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Good evening. Welcome to the USGS
in another installment in our continuing public lecture series.
I'm delighted to see you here tonight.
Some of you may know that the traffic is horrendous – a big power outage.
So I don't know how many people made it over here, but I'm glad you made it.
Most of you know that, before I introduce tonight's speaker,
I always let you know about next month's lecture
because I want you to come back in this continuing series.
Next month, Steve Fortier is speaking
about global trends in mineral commodities supplies.
Now, you might think that mineral commodities supplies sounds pretty dry,
but let me tell you, if you live in a house, and you drive a car, and you have a
smartphone in your pocket, you should care about mineral commodity supplies.
So please do join us next month to talk about global trends.
It's kind of the intersection of science and geology and politics and economics.
So it should be fascinating.
Tonight's speaker is Dr. John French. John French is the director of
the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland.
So we're very happy that he took the time to fly
across the country and come and visit us in the Golden State.
John French oversees research on a variety of topics,
including wildlife toxicology, coastal ecology, population modeling
and decision science, and a variety of monitoring programs,
some of which you may have heard of –
the American Bird Banding Lab and the Breeding Bird Survey.
The Patuxent center also has responsibility for the
North American Vertebrate Collection
that is housed in the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
John also, in his position, sits on the U.S.-Canada
Whooping Crane Recovery Team, and he has been involved in
whooping crane conservation for many years.
His scientific training was a doctorate at – a Ph.D. at the University
of Wisconsin in Maryland on the ecology and physiology of land animals.
And he was initially hired at Patuxent to undertake wildlife –
excuse me – to undertake research in wildlife toxicology.
He's been there since 1993 – longer than the Patuxent Wildlife
Research Center has been part of the USGS.
We are delighted to have him out here, and please join me in welcoming
Dr. John French talk about what's in a name.
[ Applause ]
- Thank you for that nice introduction. Good evening, everyone.
Glad you were able to brave the traffic to get here.
I'm very pleased tonight to talk about natural history collections and
museum-based research that we do at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and –
for the benefit of USGS and the Department of Interior and the nation.
Our museum group is, as you heard, housed downtown in D.C.
at the Smithsonian's natural – national – sorry –
National Museum of Natural History. Easy for you to say.
It's – they do a lot of really cool work there
with their colleagues at the Smithsonian.
And by the way, in my introductory slide here, I'd just like to point out
that this snake actually just had lunch before it was collected.
And you can see that it's got a big gecko in its gut.
And I'll tell you more about this later, but I like this slide because it
exemplifies a couple of the themes you'll hear about during my talk.
And those themes are species identification, invasive species –
that gecko in the gut of that snake is an invasive species – human health and
safety, and a variety of new techniques that are applied to museum specimens.
Let's see if I can do this right here. I'll just do that.
You know, many of us biologists got started
looking at animals when we were younger, trying to identify them.
And perhaps you did some of that yourself.
Maybe you're birdwatchers or have a pollinator garden or just like
being outdoors. Most of us started out by using field guides.
And field guides have – are really packed full
of all sorts of life history information.
And I don't know if you've ever wondered where all that
life history information comes from, but really it comes from natural history
museums, and specifically, research collections at natural history museums.
So that's the subject of my talk today. What is a natural history museum?
What are the collections used for at research museums like that?
And what are the benefits of work that
comes out of folks that work at museums?
So let me introduce to you our group there at the Smithsonian.
We call them the Biological Survey Unit.
This unit was formed in 1889 – only a couple years after
the U.S. Geological Survey was formed.
At that point, it was called the Bureau of Biological Survey.
And they were commissioned to investigate and record
the diversity of vertebrates in North America.
And really, that mission continues today.
Pretty much just as it was, except with a whole lot
better technology and a whole lot of new methods and a whole lot
of different and interesting questions that they have to answer as well.
As I mentioned, the BSU is stationed at the National Museum of Natural History.
And we – while we curate the North American collection of vertebrates –
that's mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles – I realize fish are
vertebrates, but we don't do them. We do the terrestrial ones.
And that section of the collection is really, by far, the largest part
of the collection at the Smithsonian. You can see those – for mammals,
we have about the same amount of specimens in the North America
collection as we do in all the rest of the collection for the rest of the world.
More birds in our collection than in the world collection at the Smithsonian.
And many more herps. Herps – that's reptiles and amphibians together.
So almost – we're well over a million specimens are curated
by our group there. So that's a lot of work.
And, indeed, the mammal collection is one of the best mammal collections
in the world in terms of its comprehensiveness and detail.
And so people from all over the world come to work with us
there at the museum. It's kind of fun.
You go down there, and there are all sorts of people running around.
You know, you see very, very interesting people down there.
So you've heard me use the word "specimen" a couple times.
And I just want to start from the beginning here.
A physical specimen really is the basic unit
of all natural history collections – physical specimen.
And we're – what we're looking at here are a couple of –
or three specimens of the eastern red-eared bat – a very pretty little bat.
It has a little bit of red coloration.
So these specimens are physical specimens.
They're taken into the collection, preserved very carefully.
The idea is to hang on to these specimens really forever.
Of course, nothing lasts forever, but we try our best to preserve
the tissues and the fur and the bones, and even the soft parts, in alcohol,
are kept for many, many years. The idea is to put them in a condition
that they will last for an awful long time, which is, you know, the point.
So how do we – how do we collect these specimens?
Well, early on in the life of a collection, really, expeditions to go find specimens
and bring them into the collection – or, bring them into the museum
is really what – you know, it forms the bulk of the work.
And you can kind of imagine these old guys with long mustaches out there
with shotguns collecting stuff. And indeed, that's what they looked like.
So they'd go out and trap and shoot or net or do whatever you can do
to gather these animals in. Today, we don't really do that quite so much.
First of all, we realize that collecting animals in the wild
actually does impact those populations in a way that is
somewhat counter to the whole purpose of having
the knowledge that comes from a collection in the first place.
So oftentimes, what is done is, animals are scavenged.
That is, dead animals are picked up. Actually, road kill is a fairly
common way of getting new specimens into the collection.
Early on in my graduate career – here's a little gruesome story –
I was out riding my bike getting some exercise,
sick of that damn seminar I was in kind of thing, and riding around
the countryside in Wisconsin and, like, zipping along.
And I saw this animal in the road, and I just stopped. I don't know why.
I stopped. Turns out it was a least weasel.
I'd never even seen a least weasel before.
I picked it up, wrapped it up in my shirt, stuck it in my saddlebag, and brought it
back to the – to the very small museum at the University of Wisconsin and
skinned it out. And that was my first introduction to museum collections.
But it's that kind of sort of serendipitous collection of specimens that now
forms really a lot of how we get specimens into the collection.
So how do you create a specimen? Well, I mentioned a little bit that –
about preserving the specimen, but after an animal is collected,
an awful lot of work goes into preparing the specimen.
Obviously, you have to identify the thing first.
And I had an idea what that weasel was, but I wasn't exactly sure when I
picked it up off the ground. So I had to identify it first.
And usually that proceeds by comparing it to other specimens
in the collection or field guides, or, if you can't, take a picture and
sending information off to colleagues around the world
and finding out what was going on. Hopefully you do it correctly.
So preparation of the specimen is very important, as I mentioned.
Usually mammals are skinned. The bones – the carcass is taken out,
and the bones and all the – all the flesh are put in a –
in a bin with a bunch of sarcophagus beetles.
That is, beetles that eat the flesh off the bones.
And after several weeks of that, you go back, and you can retrieve the bones.
They are absolutely clean after these beetles have chewed off all the flesh.
And those bones are kept. And you can see these vials here
are actually bones that belong to each one of these specimens here.
Not the entire skeleton, but some of it.
Very importantly, there is a label prepared for each specimen.
And here's a kind of a blow-up of a – of a label up here on the top.
I'm not quite sure why we have this thing along the bottom of the
screen here, but I guess Apple wanted to make its presence known here.
A label is a very important part of the physical specimen.
It holds the absolute most important information about that physical specimen –
the species, the date and location of collection, the color of soft tissues.
Soft tissues, once they dry out and age, lose their color.
And being able to recall what the animal looked like when it was very fresh is an
important part of the – part of the data that goes along with the specimen.
Also some – oftentimes measurements are made.
And, while not on the label, sometimes soft parts, as I mentioned, are removed.
Often the gut is removed. Gonads are removed.
Parasites that are found on the outside or the inside of the animal are
preserved in alcohol – all associated with that one specimen.
So in order to – in order to make sure that we know which data goes with
which specimen, the catalog number – this number right up here – is by far
the most important bit of information that goes on each specimen.
And all those – all those data that I'm talking about – the measurements,
the coloration, the collection field notes, photographs – and today's – you know,
gene sequences, if genetic work has been done on the specimen.
All of that data gets stuck in the database – you know,
one of these fancy relational databases today where everything
is connected with – in this case, by the catalog number.
All that goes into a very big database that's actually publicly available.
If you're interested in going on the database of the national collection,
you can certainly do that online.
Okay, all that's gathered together, and these animals are laid out nicely
in this tray with labels on them. And then the thing is installed.
That sounds a little funny. Maybe it sounds a little bit like
an art exhibition, but you take the tray, and you locate it properly among
all the cabinets of specimens within the museum.
And that location is important because usually they're put next to very similar
species – maybe similar species from this continent, maybe from other continents.
It depends what the particular curator is interested at the moment.
And it's the comparison of information across these
different collections that really provides the power of information from museums.
So a series of specimens becomes a collection that
could be analyzed and used for many different topics.
So what are these collections good for? Well, here's a series of specimens.
These are all song sparrows, as it turns out.
I'm sure many of you have seen song sparrows.
And you can certainly see that there's quite a bit of variation in
coloration among these animals. In fact, variation in size as well.
So how does this tray of birds relate, say, to current management issues?
A lot of what we do is provide information that helps land management
agencies and wildlife managers across the country do the work that they do.
Well, one thing that's important to wildlife managers
is the description of subspecies.
Subspecies are useful because – or, necessary, in many cases –
because they are the unit of protection
that's enshrined in the Endangered Species Act.
If there was an endangered subspecies, the act requires the Fish and Wildlife
Service to go out and decide whether it deserves – if it's a very uncommon
subspecies, the Fish and Wildlife Service must go decide whether
it's worthy of protection under the Endangered Species Act.
So very importantly, the museum folks sort of delineate that
subspecies designation. Which group of organisms are
we actually talking about when we're talking about a subspecies?
Is it really a subspecies? It's very interesting.
As we go through and work with some of these specimens,
we find that species that we thought were distinct actually –
or subspecies that we thought were distinct actually are not.
And in other cases, you know, subspecies are carved out of
what was initially thought to be one single species.
It turns out that these two left-hand birds on the tray –
the two large ones are indeed a distinct subspecies of song sparrow.
And actually, about 30% of all the birds that are protected
under the Endangered Species Act are subspecies.
I think there are 31 of them, so you do your math,
that's about 100 entities protected under the Endangered Species Act.
It turns out four of them are here in California.
So for you ornithologists, it's the California least tern.
The southwestern willow flycatcher – very hard to identify.
The least Bell's vireo and then the western snowy plover.
Plovers are – those small, little plovers
are endangered just about everywhere – every species too.
My ornithologist colleague says, why don't you ask people why they're
so hard on their – on their subspecies in California. I don't know. [laughter]
I'm sure you're not hard on them.
Another value of collections is to try and figure out what the distribution
of animals are – and here, on a continental scale.
And particularly for bats – and again, these are eastern red bats we're
looking at, they're not very – they're not readily observable in the wild.
They're nocturnal. They do chatter a little bit,
but usually very, very softly, so you don't hear them much.
People don't – some people don't like bats very much, so they don't pay
much attention to them. Maybe try and get away from them. [chuckles]
But – so especially for an animal like this that's hard to see in the wild,
museum collections are very useful in determining
ranges and migration schedule and that kind of thing.
So here's a map of locations in the east where the eastern red bat
has been found. And I don't believe these are
all the locations in our collection, but the range is there listed in gray.
So here's a collection of – a very attractive collection of eggs.
I particularly like those white ones with the squiggly brown marks on them.
A very pretty, you know, set of eggs.
And of course, we do collect eggs from birds.
But what would be the utility of gathering eggs?
Well, maybe some of you are aware of the fact that, when DDT
was thought to be a harmful agent for the production of – for laying down
calcium in eggshells in birds, one of the important sets of data that actually
showed that there was a time – that there was a chronology to this effect was
looking at eggs in museums and measuring the thickness of eggshells.
And that study showed that yes, indeed, before the DDT era,
eggshells were, you know, X thick. After DDT was used, those shells
became much thinner in some birds – in those birds that are
high-level carnivores that are very highly exposed to
contaminants like this through the food chain.
Adding more evidence that, indeed, the DDT was the cause of eggshell thinning.
And I'd just like to make a plug for Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.
The Patuxent folks, back in the 1960s, did the definitive experimental work to
show, indeed, that, if you feed falcons – in this case, falcons –
DDT, their eggshells, indeed, are a lot thinner.
And many of the eggshells produced in our experimental kestrel colony
at Patuxent – they were unable to hatch the eggs,
so the eggs broke as soon as they were laid.
So that was a really important study in the history of Patuxent –
for sure, in the history of wildlife toxicology.
Well, there is a – so this time series can help us look at variation over time.
There's another very interesting way we can use some of these specimens,
and that is to look at what we think is an invasive disease
here in the – in the U.S., or will be, and that's a fungus call Bsal.
Bsal is a contraction of a very long Latin name that I'm not sure
I can pronounce, which is the name of the fungus.
- [inaudible]
- Sorry. - What's going on?
- I was trying to get rid of this. [inaudible]
- Yeah. I don't know how to do that.
- Ignore me. - Okay. [chuckles]
Where were we? Let's see.
Here we go.
So here's a lesion on a European salamander – a fungal infection on the
skin of a salamander – really ugly looking thing. Looks really gross.
And we have seen a few imported salamanders.
And believe it or not, there was a salamander trade in this country – a few
imported salamanders that have come into the U.S. with these infections.
And we're quite concerned that it is something that we
don't want to see in our native population of salamanders.
It has devastated salamander populations in Europe.
But the idea that it's an invasive disease was challenged a little while ago.
And how would we know whether the disease was here or not?
Well, the herpetologists at the museum decided, well, let's go back
and look at 50 years of preserved salamanders and see if we can find
any evidence of infection in these – in these animals. Turns out they could not.
So, indeed, the – two things came out of that.
One, the crash in population numbers of plethodon salamanders in the east
was not due to this – likely not due to this fungus, number one.
And number two, yes indeed, this is an invasive disease.
It hasn't been around for a long time. So we do want to be quite careful about
importing salamanders that might be infected.
Very interesting use of the collection to go back and look at some historical data.
Well, handling all these animals gives the folks at the museum a lot of expertise.
And much of that expertise is directed towards
helping solving, hopefully, societal issues.
You know, many of you have heard of the risks of airplanes
bumping into birds in flight. And, you know, there was that
Tom Hanks movie a little while ago where you looked at – where you
recounted the story of the airliner that hit a bunch of geese over
the Hudson and came down.
There was a very dramatic and important rescue of the folks on the plane.
Bird strikes happen quite a lot with planes, as it turns out.
Bats also bump into planes – or, as I like to say it,
planes are bumping into bats, unfortunately.
And the Air Force is a little concerned about that.
They asked us to look at some of the collisions between bats and their aircraft.
It's kind of expensive when an F-16 gets its engine blown up by a little bat, right?
So they wanted to know, was there anything we can do to avoid it?
Well, first of all, what bat is it?
So our expert here, Suzy Peurach, takes a little bit of the gunk that's left,
scrapes it off the blades in the – in the turbines, and tries to identify
the bat by the nature of the hairs that remain.
And she's able to do that pretty well.
And the idea is – here is that maybe this could lead to mitigation efforts.
Maybe it can – they can change their flight protocols or understand
something about the – when during the year bats might be a problem that
Air Force base X, Y, or Z – see if they can avoid some of those things.
So there's some practical problems that we can help solve as well.
Another way we apply our expertise – again,
here's another example from the Armed Forces.
Our folks were asked to go over to an Army base in Djibouti, East Africa.
How many of you know where Djibouti is?
Good. I had to look it up the other day. I hate to say it.
It's a really tiny, little place in very eastern Africa.
And so they were concerned about
protecting the troops that were on base there.
So a herpetologist went over and, gosh, they found – let's see if I get this right
here – two species of carpet vipers – a very, very venomous snake.
And of course, we don't want our troops getting bitten by carpet vipers.
It wouldn't be a good thing.
So they figured out something about the life history
of these animals and how to avoid them and that kind of thing.
An interesting little side note on that – it looked like– there are some hints
that the carpet vipers also are vectors for the causative agent of Middle East
respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which was also something to be avoided
on the base here – very hard to – an infection that's very hard to treat.
So here's a picture of the – of the viper over here, and you can
see the fangs coming out here. I'm not sure I'd really want to get
that close to a viper, but, you know, these guys know what they're doing.
This picture kind of makes me laugh. This guy wasn't really
regular Army, I don't think. He wasn't in uniform properly.
It's one of our guys who went over there.
Apparently they had – the Army had to really get strict with him because
he didn't want to wear his shoes. So he had to wear shoes.
I guess the difference between Army life and academic life.
So here's a picture of that snake from my first slide.
This is, in fact, a diadem snake.
And the animal he ate is – I'm sure you all know this –
this is a rough bent-toed gecko.
I didn't know that until my colleagues told me what the identification was.
This gecko – I'm sorry.
The gecko is actually native to the Middle East – not Africa.
And how it got there is a little bit of a puzzle.
The puzzle is even more strange because
there is a population of these geckos in Arizona.
What are they doing in Arizona? They're native to the Middle East.
Well, the hypothesis is that there was human transport of the geckos
from the Middle East to Arizona, and then from Arizona to Djibouti
to the – to the camp there, and then we found out about it
because the snake that was collected had one in its gut.
So this is a very interesting example, if it proves to be true,
of invasive species, or transport of species – dispersal of species,
if you will, around the globe by the agency of humans,
which is happening more and more and more every day.
And I dare say, with the movement of humans around the Earth,
we really can't expect that there isn't going to be an almost completely
cosmopolitan group of species eventually on the face of the Earth.
But – and when species invade other areas that haven't seen them, if they're
predators, oftentimes, they do great damage to the local flora and fauna.
That's certainly happening in Hawaii.
So invasive species is something we work on quite a bit.
I've talked about invasive disease. I've talked about these geckos.
And I mentioned that we work on the North American collection.
Well, part of understanding what the fauna is like in North America,
part of understanding how and when we can recognize an invasive species,
is really helped out by the fact that we have this worldwide collection
at the museum and can see, understand, and recognize
an invasive species when we see one.
It's not just our folks that work on the collections at the museum.
There are researchers from all over the world that come by, as I mentioned.
And particularly folks from North America.
Here's a study that was done by one of our colleagues in USGS
who lives in Colorado at the Colorado Science Center out there.
And he was interested in the distribution of the hoary bat.
You can see that sort of frosty fur on the
ventral side of that bat up there – hence the name, the hoary bat.
The hoary bat is a migratory species,
but we really didn't know much about its migration.
We didn't know when it was migrating or where it was migrating.
And the interesting thing about this bat is that it accounts for
about 40% of all the mortalities of bats around wind towers.
Now, wind tower production is ramping up greatly, especially in the
middle part of the country where – you know, in the Midwest,
where it's flat and there's no barrier to winds.
And the siting of wind farms has become a – sort of a big business.
I guess you could put it that way.
Most of the wind power companies are fairly sensitive to the fact that
they don't want to have problems with killing species on the blades of the
wind tower after they install the thing. They want – they'd much rather
know where to put the thing in a safe place before they get going with it.
So part of the – part of the goal here is to identify those areas of the country,
and maybe those seasons of the year, when bat strikes are most likely to occur.
And the hoary bat is one that we really are concentrating on there.
So the national collection was used to actually determine and define
the migratory behavior of this bird – or, bird – sorry – this bat.
We didn't really have good collections in the field, but the – but the – sorry –
didn't have good field data on these birds, but the – bats, but the collections
in the museum allowed this fellow to define what the schedule
and spatial distribution and migration was.
And those data have been used to help site wind farms in the Midwest.
Well, most of the previous examples I've talked about were conservation
questions having to do with individual species, or maybe a predator and a prey.
But sometimes there are larger questions that we deal with –
questions of much larger scope. And an important one that's
been ongoing for a while is the crisis in amphibian biodiversity.
Maybe some of you know that frogs and toads and salamanders
and other amphibians have been declining worldwide.
It's been recognized now for about 20 years that there's
been a real crisis in amphibian population numbers worldwide
without really very many answers about why it's happening.
So evidence had been really mounting. And in the 1980s, I think people came
together and realized that something more comprehensive – some more
comprehensive data about the scope and nature of the problem was really needed.
But amphibians have a – so there are no dearth of ideas
about why it might be happening, but the definition of what was
happening is what was needed initially.
Amphibians have a very complex lifestyle.
They, you know, start out in the water. They lay their eggs in the water,
and then they move on to dry land. That's the amphi-bios –
two life – two lives. That's the Latin derivation of amphibian.
And so they're subject to habitat alteration and
habitat degradation in two different habitats – land and water.
They also have a very permeable skin. In fact, all amphibians are quite,
you know, slimy or have wet skin.
And many of them breathe through their skin.
In fact, many of them don't have any lungs and gather oxygen in only
through diffusion across their wet skins. Which is kind of interesting.
Here's another little natural history fact for you.
Anybody know what this is up here?
- [inaudible] - Very good. Who said that?
Yeah. This is a limbless amphibian.
Looks a little bit like a snake or a worm or, you know, whatever.
In fact, it took – it's actually an amphibian.
Has no limbs. Crawls like a snake.
And is really a very fascinating animal. But indeed, it is an amphibian.
So what was needed here in the – to define the scope of the problem was
a series of good monitoring programs. But how are we going to do that?
Well, the folks in the museum put together this – the initial book they put
together was in a series called Measuring and Monitoring Biological Diversity.
And they did this for the amphibians.
Basically, developed some standardized protocols for designing a monitoring
program, going out and training volunteers and others to carry it out in
a regular fashion so you get, you know, quantitatively defensible data.
And then helped – also in here was help analyzing the data
that were gathered with those methods.
So this is essentially a how-to book, or maybe even a self-help book.
And it's been very, very influential. Had many, many thousands
of references over the years. Translated into several different
languages, and really has provided guidance for amphibian monitoring
across the world for the last 20 years. It's really been very influential.
And I think that's the kind of thing that the folks at the museum can help with,
having done these kind of monitoring programs themselves in the field.
So these methods were used in the U.S. too, of course, and is the basis for the
North American Amphibian Monitoring Program that we run out of Patuxent.
And that's a series of methods and protocols that we designed for
states to use, and we kind of import the data – or, export the
method to the states, and then they send us the data back.
And we've developed some very good information
on amphibian decline through those programs.
Another very interesting issue with regard to amphibian monitoring
is they're not very readily seen – kind of like bats.
They're – you know, except for frogs and toads, who sing in the springtime,
you know, really very hard to find these animals.
And actually, when you think about it,
it's the larval stages that are the most abundant life form.
So one of our herpatologists figured out that, you know, really,
some of these monitoring programs would yield a lot more information,
and we might be able to find many more of them if we looked at the larval forms.
And you can imagine – remember back when you were out running around in
the springtime, and you'd see big masses of frog's eggs in a
ephemeral pond or something like that. And then they all hatch, and there
are oodles and oodles of little larvae tadpoles running around.
They're easy to find – easier to find than the adults, actually.
But we really don't know how to identify them.
If you go to a pond, and you scoop up some water,
and you get a whole bunch of different tadpoles, what the heck are they?
So Roy McDiarmid in our group and his colleague Ron Altig put together
a guide to the larval amphibians of North America.
It's been very helpful for us in North America, then, to do a more
comprehensive job of censusing the amphibians in North America.
Very widely used. Published – it's a very difficult thing to do, actually.
It turns out we had a lot of these amphibians in – preserved in
alcohol in the museum that we didn't know what they were. [chuckles]
So it was helpful for us in the collection as well.
One result of all this attention towards amphibians is that a couple new species
have been found. And one of them is kind of a – it's kind of an amusing story.
You usually think of finding new species, you know,
out in the middle of nowhere where nobody's ever been.
Well, there was a new species of frog found in New York and New Jersey –
probably the most heavily populated portion of the U.S.
So right under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty.
And there was a graduate student in – I think it was at Rutgers –
who was doing some frog censusing. And he heard this song that he
thought was – that he'd been calling a leopard frog for, whatever, many years.
And as he started to listen to it, he realized it was a little bit different.
Well, he collected this frog. And indeed, it was a different frog.
It was identified initially on the basis of the call.
But then, when they went back and did some DNA sampling
of both this population and other populations of leopard frogs,
they found that it was quite different.
And it was declared a species about three or four years ago.
It's now Lithobates kauffeldi.
And maybe you know leopard frogs. How many of you took biology
and dissected leopard frogs?
- Yeah. [inaudible] still Rana pipiens? - No. They're no longer Rana.
They're now Lithobates. - Oh.
- Yeah. Lithobates pipiens.
Right, but they've been divided up now to the
Atlantic coast frog and then other leopard frog subspecies as well.
But kauffeldi is really a separate complete species.
And then the interesting – so this was someone else that discovered this.
And they came to the museum and said, all right, what have you got?
So we started to go through [chuckles] – not we – not me, but they started to
go through their specimens and found that we had a whole bunch
of these Lithobates kauffeldi in our collection,
mislabeled as Rana pipiens, now Lithobates pipiens.
So species can be found kind of right under your nose in the collection as well as out
in the field. And our folks have described something like
74 or 75 new species over the – over the last 20 years.
Most of them found in the fields, fewer of them found in the collection.
But new species are still found today.
In fact, there was something on the news yesterday about
a new giant rat that was found in the Solomon Islands.
I don't know if anybody saw that – saw that news report.
It was kind of interesting.
A fellow was there and worked just tirelessly to –
he had heard about this rat but hadn't seen it.
Had seen little evidence of it – scat and little bits of food midden and
stuff like that. Finally found the thing after many years. Big rat about this size.
I'm not sure I'd really want to see a big rat that size, but anyways, he did.
So this talk has been just a little bit – a sampling of the work that we do
at the Biological Survey Unit at the Smithsonian Natural History
Museum and some of the uses that those data are put today.
We've got some really interesting projects coming up in the future
that I wanted to mention to you. The subspecies of North American
birds are getting a complete overhaul so that we will have a much better idea
of which are subspecies and which aren't and which of those need
protection under the Endangered Species Act as an important outcome of that.
And they're going to be using new genetic material –
new genomic methods to identify these subspecies.
And, as I mentioned earlier, what tends to happen, in many cases,
when we have – when you go back and look at subspecies that were
initially described on the basis of morphological characters,
the genetic characters often bring them back together.
So it sort of cuts down the work of the Fish and Wildlife Service,
I think, for producing recovery plans for many of those subspecies.
Another important thing we're doing is an all birds phylogeny.
You know, by all birds, I mean all birds worldwide.
They're applying some new genetic methods to –
called ultra-conserved elements, for those of you geneticists in the audience –
using those repeatable sequences of genes across the entire genome
of birds in the U.S. to try and get a better idea
of what the phylogeny of birds worldwide is.
It's going to be a big project. There's something like 11,000 species
in our collection that are going to be looked at, so it's going to take a while.
The microbiomes of North American waterfowl – microbiome refers to the
cast of characters in your gut – you know, the bacteria and other
microorganisms in your gut, which we're learning is a very important bit of
information for human health and clearly for the health of other animals as well.
There's an awful lot of immunological interactions
that go along in the microbiome in the gut.
And one particularly interesting reason why we're doing it in
waterfowl is because waterfowl are the agent that transfers avian influenza,
which can, indeed, be a human pathogen as well.
So we're interested in knowing which of these animals are going to be,
you know, adequate carriers of the influenza virus,
and which of them might be able to take care of the virus in their gut.
And then, as I mentioned – implied, I guess, a little bit,
when I'm talking about frogs, we need to – we're hoping to
develop some better methods for detecting frog calls.
There are all sorts of technological advances these days,
like even your cell phone, that can be used in – for auditory sampling.
And there are, indeed, apps that maybe some of you have,
where if you hear a bird that you don't – you can't identify,
you hold up your cell phone, and sometimes it can identify it for you.
Kind of cool. We'd like to do that for amphibians as well.
And then – you know, I mentioned that the –
probably the first thing that gets done when a museum is initiated is to
go out and do a wonderful field trip and collect all the animals you can.
The first expedition from the Biological – big expedition
of the Biological Survey was into the southwest of the U.S. – Arizona,
New Mexico – along the Rio Grande and the borderlands with Mexico.
So those specimens are old. The expedition, we don't think,
was quite as thorough as it could have been.
There have certainly been animals that have been moving around since then,
in the last 120 years. So we want to go back and sample there.
And, gosh, we might even learn something that would be important for,
you know, building a wall between Mexico and the U.S. [laughter]
So part of what we want to do – not part of, but a large part of
what we want to do with the museum is prevent extinctions.
And this really beautiful specimen of a Carolina parakeet at the bottom of the
slide here is one of the few birds in North America that have gone extinct.
We'd like to provide the information for wildlife managers
so that those extinctions don't happen in the future.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you very much.
I think there's a microphone.
- Please use the microphones in the center of the room.
- You had the tray of the eastern red bats. There were 10 or a dozen specimens.
- Yeah. Yeah.
- How many specimens do you like to have?
I imagine you want male, female, juvenile, adult, and stuff.
Is there some optimum number? And does it vary by species?
- Yeah. That's a really good question, and you're not going to like this,
but I can't answer that.
In some cases, we have a whole, whole heck of a lot, just because
a whole lot were scavenged in an area. And that's great.
And if it's a very common species, we'll actually go out and collect a lot,
especially if there's a question that people would like to answer
with a whole lot of them. Most of the time, we have a handful.
Sometimes we have one. A lot of times, we have zero.
So anything is really very, very helpful.
But as you, you know, implied, there's not a whole lot of comparison
that can go on with just two specimens. And even less with one.
So if you're really interested in a – in a particular topic that requires
a series of specimens, often what people do is they go around and
look at specimens at a whole bunch of different museums
rather than just go to one museum. Yeah.
- Would you please define "subspecies"? - Oh, gee. [laughter]
Yeah, that's a good question.
A subspecies is a unit of a species that is sort of functionally independent –
or, reproductively independent and identifiable by traits of some kind –
usually genetic traits – identifiable separately from
other parts of the population. But that can easily breed back with the –
with the species – other subspecies within that population.
So they're reproductively isolated by circumstance, not by physiology.
That might be one way to say it.
- So quite related to that question is, you know, what is the current
working definition of "species"? I know it's changed, you know,
quite a bit over time. - Yeah.
- Used to be very morphological. Now it's, you know,
breeding populations and overlap and all this kind of stuff –
and stable hybridization zones and all these things.
- That's right. - And now, of course, there's all the
genetics that have come in, so … - Right.
- Are there – what are the current definitions, and do they –
do they vary by family or order? - These are tough questions.
There's a whole course on that that I took when I was in graduate school.
And, as you know, things have changed quite a bit
with the advent of genetic sequencing and such.
All of those difficulties in defining species are still there with new methods.
It's just a little more refinement of what we understand –
or how we can describe a particular group of organisms.
You know, Ernst Mayr had this independent breeding unit concept
that he used and felt that the whole process of speciation
had to be a geographic process as well, so that there was a separation in
some way – a barrier to interbreeding between, you know, this group and
another group of organisms. And that was the absolute definition of a species.
And in fact, those animals could look almost identical,
but if they didn't breed and couldn't breed, then they were separate species.
I'm thinking of – in some – something people in the room
that are birdwatchers might know of the Empidonax flycatchers are
extremely hard to tell apart in the hand. Only really discernable by song.
And there's – and, in fact, now the guys tell me that they should be classified a
little bit differently on the basis of their genetic – the gene sequence information.
This isn't going to be a very comprehensive answer
for all of the theories of species that are out there now.
But basically, a separate breeding unit
is still the important aspect of species definition.
The Endangered Species Act does define – I'm going to forget the term.
Something like special breeding unit or special –
darn, I'm forgetting exactly – that can be protected under
the Endangered Species Act if it's – even if it's not a subspecies.
That is, even if it's not morphologically or phenologically or behaviorally distinct
from the rest of the population, if it's, for some reason, has a special status,
usually that status has to do with its importance to maintaining
the population of that species, that unit can be found –
be accorded protection under the Endangered Species Act even though
it's not even a subspecies. It's a special breeding unit, I think is what it's called.
So some of the physiological and behavioral definitions of a species are
superseded by other circumstances within the Endangered Species Act.
That's a tough question. I'm not prepared to give you an
entire lecture that on that, but yeah. Thank you.
- Well, this one's sort of related to that one. Sorry.
- Oh, geez. - But why do we even have species?
Why isn't everything just continuously and gradually –
slight variations from everything else? - That's a very philosophical question.
I don't know why we don't. Why we don't? I don't know why
we don't – how we don't probably is an easier question to answer.
But, well, that's a – I think what happens in – the easy answer
is that what we see is that hybrids are not fertile, in many cases.
You think of a mule. And that kind of mule example
applies to reproduction between many similar species.
The offspring are not fertile, so the numbers of organisms
that form the gradient just don't persist.
Now, that's a – that's sort of effect on the around why that is, you know,
might be a little more philosophical. I don't know. Yeah.
Why it should be that way, I'm not quite sure.
Any other easy questions other there [laughter]
- These are fun questions. Any more questions tonight for John?
Well, I wanted to say I know you – I know at least half of you
dealt with horrendous traffic. I was aware of that.
I didn't think I'd even get back here on time to introduce John at 7:00.
I apologize, but I wanted to remind you that our lectures are always recorded
and archived, and they'll be online. And so if you didn't catch the very
beginning of the talk, it'll be online. It'll usually take us a couple of days
to get it posted, but it'll be there. So I apologize.
But I am very grateful that you persisted and did come out to join us tonight.
Thank you very much. And thank you, John, for a wonderful talk.
- Thank you.
[ Applause ]
- So everybody go home and get your bird books out and
go birding this weekend. [laughter]
[ Silence ]
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