(ding)
(bouncy music)
- [Maggy] How do you
measure the biodiversity
of all life on Earth?
Naturalists have been
working for centuries
exploring remote habitats
on land and in water
to catalog the planet's
living organisms.
Museums maintain huge
collections of these specimens,
which represent Earth's
known biodiversity.
But now, new technologies
allow scientists
to take a snapshot of life
in a way that was
not possible before.
Today, we'll meet with
marine biologist Chris Meyer
to learn about his
cutting edge work
on measuring biodiversity.
Hi, thanks for joining
us. I'm Maggy Benson,
host of Live From Qrius,
Smithsonian Science How.
We have an awesome
show today for you,
but before we get started,
I want to ask you a question.
You can respond using
the poll that appears
to the right of
your video screen.
Do you think it's
important to know
about every species on Earth?
Yes? No? Or maybe
you're not sure?
Take a moment to think about it,
and put your answer in
the window to the right.
(bouncy music)
Alright, while your
results are coming in,
we're gonna go to our expert.
Today we have with us
marine biologist Chris Meyer
from the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History.
Thanks for joining us, Chris.
- Thanks for having me, Maggy.
- So Chris, I know that you
study marine invertebrates.
Can you tell us a
little bit about
what that is and what you do?
- Sure. I study
marine invertebrates,
which compose the
bulk of the diversity
of life in the ocean.
I'm basically a
biodiversity scientist.
Our job is to go
out and document
the diversity of
life on the planet,
much like many researchers here
at the Natural History Museum,
we go out and collect
and try to discover
the new species
and also document
the patterns of
life on the planet.
In front of me is a
variety of cowries
that I've collected for my PhD,
and we also have a
number of specimens
that we've brought back
from a recent field trip.
Basically, biodiversity
in a nutshell
seems like a complicated word
people aren't familiar with,
but it just means
variation in life.
And I see studying
biodiversity is like
doing a giant jigsaw puzzle,
and we're identifying
the pieces,
we don't have the box top
and so we're out there
looking and exploring
and finding the missing pieces,
and more importantly then,
how they all fit together.
And we happen to do it on reefs,
where it's one of the most
diverse spots on the planet.
- And you said you
look at invertebrates,
so those are animals
without a backbone.
- That's correct.
- So 80% of our
viewers think that
it is important to
study and understand
every species on Earth.
What do you think?
- That's good news.
(laughs)
I agree. And it's
a lot of fun, too.
- [Maggy] Wonderful. So
you said that you go out,
and you actually look
for these species,
these pieces of the
puzzle, for your research.
What do you do with those?
- What we do is it's
important to understand
the animals and where they live,
so it's very important
to document the habitats
that they're found in,
to take photographs
of them living,
because oftentimes
when we preserve them
as reference
materials for later,
they lose their color if
they're in preservatives,
so we collect and
relax and preserve
the whole curation process,
of bringing them
back to the museum
so they can provide
comparative material
for scientists to look
at for centuries to come.
Natural history museums
maintain these collections
in order to provide
the standards
that other life is
compared against.
- So how big is the collection,
say here at Smithsonian's
Natural History Museum?
- Well, the Natural
History Museum's is
one of the biggest
ones in the world.
We have, in the Department
of Invertebrate Zoology,
we have over 35
million specimens.
- [Maggy] Wow!
- [Chris] Which actually,
if you lined them up,
it would extend for about
15 miles of shelf space.
- [Maggy] That's huge!
- It is quite remarkable.
- [Maggy] So why should
we keep all of them?
- Again, this is the main
comparative material.
When you think you
find a new species,
you come and compare it,
and it documents life.
But more importantly,
museums more and more
are seeing themselves
as time capsules,
you know, we can't
go back in time,
we don't have time machines,
but the collections
that we have made
enable us to go back and look at
communities and
species and ranges
so we can compare the
present with the past
to predict the future.
- So I understand that these
are some of the collections
that we actually have
here at the museum.
- [Chris] That's right.
- And what are they?
- So again, these are cowries,
they're snails that have a
shell, and they're spectacular,
and I was very lucky
to work on my PhD
to go out and collect
and document them.
And this other
collection is from
a series of work
we've been doing
to try and use some of
these new technologies
to address diversity.
- [Maggy] What kind of new
technologies do you mean?
- It's been a relatively
recent development,
in the past people would compare
the bumps and the
patterns on these shells,
or maybe some other
features of the shape.
Now we have new
genetic technologies
that allow us to get
into the DNA actually.
And the DNA is the
blueprint of life,
allows us to compare the
sequences of Gs, As, Ts, and Cs
from one species to another
in order to get kind
of a license plate,
or a barcode, for every species.
- [Maggy] So every
single species has
its own unique DNA, like
what we're looking at now.
- [Chris] That's right,
so on the screen,
if you look, if you notice,
that's a little string of
DNA that we've isolated
from three different species,
in the top there are two
butterflyfish species,
and in the bottom
there's a hawkfish.
If you notice, there
are more similarities
between the
butterflyfish species
than there are between
either of those
butterflyfish and the hawkfish.
So there are about six
differences between
those butterflyfish species,
whereas there's
about 18 differences
between any of the two
butterflyfish and the hawkfish.
That little region of the DNA
is what allows us
to differentiate
them at all life stages,
not just as adults,
but from eggs all the way up
through even when they die.
- So Mary from Omaha
has a great question,
and she wants to know,
how much tissue do you need
to get for a DNA sample?
- That's a good question, Mary.
You know, we don't
need very much,
the cells have a lot of DNA
packed in there, super coiled,
so we take just a
tiny little fraction
and we also try
to, if we can do it
in a non-destructive way,
we'll try and do that.
When I was collecting
these cowries,
you could just take a
little piece of the foot,
and as long as you
photo-document and
you could let the animal go.
It's a very small amount.
- [Maggy] Wonderful.
I know that you're employing
these DNA techniques
in some of your other projects,
specifically in Moorea.
Can you tell us where Moorea is
and why you chose that location
for some of your fieldwork?
- We took on this
ambitious goal,
just like we're trying to
document life on the planet,
to go to French Polynesia,
and there's a little
island called Moorea
that sits next to Tahiti.
It's kind of right below Hawaii
on kind of a mirror
image across the equator.
And we picked this
island because
there's on-going
research activity there,
two long-term research stations
that are conducting work,
and we wanted to build
a better guidebook
of all the diversity
on this island.
And because it's
a tropical place,
it has all the features of
these diverse communities,
but at the same time
it's very remote,
as you noticed it's in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean,
so it had what we thought was
a manageable amount of diversity
from plants and
animals to fungi.
- So going back to
the poll question
that we actually
asked our students,
you are trying to count
every single species
that lives in Moorea
on land and in water.
- That was the goal
we set ourselves with.
So it was a big effort,
and we tasked ourselves
over five years
to go out and try to collect
representative individuals
so we could get, cause it was
important to have a voucher,
that had tissue and DNA
for every species
that we encountered.
- How did you do that?
- It was just like a huge
regional scavenger hunt.
We invited experts from all
over the world to come down,
and they partook in expeditions
where we'd go from
the tallest peaks,
we dropped people
off via helicopters
on the highest mountains,
we did light traps,
we did blacklighting,
we did flight intercept traps,
we did any way to
collect and document
diversity that we could,
and we let the experts try and
find that as best they could.
Sometimes it would last
one person for a year,
other times it
would be many people
for up to, say, three weeks.
So it was a giant
bio-blitz, basically.
- That sounds incredibly
labor-intensive. What happened?
What were some of the
results of that project?
- Over five years, we've
counted, at current count
we've documented
over 7,000 species.
As we thought, more than
half of them are in the ocean
between the fishes and
marine invertebrates.
And here's a little
reel of a handful
of creatures and their
portfolio that we captured,
and you can see we captured
photographic images
that tried to convey the
diversity that we got,
so if you saw them
again you'd notice them.
And again, it was about 7,000,
but we know we didn't finish,
there's still many many
species to be discovered.
And one thing, if you look
at the species that
are rolling by,
there are about maybe 80 species
that are in that video
montage right there,
and if you wanted to
look at all 7,000,
it would take about 45 minutes
for us to run through it,
which would probably be
by the time we're done.
- Wow!
- It's fun to think
about at that rate,
if you looked at all the
described species on the planet,
how long do you think it
might take you to do that?
- So if it took 45 minutes
to catalog 7,000 species,
or not to catalog, but to show
7,000 species at that rate,
and I know that there
are over 1,000,000
described species on Earth,
- [Chris] That's right.
- [Maggy] I'm gonna have
to say several days.
- So we think there's about
1.5 million species described,
and that's just the
described stuff,
anyway it would take
you six continuous days
of watching that movie clicking
at that rate to see them all.
- Wow, that's a long time.
- If you don't sleep or eat.
- (laughs) We don't
need to do that.
So we have another
student question.
Lillian wants to know
have you ever
personally discovered
a new invertebrate species?
- Yes, actually, a
couple when I was
doing the work on the cowries.
I stumbled across
a number of things.
There's a species here in the
drawer, this is a map cowry,
and it was thought to be just
one species, this one here.
And it turns out that there are
about six different
species in that group,
and it was through using
these genetic sequences
that we could compare
and then go back in
and look for more
clues in the shell,
and we found many,
many other ones
that are very similar to that.
So we're in a time
phase now when
we're finding that
there's probably
much more diversity
than we even thought,
even in described species.
- You keep saying
described species
and having these vouchers,
meaning having the
original species
to be able to go back and
reference with the images.
Why is it important to build
this database, this registry?
- One of the ways, you
can think of it as
we've done kind of a
door-to-door census
so we've gone and looked at
where taxa, or species, live,
and now we can use
that information
to go and ask some
interesting questions about,
once we've done the puzzles,
we can figure out how
they fit together,
and some of our assumptions
about how ecosystems work
and how species
interact we're checking,
and one of the ways we do that
is by analyzing gut contents
because as there's still DNA
in the pieces that
are getting eaten,
and we've analyzed,
we had one study I worked
with a student, Matt Leray,
who's still here
at the Smithsonian,
looking at the guts of
two hawkfish species.
And the ecologists might think--
- [Maggy] So that's looking
at what they were eating.
- [Chris] Exactly. So
we used this registry
of the database, and we
examined their food items
and we discovered that
between the two fish species,
there's an arc eye hawkfish
and a flame hawkfish,
and they both live in
the same coral head,
here's two pictures
each of those species,
they live in the
same neighborhood,
we can think of them, they're
at the same restaurant,
and some of the
people would assume
that they're eating
the same thing
because they're closely related,
they might have similar tastes.
Well it turned out when
we did the analysis,
that they ate completely
different prey items.
The arc eye on the right
ate bigger organisms,
and the flame hawkfish
ate smaller ones,
so we think about how
ecosystems function,
there's less redundancy
in the system,
so there's more diversity,
there are more tightly-linked
inner connections,
so it's important to check
our assumptions about that,
because maybe they're a little
more fragile than we thought.
- [Maggy] So you can
learn a little bit more
about how everything's
connected on this coral reef.
- Absolutely, yeah.
- So you've done a lot
of work on registries.
How does some of this sampling
actually translate to
some of your other work?
- Now that we've
done the inventory,
we can start thinking
about doing observatory.
So we ran around and
collected things,
not randomly, but systematically
around the island,
but now we want to use this
tool to monitor the system.
So we've developed
a couple ways of
standardizing that effect,
and here's a little
video of these
autonomous reef
monitoring structures,
which are basically pre-fab
housing we put down on the reef.
Now most of the
reef diversity lives
in the nooks and
crannies of the reef,
and it's hard to access,
so we build these structures
to mimic that complexity.
We leave them in the
ocean for a year.
We come back after a
year, we put a lid on them
and bring the entire
neighborhood up,
and we analyze every living
creature that we find
in that stacked set of
plates, in the ARMS structure.
Here you can see
some of the images,
we photo-document
each of the plates,
and they're beautiful.
So all those creatures have
grown on that plate in one year,
and we get a better
handle on the diversity,
and because it's
standardized we can compare
place to place, site to site,
and it can be done both
regionally and globally.
- It's hard to believe
that those are animals,
it looks like artwork.
- They look like spectacular
paintings, don't they.
And we brought, just
so people can see--
- [Maggie] This one right here.
- [Chris] This is one of the
crates that we put on top,
and then when we capture
it, it's got a mesh,
and so it keeps the
creatures in it,
and just to get a
sense of the structure
and the complexity that we use.
Half of them have little caves,
and half of them are open.
So that's the structure
we take apart and analyze,
and we look and see how
many we got in our inventory
compared to not
using this device.
- [Maggy] So that's
really interesting,
so after you've
actually picked apart
in this huge study in Moorea,
every little animal
that you're finding,
in this one, you're saying
that there could be species
that you're discovering
that are undescribed.
- On every ARM we find a
handful of more species,
in every instance,
there's no doubt.
- [Maggy] So I think we have
another poll here for you.
We actually want to ask you
how many species you
think are undescribed?
And this is, again,
thinking about the idea
that we don't know everything
about life on Earth.
So what percentage of all
biodiversity on the planet
is still uncatalogued?
20%, 40%, 60%, or 80%?
Take a moment to think about it,
and put your answer
in the window
to the right of
your video screen.
(bouncy music)
So Chris, we got some
interesting results here.
We have 86% of our
viewers thinking that
80% of life on the
planet is uncatalogued.
What do you think?
- I think that's a good answer.
That's about where we stand...
There's a lot of work to do,
we think that there
are 80%, maybe 70%,
are still uncatalogued,
so that means there are a lot
of unknown species out there.
Now we're getting a handle
on how well we did in Moorea
by using devices such
as this ARM structure,
through now even new
technologies we can start
asking exactly how many
things we're missing
out there in the environment.
- We have another
student question for
do you collect species that
are considered endangered?
- You know, we try to
avoid collecting protected
or endangered species,
we're very conscientious of,
there are lots of
rules and regulations
that we have to abide by.
It's also important though
to study them to know,
so if they are studied, there
are various protocols in place
such that it's done
in a non-destructive,
- I want to get back
to this ARM structure.
I want to know how you
actually understand
that there are undescribed
and uncatalogued animals
that live in this.
- So once we've done the
voucher approach again,
we turn the tables and we
do a different technique.
We look at the plates,
try to pick out
all the species that
we can actually see,
but then we actually
take the creatures
that lived on the arms,
and we scrape them
off the plates
and we put them in a blender.
So we've shifted now from
a find and grind approach
to a grind and find.
We literally make a reef
smoothie out of them.
- [Maggie] Oh that doesn't
look very appetizing.
- [Chris] It doesn't
smell very good either.
So you've got the entire
community blended together,
and then we can extract the DNA
in total of that
entire community,
and then we can run some
kind of fancy analyses
of looking at that
license plate,
and effectively these
are basically kind of
tollbooths or fast passes,
so we can set them up to
monitor the entire diversity.
And there was a picture there
of where you can
actually see the DNA,
and then we sequence that,
and we get a library of all
the members of the community.
Then we can compare that library
to what we have in our database,
and if we're missing it,
they're kind of dark taxa,
or dark species, you
can think of it as
dark matter in the universe,
we know it's there,
but we're really
not sure what it's doing.
And it's important
to kind of understand
how those trajectories,
as there is change going on,
we need to better
understand the trajectories
of all the communities.
Is it falling off drastically,
is it falling off a cliff,
or does it fall off
kind of steadily?
- I don't understand
why it's important
to understand all of this.
Why is biodiversity important,
and why is it
important to understand
all of these
undescribed species?
- That's a really good question,
and I hope to do a
little analogy here.
I don't know how many of
the students out there
have ever played the game Uno,
I think most kids have
probably run across this game,
it's a pretty simple card game
where it's like Crazy Eights,
and I wanted to ask a
poll of the students
to see if they understand
and try to learn
a little bit about why
biodiversity's important.
- [Maggy] Great, so
let's go to the poll.
Which Uno hand do you
prefer to be dealt with?
Hand one, or hand two?
Hand one has mostly red cards,
while hand two has more
variety of colors and numbers.
(bubbly music)
The answers are in, and
our viewers are unanimous
in saying that the second hand,
the one with more
variety, is better.
What do you think?
- That's exactly the message.
Again, diversity,
that variation, is a
I mean it's fine if
it stayed on red,
but if it shifts you'd
better have something
in your back pocket
to adapt to that.
So in many ways, that's
biodiversity whether
it's in populations or in
communities or whatever,
you need to have the
capacity to adapt to change,
and it provides you some
resilience against that,
so it's important to document
how much of that
diversity's in the community
to understand its
capacity to adapt.
- You've pioneered
this work in Moorea.
Where else have you applied it?
- We've taken what we've learned
and the lessons from Moorea,
and now we're actually going
to the heart of marine
diversity in Indonesia.
This is kind of the heart
of the coral triangle,
where it's the most diverse
marine spot on the planet,
and we've set up an Indonesian
Biodiversity Research Center
at Udayana University in Bali,
where we've been training,
every summer we run courses on
biodiversity inventories
and survey methods,
and we're training
the next generation
of Indonesian scientists
to learn more about
their biodiversity,
to become better stewards,
and better managers
of their natural heritage.
- [Maggy] So that's
really training the
next generation of scientists.
Do you work with other students?
- We also have
thought long and hard
about how to engage all levels
of students in the process,
and we've worked a lot
with middle school students
and high school students,
and we've adopted another
method, this 1 cubic foot,
and I'm gonna bring out
this wire frame here,
it's a very simple model
that we've developed,
and we're prototyping
this process
to go around and
capture a cubic foot
of biodiversity in any habitat.
And so we've worked
with students
out in the Golden Gate
National Recreation Area,
and here you can see some
students piloting this project
where we were looking
in a pond area,
and we challenged those students
to find the most diverse areas,
and then observe the habitat
and document all the species.
Again, by focusing our
attention on one cubic foot,
that itself is a
functioning ecosystem,
becomes a bit of a biological
barometer of diversity.
You can go back and monitor
the same area time over time
or look at impacts
along gradients,
maybe away from a path
or away from a road,
or something like that.
And it's really fun, the
students have a great time,
and they provide
real data that then
can be comparable from site
to site or class to class.
- So it's really another
version of the ARMS.
- It is, it's exactly
a version of the ARMS.
It's life in a cubic foot.
- We have another question
from Mrs. Hamilton.
Her class wants to know,
what's the most diverse
ecosystem in the world?
- Wow, that's a great question.
It depends on the scale
that you sample it at,
so that's the trick.
If we were taking one cubic
foot, and putting that anywhere,
where would we find
that on the planet?
Well, David Littschwager
that I've worked with,
he did this in tropical
rainforests and tropical reefs,
and tropical reefs had
about 330 species in it,
whereas a tropical rainforest
canopy had only about 130.
Now that's just in a cubic foot,
but if you aggregate
it over, I think
the tropical rainforest
might win over the reef.
Although it's debatable,
that's what we're
out there testing.
- Robin has a question
and she wants to know
how you became a
marine biologist?
- Good question, Robin.
I grew up being
fascinated with diversity,
visiting a lot of museums,
doing a lot of reading,
and I basically just
kept that curiosity going
and realize, I had some
great teachers and mentors,
they were really important
and kept encouraging me to
keep pursuing that passion.
I think that's what
I would suggest
to any students out there,
just follow your heart
and your passion,
and if you're interested in it,
and it takes work,
there's no doubt,
but I was really curious,
so it makes it easy.
- Alright. This one comes from
Mrs. Stewart's
fourth grade class.
How do you name the new
species that you find?
- That's a good question.
Often times the name
conveys something
about the features of the
animal that make it distinct,
or often times it's
named after somebody
who they want to give
some sort of credit.
It could be your wife or
your benefactor or whatever,
or the place, oftentimes
the name conveys
where it was found first.
- This one comes from Finn,
and Finn wants to know
how do you memorize
all the names
of the marine invertebrates?
- I don't.
(laughs)
That would be really hard.
It takes years, and I
don't like memorization,
that's why I didn't
like biology at first,
but actually then
understanding it as a system
makes it a lot easier,
and it's like any language,
the more you do it the
more familiar it becomes.
- From Umberto, what is
the most amazing thing
you've ever seen in the ocean?
- Everything's amazing!
- [Maggy] I agree.
- That's a great question.
It is fascinating, every
species tells a story,
and some of the more
interesting interactions,
there are really
amazing gall crabs
that actually live
in the corals,
and they get the corals
just like a hornbill might,
to kind of grow
around the female,
and then the male goes in
and out and feeds the female.
It's an amazing interaction,
and that's kind
of a wild species.
There are many, many
stories like that
across marine ecosystems.
- Elio from Louisville:
how can our class study
biodiversity like you?
- Well that's one thing
we're trying to do
with the bio-cube project,
is we're trying to bring
it to everybody's backyard.
One of the ways is
just to sit down
and appreciate and observe,
just try to find the
most diverse spot
in your local playground
or your local communities.
Again, we're trying
to prototype this
and get this out to everybody,
so I think in
about a year's time
we'll be able to
help you out a lot,
and you'll be able to feed
into a national effort
to document diversity
in your neighborhoods.
- Sophie wants to know
what's the most interesting
thing you've discovered?
- Huh, Sophie.
You know, it's great,
I have a great job because
everything is interesting,
you keep moving on from
one thing to another,
but I think some of the
most interesting things
was when I was first starting
to use these DNA
techniques as a tool,
and realizing what it revealed
as far as the diversity,
particularly in these cowries
where people had studied
them for centuries
and could never really
verify some of their ideas,
and then to bring
the power of the DNA
to look and document it,
there was all this
underlying diversity.
I remember specifically the
day where I got the data back,
and I was like, "Wow!
This isn't one species,
this is really five species,"
that was pretty remarkable.
- This one comes from
Judy from Santa Fe.
She wants to know,
what kinds of things
kill biodiversity?
- That's a good question, Judy.
You know, as far as
threats to diversity,
the two biggest threats to
reefs these days, local threats,
are certainly overfishing
and bad water quality.
Those really threaten
diversity because
it changes the dynamics
of the ecosystem.
The fish are there to
help graze down the algae,
and the corals are
competing with them,
and you can create a
complete tipping point,
but we're actually
looking at what are the
that's fish, algae, corals,
but if you look at the
underlying diversity,
what's it doing to that.
We really don't
have a good handle
on everything else
that's in the reefs,
but definitely the big threats
are fishing and water quality.
- Zach from Little
Rock wants to know
how their class can
get bio-cubes to use,
and I say we say
stay tuned, right?
- Yeah, I mean, again,
we're really close,
we're working on all the
tools to capture the data,
and again, stay tuned,
Qrius, we'll be using Qrius
and we're working with
some other developers,
iNaturalist as a
platform to help
democratize and really put
this in everybody's hand.
- What is the favorite part
about your job? Asks Sophie.
- I'm always excited
to go to work.
(laughs)
That's a good thing.
Every day you're gonna
see something new,
or you're gonna come across
something that surprises you,
and you get to
follow your passions,
it's a great place to be in,
it's a great line of work.
And I just feel lucky every day,
I feel like I've never grown up,
I'm still a kid at heart.
- Thank you so much
for tuning in today,
and thank you, Chris,
for being here.
Is there anywhere that
our viewers can go
to learn a little bit
more about your work?
- Sure, if you're interested in
following up on any of this,
there are two websites
that I can steer you to,
mooreabiocode.org
gives you information
about the Moorea
Biocode project,
and also the ibrc.org
tells you a little about
what we're doing in Indonesia,
and of course also pay
attention to the Qrius website
where we'll be posting
more information
and follow up with as the
bio-cube project matures.
Thanks.
- Great. Thank you, Chris.
Thanks again for
tuning in today.
If you missed part
of this broadcast
or want to see it again,
it'll be archived later
today on qrius.si.edu.
Thanks so much for joining,
and see you next time, on
Smithsonian Science How.
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