core agricultural literature. And that happened to include a great deal of taxonomic literature for groups of insects of economic importance to agriculturalists.

There's now a consortium of major museums and libraries attempting to raise funds to digitize all the literature since 1758, and great strides are being made. I think we can be very optimistic that within five to ten years, most of those resources will probably be accessible online.

Peggy: So what other new tools are on the horizon?

Quentin: Well, one good example, if you're trying to imagine, "What's this new cyber world going to be like to work in for a species explorer?" is an initial network of remotely operable high-resolution digital microscopes. When I was in London, we put together a consortium with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville and the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Working with a company in Virginia, Microptics, we developed a remotely operable system. So, in short, I can now sit at my desk in Tempe and manipulate and photograph and study specimens in Paris, Washington, or London as though I were sitting over a microscope in one of those cities.

Peggy: That's an amazing thought, that you can be thousands of miles away and turning an object, any object, around in three dimensions to look at all the characters that are necessary to identify it, in a way, as if you were pulling out a drawer.

Quentin: Absolutely. Some other fields, medicine in particular, have obviously been doing this sort of thing for a long time, and there are, as you may know, systems that allow surgeons to, at least in theory, work on a patient at any distance by digital manipulative robotic hands. For, no doubt, insurance purposes, these procedures are normally done with a surgeon in the same operating suite as the patient.

Peggy: [laughs]

Quentin: But, in theory, that could be done. Some of us are looking forward to moving to that stage of robotics, where not only could I examine a specimen in London from Arizona, I could also potentially dissect it.

Peggy: You also mentioned, when we had a conversation before, that you had this idea of a Martian Rover that you could send out, and possibly it could sniff out things.

Quentin: Absolutely. Ecologists are thinking in many creative ways about deploying remote sensors to detect changes in any number of parameters in the environment. Thinking creatively along those same lines, one could envision, depending on the animals you're looking for, ways of remotely sensing those as well.

What we had discussed previously was that idea of a Rover-like device, in particular for some beetles I'm interested in that produce a very distinctive defensive chemical. I think there's every reason to believe one could develop sensors capable of detecting those chemicals, and then either collecting the animals for you or at least alerting you to their presence.

Peggy: And certainly, if you were a little beetle hanging out, and a Rover came whizzing by, you would produce some scent. [laughs]

Quentin: [laughs] No doubt.

Peggy: Next month is the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus. What do you think he would have thought of all these changes?

Quentin: I like to think he would have loved it. He was certainly extraordinarily innovative for his time in how he approached this. He was very audacious. I mean, he set out to discover and describe every species on Earth, basically. And he managed to deal with, perhaps--he and his students--maybe 10,000 species in his lifetime. In the late 18th century, that was probably a pretty good percentage of people's best guess for how many species there might be in the world.

Today, confronted with the prospect of millions of undescribed species, I think he would embrace all of these exciting technologies as ways of improving our ability to get on with the work he started.

Peggy: I hear there's a move for something to replace the Linnaean system, called a PhyloCode, that proposes a new system of names, changes to rankings, and tossing the past, basically, into the dustbin. The concepts captured the cover of "Nature" magazine in March. Are all new tools good ones?

Quentin: Well, I think not, and you've raised one prime example that may not be such a good idea. The PhyloCode is well-intentioned. In my opinion, it's based on a fundamental misconception that because Linnaean classifications predate evolutionary thinking, that therefore they're necessarily in conflict, somehow, with classifications that reflect evolution.

That, of course, makes no sense at all. That would be like saying because Aristotle recognized beetles 2,000 years ago, that they're not an evolutionarily defensible group. They happen to be, and they were such an obvious natural group that even Aristotle could recognize them at that time.

So the PhyloCode assumes that we need to replace Linnaeus' system with one which is overtly phylogenetic. But the reality is, phylogenetic theory swept through systematic biology in the mid-1960s, and was instantly reflected in formal classifications.

In fact, that was the entire point of Willi Hennig, who was the theoretician who first advocated phylogenetic systematics, was that the Linnaean classifications would come to reflect the genealogy among species, and therefore serve as a general system of reference for all of biology, and I would argue that taxonomy's been doing a great job of that since the 60s. And while we can certainly improve our classifications, throwing out the Linnaean system makes no sense at all.

Peggy: And my understanding, too, is the Linnaean system absorbs any new characters you might want to add, whereas the PhyloCode tends to limit things. Is that correct?

Quentin: Yes, in a sense. The PhyloCode points to common ancestral species, and then defines clades, or groups, of related species relevant to those ancestors. The difficulty is, if we find new evidence that makes us question those ancestral relationships to begin with, the Linnaean system is highly flexible, and one can exclude or include species to reflect our best understanding, our most recent hypothesis about phylogeny; whereas the PhyloCode would lock you in, by definition, to a certain set of relationships that were falsified at a later time. That would make the classification almost irrelevant.

Peggy: That would be a mess.

Support for taxonomic research has been in decline for the last couple of decades, even though this decline has coincided with growing public and scientific appreciation of issues like conservation and biological resource management, and then there's the biodiversity crisis. These are all dependent on a foundation of sound taxonomy. Do you think that your new institute can help turn this trend around?

Quentin: Well, that's one of our greatest hopes in the institute, is that we can play a small role in doing that, and by bringing teams of museums and taxonomists together, we can advocate for taxonomy more effectively, and articulate what we're trying to do.

In my opinion, one of the reasons taxonomy has been comparatively neglected is that it's not experimental. The way many students have been educated in recent decades is to value experimentalism almost at the exclusion of any other approach in science.

In reality, taxonomy deals with testable hypotheses at multiple levels. It's a very rigorous science. But we have a large education job to do to convince our colleagues and make sure students being educated now appreciate the full breadth of what it means to be scientific.

Peggy: Now I have to ask you about your favorite research animal, beetles. What made you choose them to study?

Quentin: As an undergraduate, I was intending to be a microbiologist. I was at the Ohio State University, and I had an opportunity as an undergraduate to accompany a couple professors and nine graduate students for seven weeks through Mexico.

Peggy: Wow.

Quentin: It was on that trip that I recognized that I had come back home with a handful of new species, and these were beetles, and so there was no turning back at that point. I was hooked.

Peggy: [laughs] So you didn't necessarily know that your future would be filled with elytra and mesothoraxes or beetle parts at all.

Quentin: This is true. But I never met a notum I didn't like.

Peggy: [laughs]

Quentin: That's an old insect morphology joke. No, that's true. And, as I say, I was actually interested in microbiology and in protozoa in particular. But I think from an early age, even before I knew what a taxonomist was, I think I was one at heart.

I was always going out, trying to find species of protists I hadn't seen before. And so it was an easy transition to insects, because you can go in the field and actually see what you're collecting, rather than having to go home and culture something.

Peggy: I used term "beetle parts" a moment ago. I heard that you're the world's expert in dissecting beetle genitalia. Is that really a good thing, and why?

Quentin: Well, that depends whether you're a taxonomist or a beetle, I suppose, but--

Peggy: [laughs]

Quentin: No, it turns out that insects, many groups of insects, and beetles, certainly, among them--that the genitalia function in a loose analogy to a lock and key, so that there are very intricately shaped structures that are either associated with the mechanical coupling of the genitalia, or in species recognition, by triggering some kind of sensor in the corresponding mate. It just happens to be very convenient that when you dissect genitalia, you can often more quickly establish the limits of interspecific variation.

Peggy: OK, you heard it here: the Dean talking about genitalia.

Quentin: [laughs quietly]

Peggy: I understand that you've named quite a few species of slime mold beetles. You named them for President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, and your wife. How do names get chosen?

Quentin: Well, that's one of the privileges of getting to be an expert on a group. As you discover new species--within certain boundaries; there are international rules of nomenclature that govern both plant and animal names, and as long as you're consistent with those rules, and don't offend the sensibilities of editors--you can pretty much name species anything you like.

One of the greatest advantages of the Linnaean system is, because every species name consists of two names, the genus name and a specific epithet, they're typically thought of as a noun and an adjective. And this aids in memory tremendously. With half a million species of beetles to remember, you don't want frivolous or meaningless names. It's very helpful if the name describes the animal in some way, and it aids the memory in that regard.

Peggy: And so that tends to be the most common convention, then?

Quentin: Typically you would name it after some conspicuous behavior, or ecological association, or morphological character, or, failing that, you often see species named for the place where they were first discovered, and even that helps with the memory.

When my co-author and I named the political species, we were dealing with 65 new species in one group, and had pretty much exhausted the obvious morphology-based names. And so, in that case, these are known as patronyms, and you choose to honor people by naming species after them as well.

Peggy: I understand one of those beetles was named after Darth Vader.

Quentin: That's right. Agathidium vaderi. And we chose that because this particular species is flightless and effectively blind. It has a few facets left. The eye is very reduced, consists of a handful of facets and a little slit in the front of the head.

Peggy: Much like the helmet of Darth Vader.

Quentin: That's what it reminded us of. And what presents you, your first image, is a very broad, shiny, almost helmet-like, smooth head. And so, yeah, Vader came to mind for us.

Peggy: People are said to look like their dogs. Do people look like their species when scientists name them after themselves?

Quentin: [laughs] Well, happily, we tend not to name them after ourselves. Whether the species look like the people we name them after, I'll leave to the eye of the beholder.

Peggy: [laughs] And lastly, what would you call yourself if you were a beetle?

Quentin: Excellent question. Perhaps "gigantia". I need to go on a diet.

Peggy: [laughs] Well, Quentin, I want to thank you so much for taking time to sit here and talk with us.

Quentin: Oh, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you.

Peggy: And to find out more about the Institute for Species Exploration and the fun, maybe even revolutionary things that are going to happen on the horizon as it debuts at ASU, go to:

Quentin: www.species.asu.edu.

Peggy: And who knows? If you go there, you may even have the opportunity to name a beetle of your own.

This is Peggy Coulombe, and you've been listening to the School of Life Sciences' podcast, Science Studio. School of Life Sciences is in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University.

Species Exploration

Transcript - [Printable PDF format]

SOLS Podcasts 2007