PROGRAM SEEKS TO SAVE TAXONOMISTS FROM EXTINCTION

by Jennifer Jacobson

Taxonomists, the scientists who describe and identify plants and animals before they disappear forever from the planet, have found that they themselves are on the brink of extinction. But a six-year-old federal program is beginning to bring new blood into the field.

Although no hard data are available, taxonomists say their numbers have been dwindling for decades as research interest and, more importantly, dollars have been attracted to new scientific fields like molecular biology. Taxonomists studying algae, invertebrates, and fungi are thought to be especially few in number.

In the entire world, for example, only three experts remain who study the 4,500 known species of pseudoscorpians, small arachnids that live in the soil and under the bark of trees, says Petra Sierwald, a curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago who specializes in spider taxonomy. One of the three is retired in this country, one is in Paris, and the other is in Australia.

When the Victorian view of science as a collection of facts was replaced by the modern approach-science as a systematic way of asking questions-the collecting of facts and describing of specimens came to be considered "a lower form of science," one that did not attract money, says Ms. Sierwald. "At universities," she adds, "people interested in spiders and millipedes were simply not hired in the 1970s."
In other words, they were swatted away like flies. That has been to the detriment of the planet, Ms. Sierwald believes, since science has identified only 20 to 30 percent of living things on Earth. "If you don't know the species in an ecosystem, you can make no sensible assessment of the danger that could be done to that ecosystem," she says. For instance, "If you try to reforest an area, you need millipedes, ones that chew down the leaf litter." Otherwise, she says, a deciduous forest would drown in the stuff. Taxonomists provide the tools to identify the correct millipede and thus help ecologists reforest properly.

One of the beauties of taxonomy is that it can be done cheaply. "Quite often you may not have to write a grant proposal," Ms. Sierwald says. "If you have a microscope and a collection, you're pretty much set."

In response to a dual crisis-the loss of biodiversity among species worldwide and the disappearance of scientists who know about them-the National Science Foundation six years ago developed five-year grants under the Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy program, also know as PEET. The idea was to rejuvenate the field and convince biology students that taxonomy is still a viable science.

The grants, worth up to $750,000 apiece, have been awarded to more than 40 leading taxonomists around the country to study mites, leeches, spiders, and mollusks, among other organisms not studied well, or at all.

Grant recipients must each train two new taxonomists to help replenish the ranks, says James E. Rodman, program director for systematic biology in the NSF's Division of Environmental Biology. In addition, recipients must place their research on the Web to make it more accessible. All of the PEET projects have foreign collaborators, and the European scientific community is also starting to create similar programs to train taxonomists at their own institutions and museums, he says.

Scientists say the program is starting to pay off. Only about five experts in the world study the 65 genera of chytridiomycetes, a group of fungi found in the soil and in aquatic habitats that help degrade such materials as pollen and insect remains. Three of them--including Martha J. Powell, a professor and head of biological sciences at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa--have received a joint PEET grant to study the fungi and to train three young taxonomists on chytridiomycetes.

"We as humans are attracted to things we know best-mammals and trees," Ms. Powell says. Since chytridiomycetes belong to the microbial world, "people don't see them and don't know how neat they are. We have not had the means to even recognize the biodiversity that has existed." But now with new molecular techniques, she says, scientists can find organisms in water and soil that they didn't know were there.

Only five millipede experts were left in the world-three in this country, one in Moscow, one in Copenhagen, all of them in their late 50s to early 70s. That is, until Ms. Sierwald used her PEET grant to study the many-legged arthopods and recruited two students to do the same.

For two years, Jason E. Bond, one of two students under Ms. Sierwald's wing, has worked as a postdoctoral fellow on the grant. As an undergraduate, he wanted to study spiders but was discouraged from pursuing that interest by a biology professor who told him, "If you want to make it in biology, you need to either be a molecular biologist, a biochemist, or a microbiologist," because that's where the jobs and the money were. Mr. Bond ignored the advice, and he is to begin work in January as a tenure-track assistant professor of biology at East Carolina University.

Still, taxonomy has a long way to go before the field is replenished. Ms. Sierwald doesn't know how many taxonomists the world actually needs. "Everybody would want more people in their groups," she says. "I'd never say we need 10,000 millipede specialists. We certainly need more than one. Ten people with a good spread in age would be good."

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Jennifer Jacobson is an editorial intern with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Saving a Dying Field," Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 27, 2001.