Biodiversity research requires more boots on the ground

 Edward O. Wilson

Our incomplete taxonomic knowledge impedes our attempts to protect biodiversity. A

renaissance in the classification of species and their interactions is needed to guide conservation
prioritization.

The discovery and description of Earth’s biodiversity is the oldest biological science, yet it is the
least developed. The number of species characterized and given Latinized names by taxonomists
recently passed 2 million. However, the full roster, comprising all those known and others awaiting
discovery, is generally believed to be of the order of 10 million; one mathematically reasoned
inference put the number of eukaryotic species alone at 8.7 million1. Thus, a very large fraction of
living species, as many as 80%, remains unknown to science. Simply put, we live on a little-known
planet.

Take the ants, for example. These relatively well-studied insects are among the most abundant
and environmentally dominant animals on the land outside the polar regions (Fig. 1). There are
334 currently recognized genera, of which the second largest in species number is Pheidole. In my
study of the New World Pheidole I identified 624 species, including 337 new to science2. The
natural history of fewer than a score of these has been studied in any detail. Meanwhile, new
species, discovered mostly in tropical forests and savannas, continue to pour into museum
collections.

Fig. 1: Two of the 15,214 species of ant named globally by mid-2017.

both photographs, Christian Rabeling/Harvard University.

a, Facial view of a workerof Thaumatomyrmex paludis, a specialist predator on polyxenid (‘pin

cushion’) millipedes. The pitchfork-like mandibles are used to penetratethe dense mat of
protective bristles that cover the millipede bodies. b, A worker of Martialis heureka, the most
primitive (basally diverged) living ant species, known from only a few Brazilian specimens.
Specimen returned to Brazil.

Full size image

A second example is the astonishing abundance and diversity of single-celled protists uncovered in
studies3 of the soil and litter of neotropical forests. A large fraction of these mostly new species is
parasitic. Their activity seems to be a factor that sustains diversity in insects and other
invertebrates, a large majority of which are also unstudied — or entirely unknown.

Biodiversity in the sea is even less well explored than that on the land. The ultramicroscopic
bacterium Prochlorococcus, the principal photosynthesizer of the warmer open sea, was first
recognized in 1988. These microbes, along with another superabundant marine
bacterium, Pelagibacter, are exceeded in turn by viruses, which number on average billions per
litre of seawater. A great many, perhaps most, seem to be bacteriophages.

Biologists have scarcely begun to measure the variety of life in Earth’s immense virosphere. Yet
even as this domain is more fully explored, we are met by discoveries such as the mysterious
ultramicroscopic eukaryotes classified in 2013 as a new phylum, the Picozoa. And beneath the
surface of both land and sea is the ‘deep biome’ of rock-eating bacteria and their occasional
nematode predators4 that range downwards to the level at which the risen heat prevents all life
— we think.

Most biological research begins and stays with the species as the favoured level of organization,
whatever the nature of the trait analysed. The sequencing of highly variable mitochondrial
segments — or even of the entire genome — is valuable in its own right, but tells us relatively little
about the anatomy, physiology and behaviour of the organisms, and even less about their role in
ecosystems. At the highest level, the classification of ecosystems and the rates at which they
change tell us a lot. The same is true of ecoregions, relatively undisturbed natural areas consisting
of one to multiple ecosystems5. But the delineation of species and the rates of their individual
population growth or decline tell us much more, and with far greater exactitude.

Many of the less-explored groups are immediately available for fruitful research on biodiversity —
for example, the mites, soil-dwelling spiders, schizomid arachnids, parasitoid wasps, springtails,
tardigrades, nematodes, rotifers, parasitic flatworms, midges, crustaceans, microscopic algae and
a seemingly infinitude of microscopic fungi. I have often offered the following suggestion to new
graduate students: if you go outside and pick up the first small organism you see, you will hold in
your hand a PhD project.

As a rule, the only scientists able to discover and analyse the fine detail of biodiversity needed at
the species level are specialists: the entomologists, herpetologists, nematologists, mycologists and
others who devote their careers to the biology of their chosen group. They alone develop the
fingertip familiarity with the species and a feel for the intricacy of organisms in the environment.
They accumulate not merely data and syntheses but also impressions and intuitions beyond the
reach even of Big Data technology. This deep peripheral knowledge leads to new questions and
lines of research beyond ordinary imagination.

Unfortunately, research into the biology of diversity has been largely abandoned by universities in
favour of focus at the molecular and cellular levels of a small number of ‘model’ species. Museums
around the world with outstanding collections have been unable to increase their curatorial staff
to compensate for this shortfall.
The Linnaean enterprise has taken a new urgency with the recognition that global extinction rates
have risen to between 100 and 1,000 times the rate during pre-human history6 (approximately
900 times in North American freshwater fishes, for example7). It makes sense, when surveying and
mapping species for conservation practice, to focus first on those groups of which we have the
greatest knowledge and can move most quickly to completion. Among them are the flowering
plants, vertebrates, corals, butterflies, dragonflies and damsel flies, araneid spiders and
mosquitoes. From this distribution information alone, which we could assemble in a decade, it
should be possible to map the optimum placement of biodiversity-defined reserves. Some of these
distribution studies already exist and conservation planning on the basis of them is ongoing8.

Advances in molecular genetics and information technology are assisting crucial biodiversity
studies9. The reading of highly variable segments of mitochondria allows reliable identification of
specimens to species level, and even to different life forms or isolated tissue fragments of the
same species. Complete genomes make possible quick scans of entire faunas and floras. They also
permit the reconstruction of the evolutionary history by which related species have multiplied. Yet
in the broader perspective of biodiversity, these studies are the equivalent of aerial surveillance;
what is more needed are boots on the ground.

The ongoing neglect of biodiversity research impedes the progress of conservation of life at all
levels in all taxonomic groups. It also diminishes the capacity to meet one of the greatest
challenges to the biological sciences, rising just over the horizon: the origin, evolution and
equilibration of ecosystems. The problems presented by ecosystem analyses are equivalent in
complexity to those presented by the human brain. They can be solved by nothing less than a
Linnaean renaissance, in which each one of the millions of Earth’s species still surviving is
discovered and its role in the biosphere increasingly well documented.

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