Research Stories

by Adelheid Fischer

Illustration

"Keep your eyes peeled for rattlers!" I call out as we scramble down a bank into a sandy wash in South Mountain. Only weeks before I nearly stumbled over a diamondback stretched across the dry streambed.

But rattlesnakes aren't the objects of tonight's venture into this desert preserve in the heart of urban Phoenix, Arizona. We're scouting instead for pinacate beetles–in the genus Eleodes, to be precise. Included in this group is one of my favorite Sonoran Desert animals–a large beetle known as Eleodes amartus.

Stout, deliberate and lumbering, it maneuvers over desert rocks and dirt mounds like a Sherman tank. When disturbed, however, E. amartus becomes an agile gymnast. Wave the tip of a hiking stick in its face and the beetle instantly hoists its hind end into the air in what looks like a handstand. It's a warning: back off or risk being squirted by a foul-smelling liquid.

Beetle wranglers Quentin Wheeler and his postdoctoral student, Malte Ebach, are not deterred. By day, Wheeler serves as a vice president and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, the university's largest and most diverse academic division. Along with the demands of academic administration, he maintains a companion career as a world-renowned beetle taxonomist.

Beetle taxonomy is a vocational passion that dates to the 1970s, when Wheeler was an undergraduate at Ohio State University. Back then, the budding entomologist spent six weeks in the forests of Mexico where he turned up a half-dozen new species of slime-mold beetles in the genus Anisotoma. He was hooked.

During the ensuing decades, Wheeler says he "fell in love" with Agathidium, a sister group of beetles. He went on to describe 65 new species in this genus using existing museum records as well as specimens that he'd collected from the wilds of southern Appalachia.

Judging by his spirited step and focused attention, Wheeler has lost none of his youthful enthusiasm. On this outing, he doesn't turn up any new species. But no matter. Before the night is over, the scientists will have collected 13 Eleodes beetles.

Each insect is preserved in a vial of alcohol. Ebach carefully notes the date, time, GPS coordinates and names of all the people present. This information will be later transcribed into an official collection record. Someday another coleopterist (beetle expert), student, or conservation biologist will dust off these specimens for use in their own research.

If Wheeler had his way, such records wouldn't be squirreled out of sight in the storerooms of natural history museums or botanical gardens. He dreams of a time when a grade-schooler in Kansas or a field biologist in Brazil can pull up specimen records from any institution in the world with the click of a computer key.

In his role as the director of ASU's International Institute for Species Exploration, Wheeler believes that time has come–and none too soon.

"There's growing consensus that a massive species extinction is underway," Wheeler explains. "Some estimates say that it's about 1,000 times more rapid than the extinctions we can document in the fossil record. Within this century, we stand to lose one-quarter or more of the species on Earth, collectively referred to as the biodiversity crisis. We're the last generation with the opportunity to explore and document most of the species on this planet. That's important for biologists who are interested in evolution because this is the only evidence we're likely to ever have of 4 billion years of evolution," he adds.

"It's also important for environmental science," Wheeler continues. "If we don't have a baseline of what species exist or where they occur, how are we to detect increases or decreases in biodiversity? How are we to detect introductions of potential agricultural pests or vectors of disease? How are we even to know if we succeed in some of our conservation efforts when we have no idea where the starting point is? This adds a sense of urgency to the mission of taxonomy that didn't exist before."

As it's currently practiced, however, taxonomy isn't up to the task. Notoriously time-consuming and laborious, the process hasn't changed much since the 18th-century. That is when Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus devised the binomial system still used for categorizing plant and animal species.

When a new species is discovered, for example, taxonomists begin by comparing the physical specimen to all others of its kind to ensure that it is indeed unique. The next step entails describing the species in both words and drawings and assigning it a name. The results must then be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Complete documentation for one species normally takes a minimum of six months or more.

As a result, only 1.8 million species have been described in the past 230 years. To meet current needs, Wheeler says that five times as many species will need to be described in a fraction of the time. And the taxonomic demands are mounting just as the ranks of experts are dwindling worldwide due to a lack of investment in training and job creation.

"The challenge facing taxonomy is how do we inventory, discover, describe, and name an estimated 10 million additional species?" Wheeler asks. "At the pace in which we've been doing taxonomy, it's impossible to complete this before many species have gone extinct."

Undaunted, Wheeler has crafted a comprehensive plan that introduces new strategies and leverages existing efforts to accomplish this ambitious agenda. To speed the discovery of new species in the field, for example, Wheeler is working with students from ASU's W. P. Carey School of Business to establish what he calls a Species Exploration Microbank.

"In taxonomy, you can get a lot of work done on the cheap," Wheeler says. " We want to create a web site where those who want to support the exploration of new species on Earth can sift through a list of people who need small quantities of money. Maybe it's a grad student who needs $50 to visit a remote site in Bolivia. In taxonomy, small contributions can have a huge impact."

The goal is not only to build the collections of museums and herbaria, but also to step up the description of new species and increase access to them. Major worldwide initiatives are active. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility is just one example. These projects are helping to move millions of species records from the file cabinets of museums and botanical gardens to the Internet.

With help from engineers in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, Wheeler hopes to capitalize on such efforts through the construction of a cyber infrastructure. By manipulating remotely operable microscopes, for example, taxonomists can pore over specimens in great detail and even perform simple dissections. These cyber close-ups could be linked to other technologies, such as video conferencing, to create a platform for discussion.

Using these cyber platforms, teams of experts could collectively examine specimens in real time and reach consensus more efficiently. Working online also could save considerable time and money by allowing scientists to cut back on travel to far-flung collections. And, as Wheeler points out, the good news is that "most of the technology to build a cyber infrastructure is either adaptable from off-the-shelf stuff that exists or is very easily engineered by computer scientists."

But not all taxonomic challenges are technological. Wheeler also plans to engage experts such as sociologists. For centuries, he says, taxonomy largely has been a solitary pursuit. But the urgency of the biodiversity crisis demands that fiercely independent taxonomists learn to work collectively toward a goal that is every bit as challenging as flying to the moon.

The ASU scientist is convinced that it can be done. "Other fields such as astronomy don't shy away from numbers," he says. "Astronomers are systematically mapping the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way every night while we're asleep. New York City revises the phone directory for 8 million people every year. There is no reason why the cataloguing of 10 million species is not manageable."

For more information about biodiversity, watch the Planet Bob video.

Or listen to a podcast with Quentin Wheeler at the Ask a Biologist web site.