I went to Hawaii a few weeks ago, for a good friend’s wedding (seems I only travel for weddings these days). I have been to Hawaii several times and I must say I love the place. I probably wouldn’t want to live there for very long because of the lack of seasons and because the sheer isolation and limited land area of the archipelago would probably drive me nuts. But it’s a lovely place to visit, no doubt.

Hawaii is superficially very beautiful, but with my biology goggles on I can’t help but see it for what it is: an environmental disaster. Specifically, Hawaii is a sad example of how human-mediated invasions of alien species can radically change natural ecosystems. Insane numbers of introduced organisms have been ferried over to Hawaii since the first Polynesians pushed their canoes ashore. These new species can outcompete and consume natives, introduce new diseases, and destroy habitat. Now the rate at which new species are arriving on these once isolated islands is millions of times higher than it was before humans were in the mix. We have introduced great numbers of weeds and other plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Hawaii’s native bird species have been decimated by disease and introduced predators; half of all the plant species now on Hawaii are non-native. Boo!

I was on Maui during my recent visit. I saw some exotic-looking birds that most tourists probably assume are Hawaiian endemics. Nope. I’ll bet that just about every bird I saw was an introduced species. And who knows how much of the lush plant life I saw while hiking in Iao Valley (see photo above) was composed of weeds and such from all corners of the world? I couldn’t even get excited when I found a cane toad hopping in the grass of a beach side resort one night– Hawaii has no native amphibians or reptiles.

Depressing…

On March 19th, I drove up to Portland, Oregon to attend the spring national steering committee meeting for Partners in Amphibian and Reptiles Conservation (PARC) . Here is how PARC is described on their website:

Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC) is an inclusive partnership dedicated to the conservation of the herpetofauna–reptiles and amphibians–and their habitats. Our membership comes from all walks of life and includes individuals from state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, museums, pet trade industry, nature centers, zoos, energy industry, universities, herpetological organizations, research laboratories, forest industries, and environmental consultants. The diversity of our membership makes PARC the most comprehensive conservation effort ever undertaken for amphibians and reptiles.
Reptiles (alligators, crocodiles, lizards, turtles, the tuatara, and snakes) and amphibians (frogs, toads, salamanders, and caecilians) have suffered from a broad range of human activities, due in part to the perception that these animals are either dangerous or of little environmental or economic value. We know now that they are important parts of our natural and cultural heritage.

I have recently joined PARC, but am not a member of the committee or anything. I attended the meeting not because I would have anything to say about how to “steer” the organization, but because I want to get involved in the conservation of herps. I wanted to see what PARC is all about. I have felt deeply connected to amphibians and reptiles for as long as I can remember. My graduate research has been on the population genetics of frogs and I hope that it will someday benefit these animals. To date, however, I have not done any real on-the-ground conservation work. Being involved with PARC is a step in the right direction.

One of the really cool things PARC does is produce regional Habitat Management Guidelines for amphibians and reptiles. The Northwestern division of PARC is still working on the Guidelines for this region, which are scheduled to hit the press in November of this year.

My friend Sam took his four-year-old daughter, Audrey, on a hike in the Columbia Gorge last week. They found a little Cascade torrent salamander (Rhyacotriton cascadae) tucked in the moss and ferns beside the trail. Audrey held the salamander and was enthralled. She talked all the way home about how they needed to find more salamanders. Sam says she is still talking about it. Little kids like Audrey, and everyone else for that matter, should always have the opportunity to go out into wild places and have happy experiences with creepy crawly herps and bugs, fuzzy-twitchy mammals, vociferous birds, and all the multifarious denizens of the Outside.

Though I feel that all forms of life have intrinsic worth and deserve to be conserved (except, that is, for some a-hole humans), I have chosen to champion the reptiles and amphibians. Now I just need to actually get out and DO something!

Let’s imagine that the sum of what we humans know about the living world is a sphere—like a lustrous, red balloon. The surface area of the sphere is proportional to the amount of knowledge we have. I should point out that I am not the first person to make this analogy (was it Carl Sagan?)—I am just twisting it for my own sinister purposes. Anyways, the sphere started off very small, back in the day when we were chucking rocks at each other and spearing woolly rhinoceroses for supper. Whenever someone figured out some key truth about the biological realm and that truth was disseminated amongst the rest of humanity, the sphere expanded, as though the discoverer had blown a puff of air into the sphere/balloon. Every little discovery puffs up the balloon too, but to a lesser extent.

With the rise of the industrial revolution and communications technology, the balloon expanded hella fast—puff, puff, puff. I would say that after about 1600 C.E., when the Scientific Revolution began, the world’s first real biologists were causing the balloon to expand rapidly. Then along came Darwin. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection damn near caused the balloon to pop. Since every bedbug, wombat, slime mold, marmoset, spirochete, and tunicate—every living organism—is the product of evolution, all of biological knowledge is unified by the theory of evolution. Darwin’s was the single most voluminous lungfull of breath that has expanded the balloon of biological knowledge. That’s what I say, anyway, and this is my imaginary balloon so I can say what I want.

The space outside the balloon represents the great and mysterious realm of what we do not know about biology. It’s dark and spooky out there in the void. So check this out: as the balloon gets bigger, as we understand more and more, the balloon’s surface area comes into contact with more and more of the unknown. So the more we know, the more we know that there is so much more that we don’t know. Get it? If you consider the formula for the surface area of a sphere, where surface area = 4πr^2, you can see that as the radius of the sphere doubles, the surface area actually increases by a factor of 4! The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. This may not be how it really works, however. The realm of what is unknown may not be infinite, at least when we are talking about biology. Who really knows how much we don’t know?

Another part of this balloon model, if I can call it that, is that there may be a real limit to what humans can know about the living world. Even if there is a whole lot more to learn out there, the finite computational power of our little chimp brains and the limitations imposed on our technology by the laws of physics may prevent us from puffing up the balloon forever and ever. Perhaps the rate of the balloon’s expansion has begun to slow, because we are nearing the limit of our ability to make major scientific leaps and bounds. Can there ever be a new discovery as monumental as Darwin’s?

Something amazing has happened in the last few decades, however, that has certainly quickened the balloon’s expansion. With the rise of a relatively globalized scientific community and the gol-danged Internet, we are puffing right along. Now biologists from Japan can communicate in real time with biologists in Mexico via email, Skype, etc. We have instant online access to journal articles, genetic databases, museum records, satellite data, etc. There is SO much information and we can all share it with one another RIGHT NOW! Darwin had to send stupid ol’ paper letters to his colleagues and wait weeks or maybe months for responses. Crazy! Through the Internet, we are becoming like individual neurons in a giant, pulsating hive mind. Science is advancing in wholly new ways and who knows where we will go from here. Thankfully, the balloon will keep expanding into the foreseeable future (until the aliens, robots, or viruses kick our asses back to the stone age, that is). Hooray for technology!

Here is Sarah Harmer singing in French about a Salamander. It’s precious. The lyrics:

Salamander, Salamander
You have to help me understand
All the mysteries of the forest,
The secret map, the golden tree
I’m waiting for you patiently
Salamander

Salamander, Salamander
The two of us together
My solitude and boredom
Disappeared overnight
I’ve led a lonely (slow) life for so long.
Salamander

It’s true, one day I’ll be King
All of France awaits me
Every word I say will be made law
But for now, my only friend
Please come quickly, I beg you.
Salamander

Salamander, Salamander
The night is approaching, I think
The moon will be our candle
Welcome to my new life
Our adventures await us
My Salamander

Today is the birthday of Charles Darwin, the godfather of evolutionary biology. He would have been 198 years old. I wore my “I believe in science” t-shirt as a tribute. A colleague in our department baked an awesome cake in the shape of a leather-bound Origin of Species book! I missed out and didn’t get to eat any of it, but I bet it tasted like sweet, sweet heresy. Oh Charles… Did you ever dream that people would be baking birthday cakes for you 125 years after your death? Darwin is about as immortal as anyone can be.

I was talking to a fellow grad student yesterday who is facing the prospect of being entirely alone in her lab next year. It just so happens that the senior PhD students and post docs in her lab are all leaving. If no new post docs join her lab next Fall, my friend will have only her advisor to go to for help. This isn’t a good situation. Yes, we grad students are expected to be fairly independent at this advanced level, and a good advisor is certainly helpful, but very often we need the help of more experienced students and post docs to be successful. This is especially true in laboratory settings, where the advisor (or P.I.) probably doesn’t spend much time in the lab and may be unable to teach us lab protocols or troubleshooting tricks. Ideally, there is stratification in the lab: students representing multiple levels of seniority are present as well as post docs. In stratified labs, incoming students are taken under the wings of older students and given enough guidance to avoid the mistakes of those who have gone before.

This is probably analogous to large families that work on farms and stuff. The parents have precious little time to teach routine skills to each new child, so the older siblings step in and do the job. Younger children benefit from the practical knowledge of their siblings. The oldest child only had their parents to learn from and had to suffer through many trial-and-error experiences. This is what happened to me, except that I am an only child, so I never got to pass down my hard-won wisdom.

Stratification has been immeasurably important in the advancement of human culture and technology. Lucky for us, we have overlapping generations (not to mention writing!) so that older people can teach younger people what they learned from the preceding generation as well as what new knowledge they accumulated in their own lives. Nobody should have to “reinvent the Wheel.” Imagine how things would be if every human being was born simultaneously and had no one from the previous generation to learn from. All culture and knowledge would have to be generated de novo, from scratch. It just wouldn’t work, would it?

My own advisor has said that he tries to maintain a stratified lab and I think this should be an explicit goal of all professors who have graduate students. It’s not always feasible to keep a nice level of stratification, and some students do just fine by working things out on their own, so stratification doesn’t have to always be a top priority. However, I think that the continuity of knowledge and culture in a laboratory is best maintained the way human culture is maintained: through the flow of knowledge from one generation (or cohort or whatever) to the next.

Now I have a reason to approve of Oregon State University’s alarmingly angry mascot, Benny the beaver. It turns out that beavers, by virtue of their proclivity for dam-building, help out amphibians by creating pond habitats where there had been none. Beavers gnaw through trees and pile the felled logs to build dams across streams. Though this behavior seems destructive (and I guess it is from the perspective of an individual tree), it has long term benefits for the whole forest ecosystem. Beaver ponds eventually turn into wetlands after the beavers split and the dam breaches. The wetlands are incredibly valuable bits of natural real estate because they are home to many organisms (including amphibians!) and are important for nutrient cycling. Eventually, the wetlands dry up and become meadows, which are invaded by trees, and then the beavers can move back in. The circle of life.

A recent study published in Biological Conservation found that beaver-created ponds can serve as breeding habitat for several anuran species in Canada. These species totally hate streams, but ponds please them down to their very souls. Okay, so I am being stupid—the point is, more ponds equals more frogs. The beavers win, the frogs win, people who don’t despise nature win.

From the abstract:

We propose that the distribution and abundance of beaver ponds could be determined over large areas quickly and inexpensively by remote sensing and used to identify and monitor amphibian habitat, and possibly, populations. This work establishes the pre-eminence of beaver-created wetlands as amphibian habitat in the Boreal Foothills and that the incorporation of dam-building patterns into forest management strategies could aid amphibian conservation.

This makes me wonder… The Oregon spotted frog (Rana pretiosa)—a species that we study in our lab and that has been extirpated from the Willamette Valley where it was once common—might have benefited historically from beaver activities. If beaver populations were greatly reduced by trapping, maybe there was an associated loss of pond habitat which was one reason the frogs died out? This is pure speculation, because I don’t know what the state of beaver populations is in the valley and I don’t know if they ever coexisted with Oregon spotted frogs. Just a thought…

The fossil record for amphibians is fairly spotty, apparently, and hasn’t provided much data for scientists to answer questions about what has happened to amphibians during the Earth’s major extinction events (e.g. at the ends of the Permian and Cretaceous). If worldwide extinctions are associated with major changes in climate, the expectation is that amphibians should have been hit hard in the past, due to their sensitivities to temperature, chemicals in the environment, etc. Modern day climate change is thought to be an important factor in the acceleration of amphibian extinctions. Have amphibian lineages diversified gradually since the good ol’ Permian, or, as we might expect given the delicate nature of amphibians, are the groups existing today the descendants of a lucky few lineages that survived the last global extinction event? If you were to consult the amphibian fossil record for an answer, you would have a tough time finding one.

Molecular Phylogenetics to the rescue! A recent study published in PNAS used DNA sequences from representatives of most of the extant amphibian taxa to show that, when paired with the available fossil data, the molecular data tell a story of amphibian extinctions and subsequent diversification over the last several hundred million years. Mass extinctions in amphibians have occurred at roughly the same times as the extinctions of amniote vertebrates. Some amphibian groups went through adaptive radiations–sort of like what happened to mammals after the dinosaurs bit it. The most diverse and widespread groups today are mostly those that underwent rapid diversification toward the end of the Cretaceous: the Natatanura (including “true frogs” in the genus Rana), the Nobleobatrachia (including toads and treefrogs), Microhylid frogs, Plethodontid salamanders, and Salamandrid salamanders. Sorry for the sesquipedalian taxonomic jargon.

What species or lineages of modern amphibians will make it through the current extinction crisis? Hopefully most of them, if anything can be done about the depressing trend of habitat destruction and global warming. From a long-term, evolutionary perspective it seems likely that a handful of amphibian lineages will survive and diversify in the future. If I were placing bets, I would put my money on bullfrogs (Rana catesbeina), cane toads (Bufo marinus), and maybe the Pacific treefrog (Pseudacris regilla). These plucky species seem to do pretty well despite the efforts of humans to either eradicate them outright or modify their habitats beyond recognition. There are probably other pest-like amphibians around the world that for one reason or another are well-suited to coping with environmental change. I hope that the global experiment to see which amphibian lineages are capable of surviving this latest, human-caused catastrophe never takes place. Wait… I guess it’s already begun, hasn’t it? Crap!

If you are like me, your experience of large carnivorous mammals is limited to days of lazy gazing at the zoo, through bars and glass, at the pitiable creatures lounging in their enclosures. Or perhaps you’ve been lucky enough to have had a sighting or two of these animals in their natural habitats. Lions, tigers, and bears! We have seen them many times, mostly as relatively tame captives or on the television screen. The iconic images of these big predators are everywhere and I sometimes find it easy to have lackluster feelings regarding them. For example, clothing with orange and black tiger-stripe designs looks tawdry and dated (as in, 1980’s) to me. I don’t associate that pattern with the wild animal anymore. But what if I had never seen the tiger-stripe pattern before? Wouldn’t I find it beautiful and mysterious? Bears and tigers are so rampant in our collective consciousness that I tend to overlook them and spend more time thinking about oddball animals that don’t get as much attention. But again, wouldn’t the big carnivores fascinate me if I hadn’t been beaten over the head with their images my whole life? Don’t get me wrong— I am interested in charismatic carnivorous megafauna, but it sometimes takes a little more mental energy for me to see them as the exotic and awesome things that they are.

I remind myself that the big mammalian carnivores used to be scarier than shit to the people that lived side-by-side with them. People were routinely killed and eaten by them. Lions, tigers, and bears were real-life monsters, lurking in the bushes and in the darkness beyond the campfire light. Amazingly, these monsters still roam the wilderness today and will kill humans if the mood strikes them. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because it’s depressing to think that the world’s magnificent, terrifying beasts will someday be gone from the wild, existing only in zoos, as attenuated forms of their ferocious selves— or worse, they might be gone altogether, extinct.

I came across a little blurb in National Geographic about a tiger attack that was caught on film. The still images of the tigress as she leaps over the head of an elephant to maul the human rider utterly amazed me. I found the original film online and here it is. Marvel at the seemingly preternatural speed and power of this wonderful animal.

If for some reason the video below won’t play, click here.

Yay, Halloween! I watched The Lost Boys again with my roommate the other night. I saw it the day it came out in 1987 and it instantly became my favorite movie (replacing 1986’s Aliens). That was almost 20 years ago, but the quality of the film has kept it from seeming dated, despite the presence of the Coreys, Feldman and Haim. I was already a big fan of horror films and sci-fi at 11 years old; The Lost Boys shot an injection of nitro into my adolescent imagination. I wanted to be a vampire! Still do, kinda.

Now that I am an evolutionary biologist and pursuing a career in academia, I think that being a vampire would be extra cool for me. Besides the benefits of having fangs and crazy evil eyes, flying, and kicking ass, I would be immortal—and that would allow me to do things no biologist has ever done. The two limiting factors in scientific research (and in life, generally) are money and time. Let’s say I am a vampire and that I can use my vampiric charms to get money, somehow. Reasonable amounts of money should be available for me to conduct research. And I’m never going to die—never going to run out of time—so time is no longer and issue. Awesome! I can conduct experiments and observational studies that extend over many years, maybe even centuries. Evolution in natural settings often proceeds slowly when viewed from the perspective of a frantic, mortal man’s life. But a vampire can patiently observe and document evolutionary processes, making insights that no mortal person ever could.

Of course, my life as a vampire biologist will have some foreseeable complications and limitations. First and foremost: sunlight will burn my ass like a campfire marshmallow until I am dead. If I want to conduct studies in the outdoors—and I do—I will have to study nocturnal animals. Hmmm… let’s see, what animals are generally nocturnal that I might find interesting? Oh yeah—amphibians! Hooray! Alternatively, lots of mammals, invertebrates, and birds are nocturnal. So there’s really no problem with only being able to go out at night. I will just have to make sure I am safely hidden from exposure when the Sun comes up. It might be hard to drag a coffin around in the woods.

The second issue is where I will work. If I don’t age, the people I work around will become suspicious after a decade or so. I will have to set up a private organization and work either alone or with trusted minions. And speaking of minions, I could always make a few trusted colleagues into vampires, so that we can work together into eternity.

The third issue is publication. I will author my research papers as Ivan Phillipsen, but for how long can I do that? Certainly not more than 70 years or so. Eventually, I would need to either use an alias or have other people (trusted mortal minions) publish my work under their own names. This doesn’t seem like too much of a problem.

The last problem is that of needing to participate in the scientific community. If I am a vampire, I won’t be attending many annual meetings, workshops, symposiums, etc. I might be able to swoop down to mingle at the occasional evening cocktail social that ends a day of presentations, but in general I will miss out on much of the interaction that is vitally important in the life of a scientist. Not sure how I will solve this problem.

Ah, but it will be worth it! I will be a great vampire biologist. It’s Halloween and my invitation is open to any vampires out there to come on over and do your thing. I mean, don’t kill me kill me or anything, but make me into one of you. Got it? To quote the Lost Boys tagline:

Sleep all day. Party [and do science] all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.