New Creatures in an Age of Extinctions

Natalie Angier, The New York Times 25 Jul 09;

In the inner precincts of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, along a corridor that could easily accommodate a string of bowling alleys, Kristofer M. Helgen, curator of mammals, pulled open one of the thousands of metal cabinets stacked against the walls and gestured grandly at the contents. Inside was a tray of a dozen dried rodents, chestnut-furred and with tails neatly extended, like campfire wieners on sticks. He opened other drawers, revealing small, fox-faced bats, and a pair of giant bats with fierce, bicuspid canines, and a weasel-sized mammal with a pendulous snout, and a bat whose translucent, mottled wings looked like parachutes for G. I. Joe.

The animals came from New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Kenya, Sulawesi, but they all had one trait in common: they were new to science, some of them so new they had yet to be named. And the Smithsonian specimens are just part of a much wider trend. Fabio Röhe of the Bronx Zoo’s Wildlife Conservation Society and his colleagues just announced the discovery of a new monkey in the Brazilian Amazon, a petite saddleback tamarin with a foot-long tail and a pelt of rust, gray and dappled gold, while other scientists with the conservation group have lately detected new primate species in Bolivia, India and Tanzania.

Since the last summary of the world’s mammals was published in 2005, tallying the roughly 5,400 mammalian species then known, Dr. Helgen said, an astounding 400 or so new species have been added to the list. “Most people don’t realize this,” he said, “but we are smack-dab in the middle of the age of discovery for mammals.”

Yet as he and other biologists are all too aware, we are also smack-dab in the middle of a great species smack down, an age of mass extinctions for which we humans are largely to blame. Estimates of annual species loss vary widely and are merely crude guesstimates anyway, but most researchers agree that, as a result of habitat destruction, climate volatility, pesticide runoff, ocean dumping, jet-setting invasive species and other “anthropogenic” effects on the environment, the extinction rate is many times above nature’s chronic winnowing. “Our best guess is that it’s hugely above baseline, a hundred times above baseline,” said John Robinson, an executive vice president at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “The problem is, we’ve only described an estimated 15 percent of all species on Earth, so most of what’s going extinct are things we didn’t even know existed.”

In sum, we have a provocatively twinned set of rising figures: on the one hand, the known knowns, that is, the number of new species that researchers are divulging by the day; and on the other, the unknown unknowns, the creatures that are fast disappearing without benefit of a Linnaean tag. To this second statistic must be added the “known no longers,” the named species that we’ve managed to directly or indirectly annihilate, like the Yangtze river dolphin, declared functionally extinct two years ago, or the dusky seaside sparrow, which tweeted its last in 1987.

Antithetical as they may seem, the two data sets are in many ways intertwined. One reason scientists are discovering more new species now than they were a couple of decades ago is that previously impenetrable places have been opened to varying degrees of development, allowing researchers to rush in and sample the abundance before it disappears. The gulp ’n’ go style of the global market can also deliver taxonomic novelty right to scientists’ door.

Scott E. Miller, deputy undersecretary for science at the Smithsonian, pointed out that flowers grown in Kenya today could well arrive at your local Safeway tomorrow, incidentally bearing the larvae of an undescribed and possibly undesirable species of moth. “The next invasive insect species could come from any place on the planet,” he said. “From my perspective, if we knew more about the players — who’s out there, how they live, what they eat — we’d know better how to respond” to the funny green alien pupating by the produce section.

Yet if it is through habitat disturbance that many new species are brought to light, scientists argue that formal recognition can in turn prove a debutante’s salvation, especially if the ingénue is a looker. Jean Boubli, who directs the wildlife society’s Brazil programs, said he was planning to use the newly discovered saddleback tamarin as Exhibit A in his efforts to block the construction of paved roads into the still-pristine patch of the Amazon where the primate lives, some 65 miles from Manaus. “It’s a godsend to have found that monkey right now,” he said, “to make our case to the authorities that opening up access to the forest would be a disaster.”

Dr. Boubli, like most conservationists, is a shameless pragmatist, who will pluck every self-referential string in the human limbic system if it means some nonhumans may benefit. Of course the overwhelming majority of the world’s mystery dwellers are insects and other invertebrates, and of course the rate of discovery of new insect species is orders of magnitude greater than for mammals or even frogs, fish or plants. Of the Smithsonian Institution’s 85 million biological specimens — among the largest such collections in the world — insects account for 35 million and mounting. “We have new insect specimens coming in by the boatload,” Dr. Miller said. “The collection grows by a few hundred thousand a year.”

Moreover, insects and their arthropod kin are thought to suffer disproportionately from habitat loss, for many are specialists endemic to one small eco-niche. As May Berenbaum of the University of Illinois has observed, however, it’s hard for people to identify with a creature that wears its bones on the outside and has backward bending legs. “If we found a new species of beetle, or even a whole new family of beetles, who would care?” said Dr. Boubli. “But monkeys are big, cute and furry. Monkeys have a special place in our hearts.”

Evidence suggests that it pays to look good on a fund-raising calendar. “We know we’re losing a lot of species overall,” Dr. Robinson said, “but when it comes to the large, charismatic species, for the most part we’ve been able to hold on. There are so many conservationists working really hard to make sure that we don’t lose our iconic, culturally important megafauna that, although many are right on the brink of extinction, they haven’t gone over the edge.”

Yet even our most beloved mascots — the pandas, the snow leopards, the gibbons and the whales — remain a mystery to us, their wild lives unplumbed. “We think we know the mammals pretty well,” said Dr. Miller, “but we have the most basic sort of information for only 6 percent of them.”

Moreover, conservationists are now grappling with the question of where and under what conditions the precious surviving megafauna will be living 5, 10, 50 years from now. In restricted parks and refuges? In zoos? Or amidst some semblance, reconstructed or otherwise, of the ruthless, splendid labyrinth in which their ancestors, and ours, lived and died and evolved?

Which brings us back to the need to know what’s out there, the whole phylogenetic swag: the rats and bats and beetles, the frogs in the trees, the algae in the seas. “If you don’t know what level of biodiversity exists,” said Vicki A. Funk, curator of the United States National Herbarium, “how are you going to conserve it?” Pickled, perhaps, and with tail pulled straight, and carefully, everlastingly archived.