Collecting Then and Now the Importance of Field Biology
February 11, 2009
Vicki Funk lecture from the Looking for Life: Adventures and Misadventures in Species Exploration Symposium presented as part of the Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series. This symposium series is sponsored by the Arizona State University International Institute for Species Exploration, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the School of Life Sciences.
Transcript
Robert Krulwich: [0:00] Vicki Funk, now there ’s a name, from the Smithsonian Institution. The title is kind of gentle. "Collecting Then and Now: The Importance of Field Biology." I ’m hoping that Vicki Funk was not either attacked, garroted, poisoned, bitten, or slain in some unusual way. [0:19] [laughter]
[0:21] Vicki Funk. Thank you. It ’s a pleasure to be here.
[0:23] You have to pay careful attention to this first slide. This is a picture taken when we were in graduate school. Quentin was in the office next door to me, and we met because I heard this ruckus going on in the room next door. I went over to see what was going on. I met two other cladists. I think we must have been the three cladists in the Midwest.
[0:42] He and Larry Watrous were arguing about something having to do with cladistics. We have T-shirts on here that only four people in the world have. It says, "Vive Hennig," and on the back of it is a mushroom. The reason it has a mushroom on the back is because somebody was saying disparaging things in a book about cladistics. It said that, "Cladistics had produced a plague of toadstools on the lawn of taxonomy."
[1:02] So, in protest, we put a toadstool on the back of the shirt, "Vive Hennig" on the front, and we formed a running club. That was the four of us in graduate school. Well, actually, Dan Brooks was already out. He was a post-doc.
[1:13] Cladistics is a way of producing branching phylogenies, but a lot of people didn ’t like it for a number of reasons. One is because they claim we threw out half the characters in taxonomy, because we only use derived apomorphic characters and not the primitive ones, and that caused quite a ruckus.
[1:29] That means you ’re sort of throwing out half the groups. Because if you have yellow flowers and you have white flowers, and you ’re saying, "Yellow flowers, that ’s the good character," then you lose the group that has the white flowers. So, it caused a lot of uproar in taxonomy back then.
[1:42] I ’m at the Smithsonian. I wanted to second two things that have already been said, and that is, I am from western Kentucky. I spent my childhood playing outside. My mother would open the door in the morning and say, "Out! Don ’t come back until you ’re hungry," and shut the door. Those were the days when you could wander around for hours, playing with a gang of kids or by yourself in the forest. That ’s how I got started.
[2:03] The other thing that is similar is that when I was nine or ten, my father was a pilot, and I flew with him to Washington DC. He had things to do, and I got dropped off, the first day, at the Natural History Museum and picked up when it closed. That ’s where I went every day after that for a week. I never wanted to see anything else.
[2:20] My father tells me that the last thing I said when he picked me up the last day was, "I want to work here some day." I had totally forgotten about it until I got a job at the Smithsonian, and my dad said, "Well heck, that ’s what you wanted to since you were 10."
[2:32] I think there ’s some similarity in our backgrounds for that. I do work at the Smithsonian. We are all about collections. We ’ve lots of different kinds, you can see here. Lots of different kinds of collections, living collections, preserved museum specimens, data collections, ancillary collections like photos and illustrations, and of course, libraries.
[2:52] We have lots of specimens. We have about 135 million right now, just in the Natural History Museum. A lot of those are insects. Many of them are beetles, Quentin ’s favorite. I do most of my work in South America, although I also work in all other high-elevation areas and Mediterranean areas around the globe.
[3:11] But, I ’m going to focus my talk on South America, mainly because it ’s a big influence on Darwin as well. I ’m a systematist. We generally ask four questions. How many species are there? Where do they grow? How are they related? And what ’s their history? That ’s where I focus most of my energy.
[3:29] We have a lot of other questions we ’re now asking having to do with biodiversity. These are new questions that we didn ’t use to ask. We think, but I ’m going to show you, that some of these actually were asked.
[3:40] What are the global patterns of biodiversity? How important are different taxa? How similar are different areas in their biological components? How can we assess patterns of species richness? And many others. The questions that we ask in the field have certainly grown over the years.
[3:54] But, I want to talk about expeditions, what I call documenting biodiversity by collecting specimens or expeditionary science, and I want to talk about South America, since this is the focus I have chosen. I want to talk about historical collections that were made in South America that have had a big importance on the way we do science today, and also compare that to the way we do collecting now.
[4:16] I ’m not going to talk about all of these expeditions. I ’m going to talk about four, principally, very briefly. Then, the rest of them you ’ll have to just look up on the web. There ’s lots of information about these people.
[4:27] Alexander von Humboldt was arguably the father of biogeography and the first mega-explorer. He was a phenomenal guy, just an absolute Renaissance man, knew many, many things, published 21 volumes after he got back on his work, and set the stage for a large number of biodiversity works in South America.
[4:49] He was gone five years, left from France, traveled to South America. He did one of the most productive trips, a lot like Darwin did, in that they were on a boat for a while, then they would get off the boat. Then they would travel over land. Then they would get back on the boat and go somewhere else, and then they would travel over land.
[5:06] It was those brief, or sometimes extended, trips over land where they gathered so much of their information and got so many interesting things. So, it ’s this combination of traveling by boat and having access to the coasts and also going overland and having access to the forests and the mountains.
[5:24] I would point out that Humboldt, if you look at his itinerary, stopped by Washington DC on his way home to see Thomas Jefferson. They had written one another and were big correspondents, and they were sort of distant correspondent pals.
[5:40] Humboldt traveled on this trip with Bonpland, who was a botanist. Bonpland collected 60,000 specimens. Humboldt is in the front there in the shining light, because he was the guy with the money. He funded the expedition with his inheritance, and he was the naturalist. Bonpland was primarily a botanist, but they were great friends.
[5:58] They traveled for five years. It ’s an interesting story about both of them. When they got back to Europe, Bonpland worked for a few years at the botanical garden. When his job ended, he went back to South America, where he was kidnapped by the dictator who was in charge of Paraguay, and held under house arrest for 10 years before he was let go. He eventually married a local woman and never returned to Europe. So, his misadventure and his collecting did not turn out so well.
[6:24] Many things are named after Humboldt - birds, plants, vertebrates. One of my favorites - you see a Utricularia humboldtii, which is a carnivorous plant that eats insects - lives in large bromeliads, which are in the background there. You can see the gentleman, holding that plant, is one of the people I was in the field with. It ’s a beautiful plant, but it ’s the largest bladderwort in the world.
[6:49] Charles Darwin, we all know about Charles Darwin. We ’re here, actually, to celebrate his birthday tomorrow. He was a famous collector. This is the way I get talking about evolution across in western Kentucky. I talk about Darwin the explorer, and then just mention the fact that he also had something to do with evolution. It ’s a tough sell. [laughs]
[7:10] I did it for my mother ’s garden club.
[7:13] He traveled on the "Beagle" for five years. His route looked somewhat like Humboldt ’s, although it went around the world. But, you can see he was in and out of South America more than he was any place else. Everything that he did, just about, was focused on, as a result, many of the collections and the things that he saw in South America - especially in Argentina, the fossils he found in the mountains, and up in the Galapagos Islands, of course.
[7:38] Darwin took lots of field notes. He drew pictures. He traveled across the mountains on the backs of four-legged animals, and other difficult circumstances. He collected lots of specimens that are all at the British Museum. The specimens are currently there. You can look at them. People have for years studied his findings, some of them holding up very well, others having some changes.
[8:03] But, you can see that he collected fossils. He collected artifacts as well as beetles and many other things. So, he was, at heart, a collector.
[8:14] Many things are named after Darwin - the rhea, the bird that you were talking about. Actually that name exists. It isn ’t the proper name now, but I like to give the example of a family that I work on. The sunflower family has 25,000 species that are accepted names, and 75,000 synonyms. So for every one good name there are three that are not in use. So, this would fall into that category of names that exist that are no longer in use.
[8:40] A great variety of plants and animals are named after him.
[8:44] Captain Charles Wilkes, the Wilkes Expedition, also called the US Exploring Expedition, which traveled around the globe for four years. But, here ’s what ’s different about this expedition, and the one that I find very interesting. For one thing, it ’s the founding collection of the Smithsonian Institution. This is what started the Smithsonian as a natural history museum.
[9:07] Also, look at this. There were six ships, 82 officers, 342 sailors, nine naturalist scientists and artists. I would venture to say that there ’s never been an expedition better documented than this. With natural historian, scientists - I like the fact that they separated those two - and artists. The painted pictures were actually finished once they got back. But, you can see they even had photographers.
[9:36] And there ’s [inaudible 09:31] a very famous plant in the Hawaiian Islands, found only on Kauai. It ’s named after the capita. One of my personal favorites, along with Darwin, is Darwin ’s close friend and confidant, Joseph Dalton Hooker - fantastic guy. Unlike many of the other people, he made multiple trips that lasted long periods of time and traveled primarily in the southern hemisphere, although he did go to Nepal and areas around there. He was the second director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, did huge amounts of administrative work and still published the Bentham and Hooker treatment of just about the plants of the world. So, there you go.
[10:16] Here was a guy who had a full time administrative job, also doubled to tripled the size of Kew gardens and at the same time published more than any of us could ever hope to. I hope he had minions and that ’s how he got it done. He traveled, on this particular expedition from 1839 to 1843. He took part in voyages that went to Tasmania, New South Whales, New Zealand, Auckland Islands, Campbell Island, and other places in the southern hemisphere, many of them beautiful.
[10:43] Also, he took note of many of the things that he saw there. We all are familiar with Darwin ’s notes and the things that he saw when he was in the field, and the fact that he came back and he spent many years writing these up with a lot of very important insight into science. But, Hooker as well, his good friend, was, in my book, the real father of biology I look to, because he was the first person to come up with really good solid ideas about how we can compare the diversity across the globe.
[11:14] Hooker ’s plane, or his method, was to make lists of all the plants that he found in the different places that the went to, compare those lists, and then look at the similarities and differences between those lists and among those lists to try and figure out if the floras had something in common. Hooker published widely on this, and he came up with a hypothesis that all of the continents in the southern hemisphere had once been connected. He was certain of this because of the similarities and the differences among the floras.
[11:45] He called these bands of infinity. You could identify the things that they had in common, and then you could identify the things that were different in each place. I loves what Brent Dean said in 1966. This was 100 years after Hooker published his findings. He said, I underlined it, it said, "It has had a powerful effect on the imaginations of scientists." Hundred years later. I think that people like Darwin and Hooker use their experiences in the field to fundamentally change the way we do science.
[12:16] I ’m just going to mention Spruce briefly because he was the ultimate field guy. He spent 14 years in the Amazon collecting mainly plants and produced a flora of the area that was used for many years. I also want to do it because I want to show you these pictures. You can compare them to some of the ones I ’m going to show you about modern work. Here ’s Spruce crossing the rapids in his travels on the Amazon River. This is one of the places that they stayed in Peru. Just hold on to those images for a little bit. He also had a number of plants named after him, very beautiful [inaudible 12:48] floras. There are a number of other gentlemen who talk about all of these explorations, but we don ’t really have the time.
[12:56] If we talk about explorations, then, what were they about? Well, you have long boat trips. You were years away from home, lack of places to resupply. Many of them had to sell their collections in order to live. Most were generalists. A lot of them were artistic. They drew wonderful drawings of what they saw on their trips. Most wrote books on their adventures, very difficult field conditions, no safe way to ship specimens home and receive money and supplies.
[13:23] In fact Wallace, who also was in the Amazon during this period in 1848, I think, all his specimens were lost on the way home. He was so discouraged when he went back to the UK that he turned around and spent the rest of his time in a totally different part of the world. You also had in a country traveling by four legged creatures and canoe, and walking were big options. So, your expeditions were long, dirty, difficult trips. Long nights, you ’re up late cooking and taking care of your specimens. You face disease and injury, long distances from medical help, highway amidst storm, unreliable support.
[14:00] Specimens were prepared by hand. They were highly priced, and museums vibe for these collections and bid for them. The collectors were well received, and for some acquired quite a personal fortunate out of it.
[14:13] Humble, for instance, was the second most famous man in Europe, after he came back, and was very well thought of and respected. He became an advisor to the teams of several countries. They are examples of that.
[14:27] So, let ’s talk about today, some of the work that we have been doing. Well, now you get to fly. You know, you get on a plane and you get to your major destination pretty quickly. And you can go on a smaller plane, and you can fly internally some place. But, at some point, the plane stops, and you are back to wooden canoes, with teems of people loading and unloading, poling your way up and down the river when it ’s not very deep, using motors when it is.
[14:50] You have the same basic collecting gear, plant presses and the animals that you skin. Many of the things are the same. You ’re waiting chest deep in streams to get across places where you ’ll see something that you want to collect.
[15:02] That ’s me up a tree - climb large trees to collect specimens. This is where you learn never climb a small tree to get to a big tree, because the small trees are often secondary growth forests and they have lots of ants in them.
[15:15] And that ’s a cecropia tree. For those of you that know about cecropias, there are home to many different kinds of ants - and that was a lesson that you learn.
[15:22] But you can see the boats that we use are very similar. You have the wooden dug out canoes that the local Amerindians Indians make and you pole down the river, and sometimes you have a boat motor.
[15:32] You have to haul all your gear long distances across the land, and you have to press your plants outside. You have a field kitchen, where you have to do most of your work.
[15:44] So, let ’s look at exhibitions now. If you get to jet to foreign countries, you are weeks or months away from home and cameras have replaced drawings. So now, it ’s besides being an artist, you got to be a real good photographer, because getting a message across when you get back requires having good visuals.
[15:59] You can buy your supplies in cities. And most collectors have jobs at museums or universities. Most are specialist. Few write adventure books to acquire funding.
[16:08] There are safe ways to ship your specimens ’ home for the most part, and to get your money and supplies. And your first part is by plane, it ’s not a problem. But, the second part is once again by four legged creatures, canoes and walking. That hasn ’t changed.
[16:23] There are long, dirty difficult trips in the forests and mountains. You have to go further to get away from disturbance, because biodiversity decreases with close proximity to human beings.
[16:33] So, the amount of distance you have to go to get to some of these areas is much greater. You have disease, injury, and long distance from medical help. You have your highway and your storms and your unreliable support. Your specimens are collected more or less in the same manner that they were collected 100, 150 or 200 years ago. Except now, we do take material for DNA, which is a difference, and we do have GPS ’s, so you get a more accurate location.
[16:57] When I first started collecting, we would have labels that said "there are three bends up the river from the fork with this stream and that stream on the right bank" kind of a description, and nobody would ever find that again. Now, they can go right up to the spot where you were, and say "I shouldn ’t get that here!" and you have to be a little more careful.
[17:15] Specimens are not tolerated. And your expedition money and your budgets have to include support for processing specimens and housing, and we put that in our grant proposals - 50% of the money is for infrastructure for taking care of the plants specimens and animal specimens when we get back.
[17:30] Museums have big backlogs. I mean, the Smithsonian, in botany, we have almost a half a million specimens that are identified and still in newspaper that are not mounted and not available. We have five million that are available, about half a million that aren ’t.
[17:43] Collectors really gain very little recognition for what they do. And you really have to fight for funding. And they had to establish a special program called BS&I, The Biotic Surveys and Inventories at NSF, so that collectors could get some money, because they had sort of been closed out of all the traditional ones.
[17:59] Let me show you, here ’s a picture by Schaumburg, who in 1848, was doing collecting in north-eastern South America. You can see they are drying their planer on the roof, the bread that they eat.
[18:09] And then this is a picture we took last year in the field, when we were back in the southern part of Guyana on the border with Brazil. It was still, more or less, the same kind of set up that we had then.
[18:19] But, why do we do it, that ’s always the question that people get. I work on the flowering plant family, compositae, which is the sunflower family. And so I mentioned, there are 25,000 species. I spent now 30 years studying these and I and my colleagues have put together a huge treatise on the family, which is due out shortly. It puts together everything we know from all of our years in the field and all of our work in the lab and all of our study in morphology to try and understand the evolution and diversification of the family.
[18:48] I think being able to ask questions, being curious about what ’s going on, being able to put it together in a global framework is what makes field work important and what makes us put up with some of the negative aspects. But, it is absolutely beautiful. That is Bolivia. This is Aparmo from Ecuador, which is a phenomenal area to do field work.
[19:07] Those are compositaes, sunflowers. And you get to meet the local inhabitants and go to some of the local cultural areas. It ’s always really a lot of fun.
[19:17] Quentin wanted me to talk a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations we ’ve had. I ’m just going to give you a couple of one field trip that we went on. It was our attempt to re-create wilts, not going to the same place, but putting together a large number of scientists going in and studying the biodiversity of an area from beginning to end and we picked Neblina, Mountain of the mists.
[19:37] It was one of these table top mountains from Venezuela and bordering Guyana and Brazil. Many of them have flat tops, steep sides, very isolated. They get up to over 3000 meters in elevation, 10,000 feet. They are right on the equator almost.
[19:54] So here you have this completely different habitat stuck on top of these high mountains that has a totally different flora on the top and than what you get on the ground below.
[20:05] The escarpments drop off in huge waterfalls, such as Kaieteur Falls in Guyana where the Potaro Plateau stops and the Kipui ends. And that ’s me, sitting on a rock and I use this picture because I had on pink pants. And so you really can see the size of the waterfall. Otherwise you don ’t get the scale. It ’s a 900 foot straight vertical drop, the largest continually flowing waterfall in the western hemisphere.
[20:33] The most famous mountain is probably Roraima of A. Conan Doyle ’s "Lost World." The big point of this is that when you get up to the tops of these, we usually go in by helicopter, you are trapped. Once the helicopter leaves, they can ’t land because they can ’t start the engine again.
[20:48] So, they fly up. They hover. They throw you and all your gear off and they go away. Then they come back and get you. This is fine when they come back. But, I would add another rule to your list and that would be you need to have reliable logistics. You need somebody who is in charge of your logistics who is going to come back and get you.
[21:05] So, to get to Neblina, which is in the middle of nowhere you have to fly in to Puerto Rico in Venezuela and you take a large boat, a bongo, large wooden boat downriver. You get to San Carlos de Rio Negro, which is a little village.
[21:22] Then you have a helicopter that picks you up and takes you into the camp, which only takes about an hour by helicopter, but the rivers are so convoluted that if you come out by boat, which we did once, it took us eight days in a dug out canoe, coming out.
[21:38] It ’s not a pleasant experience. If you have an abscessed tooth while you are in there you are eight days by boat when the helicopter is not there from any kind of primitive medical attention. So an abscessed tooth can kill you. You live with the fact that an appendicitis attack you can say, forget it.
[21:57] The toopouis are wonderful but they are very unpredictable. The weather on top of the toopouis is completely different than the weather below. You can have a beautiful day down below and all of a sudden the river water will go up 30 or 40 feet.
[22:09] You can hear the roar as it comes down the canyon, but it hasn ’t rained a drop. If you look at the picture on the right, the helicopter on the left is sitting on dry rocks. On the right we took off just in time to avoid water that was coming down river that we heard before it got there.
[22:27] We had a team of 22 scientists that came in on this expedition. We had people at this camp for two years continuously. The idea that we would rotate through all these well known scientists who would collect their groups and we would end up with a wonderful knowledge about the diversity.
[22:42] Everybody was so excited, but we just didn ’t pay enough attention to the person that was running the logistics of the place. We did have nice camp. My hammock was hanging in this tin roof hut for six weeks that we were in this base camp. We had a laboratory where we processed our insects and plants and bats and birds.
[23:00] We had a latrine which I took a picture of before they put the sides on. It was a really fine base camp, but the transportation to the top was very unreliable. We had one small helicopter. It broke frequently. We didn ’t have a mechanic with us when it broke. It had to go back to Puerto Rico or even to Caracas to get fixed.
[23:18] When the helicopter was gone, whoever was where they were, they were stuck. This unfortunately happened while we were on top. We had taken food for three days and there is nothing to eat on top of Neblina that you want to eat, even the earth worms we tried cooking. It didn ’t work out too well.
[23:33] But, the top of this mountain is 3000 meters. So, we ’re sitting up there and the helicopter didn ’t come back the day it was supposed to and we finally... we had a little tiny radio. We finally got a hole of somebody in the evening. And they said the helicopter has gone back to Caracas. It broke something.
[23:49] And we said, OK, when ’s it coming back? Ooh, we don ’t know. It ’ll be here soon. No problem. Don ’t worry.
[23:56] Well, the next day, now we ’re out of food. We ’re down to bouillon cubes and coffee. This is day four. No helicopter. So beautiful on top, fogged in on the bottom. The weather clears the helicopter comes back, starts up the canyon. You could hear the rotors. We could hear it coming up... Clouds moved in. No helicopter.
[24:17] Some more days, the clouds go away. So, we ended up ten days on top with three days of food. It turned out to be a really good diet. We call it the Smithsonian Diet. But, conditions in the camp were probably the worst I have ever had. The surface is very wet and you can see that where we had the camp, everywhere you step water would come up through the soil.
[24:36] So, we keep putting fronds and leaves down, trying to dry the area out. At night, water would run through the tent. Once you started sinking down into the ground, water would come through and just end up running... and if you had an air mattress, which we did, you would sort of float around inside the tent at night. It was miserable getting up and going to the bathroom.
[24:54] But, the plants are phenomenal. The red one here, that is an African violet. It ’s doesn ’t look like an African violet. It looks like something completely different, but it is one. That ’s a composite in the bottom right. It doesn ’t look like a composite. It doesn ’t look like a sunflower, but it is. It happens to be a humming bird pollinated sunflower.
[25:12] The long red flower hanging down in the middle happens to be a mistletoe. Now, if you know mistletoes they have tiny little ugly green flowers. This one has three inch red tubular flowers.
[25:23] On the left, you may know pitcher plants which have tiny little plants and small flowers. This is a pitcher plant that can get five feet tall with a three foot stalk on the flower.
[25:35] So many of the things that grow on the top are very different from the things that you find below. Orchids on the other hand are exactly the same. Other things that are exactly the same are mosses. And the things that orchids and mosses have in common is that they have tiny feet.
[25:49] The other thing that happened while we were up there fortunately this was not my doing. Another group that was up on one of the slopes got a little gasoline in the oatmeal and they decided to flavor it with blueberries. Fortunately I was not the botanist along on this one.
[26:03] My colleague from New York Templeton. He said sure they are perfectly safe to eat. So, everybody put blueberries on their morning oatmeal except for two people and they turned out not to be safe to eat and everybody was going into some kind of a hallucinogenic phase before they passed out.
[26:20] And they thought they were dying so everybody was writing their wills on scraps of paper in their hammock and they were trying to figure out the packing. Al Gardiner who was three times as tall as everybody else was packing his ant specimens really fast so that they would all be packed up safely if they get back home before he keeled over.
[26:38] He was so tall it took him longer to pass out than it took everybody else. But, two people hadn ’t and they were there trying to take care of everybody. Eventually everybody was fine, but it was a very scary moment for everybody.
[26:50] So, that ’s the adventure stories for the Neblina trip. And so, where we have future expeditions? Well, I don ’t know. We have the building and logging. That gold mining road. This is one in Guyana. Dredging. I don ’t know what ’s going to happen.
[27:06] But, one of my favorite quotes is from John Muir. Here ’s a picture of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt at Glacier Point in Yosemite Valley. It says, "Tug at a single thing in nature and you will find it connected to the universe."
[27:19] I think that ’s something we all have to keep in mind. So thank you.
[27:22] [applause]
Announcer: [27:26] This lecture was part of the Arizona State University, Darwin Test. It is sponsored by the Institute for Species Exploration, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Life Sciences, and is a production of Grass Roots Studio
Transcription by CastingWords