Deep
Sea Daycare - How do you take care of something that practically no one
has ever even seen alive before? (1/23/03)
Animal
Archive - It’s a fact that animal species are fast disappearing
because of human activity. But the San Diego Zoo is trying a different approach.
They are trying to save the animals by preserving their DNA and cracking their
genetic code. (5/22/01)
Running
Out of Reptiles - The World’s reptiles could be going the way of
the dinosaurs. (8/15/00)
How many different creatures share this world with
us? Some scientists want to take an animal census to classify our furry and
slimy neighbors. It’s the kind of thing most people think has already
been done.
“Humans seem more interested in discovering life on Mars than we are
on this planet,” says Brian
Fisher, assistant curator of entomology at the California
Academy of Sciences. “Yet understanding life on this planet is critical.
It is said that modern medicine didn’t begin until the completion of
the Human Genome Project.
Likewise, we can say that modern biology won’t begin until we understand
who we share this planet with.”
Fisher is a member of the science board of the All
Species Foundation, an organization with the ambitious goal of inventorying,
describing, and classifying every animal and plant on our planet. The All
Species Foundation is currently based at California Academy of Sciences, and
its search
engine has indexed more than 873,000 species, 120,336 common names, and
130,504 synonyms from twelve
contributing databases.
Why hasn’t this inventory been done sooner? “Basically, we lacked
the technology and actually the motivation to accomplish this task,”
explains Fisher. “Simultaneously, the threat wasn’t there before.
It’s only recently that we’ve developed the capacity to destroy
much of the natural habitat, and at the same time, we’re beginning to
really understand how human society is linked with the natural world.”
image: Chris Baldwin, Shoulder High Productions
Fisher would like to see this inventory get underway
in his lifetime. “Let’s say there are 30 million species out there
in the world, and we understand only about 10 percent of them. In the next
25 years, we may go from understanding 10 percent to 80 percent. But we would
have reached the threshold, where we’ve understood enough and developed
the means to accomplish the rest after 25 years.”
Fisher’s particular area of expertise is ants, “one of the most
dominant and ecologically important organisms.” He is helping to develop
AntWeb,
a joint project between the California Academy of Sciences and the University
of California at Davis designed to provide information on ant diversity.
“Every single person has met an ant,” says Fisher. “Every
single person knows what an ant is. But what they don’t know is that
ants are the most abundant organisms in terms of biomass or in terms of numbers.
In fact, if you piled up all the ants that you find in all the forest habitats
in the world and put them in one big pile, they would weigh more than all
the humans combined. There are more ants than any other terrestrial organism
on earth, so they also dominate in terms of interaction. They are seed dispersers.
They eat more plant material than any other insect.” And yet, Fisher
points out, we still know so little about them. “It’s impossible,
almost, to identify an ant from North America unless you’re one of the
one or two scientific experts. We have no information that’s available
to the public or land managers for identifying any insects.”
Fisher counting ants in Madagascar. image: Chris Baldwin, Shoulder High Productions
Fisher has spent ten years getting to know some of
the more than one thousand species of ants on Madagascar, an island off the
coast of Africa. A documentary
of his trip is in the works. Next, he’s heading to the Seychelles, remote
islands that were once part of Madagascar. As shown on PBS’s NOVA,
the Seychelles are home to many creatures isolated from the African mainland
for millions of years, and found nowhere else on earth.
Fisher knows that he and his colleagues have their work cut out for them. “The
ambitious goal of surveying life on this planet is a costly endeavor, about
maybe 5 billion dollars. However, the return on that investment will be greater
the sooner we get it accomplished. Every decision made by a city—where
to put a road, where to put a farm, where to build a school, how to decide
between preserving something or turning it over to development—is a
decision requiring this information. So the sooner we have it, the more efficient
and the better we’ll be at protecting and using the world.”
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