Scientists play Noah
Like trying to empty the Pacific with a teaspoon, it’s a task
doomed to failure.
But teams of scientists from different areas and different
disciplines are cooperating to attempt the impossible. They’re
trying to catalog every living thing on planet Earth.
Scientists play Noah
Like trying to empty the Pacific with a teaspoon, it’s a task doomed to failure.
But teams of scientists from different areas and different disciplines are cooperating to attempt the impossible. They’re trying to catalog every living thing on planet Earth.
The creation of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was such a monumental tasks that books have been written to detail the odyssey.
And the first and each subsequent edition of that monumental collection of words is obsolete the day it is published. The English language continues to grow and change, to evolve.
It’s a different challenge that will inevitably stymie thing that’s out there.
thing that’s out there.
As we scratch at the ocean depths, new creatures continue to emerge. Some of the research is taking place nearby. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing is peering into the depths of the bay’s signature canyon, a crack in the earth big enough to swallow the Grand Canyon.
And just a few years ago, biologists were amazed to find a new species of parrot – hardly a quiet, retiring animal – that inhabits the seldom-visited cloud forests in the mountains west of the Amazon.
Closer to home, backyard biologists continue to turn up new species of insects, even among the tens of millions of us right in California.
As kids, we sometimes liked to imagine that our rambles took us to places where no human had set foot. That was unlikely, of course.
But the knowledge that we are far from knowing everything there is to know about the Earth’s natural world promises that kind of adventure – the opportunity to travel beyond known horizons.
When I was a kid, the coelacanth – a fish believed to have disappeared with the dinosaurs – was “rediscovered.”
Residents of remote Indian Ocean communities were aware of the fish, of course. They even used its rough, scaly hide to rough up inner tubes before gluing patches on.
But the fish didn’t exist because scientists had not cataloged it. Before its official discovery, they knew of it only through fossil evidence.
And then that darn nature keeps rewriting the rule book. A husband-and-wife research team studies finches on the Galapagos Islands. Over the course of a lifetime of research, they have seen the finches adapt – evolve – to meet changing conditions. Given enough time and the right circumstances, new species may emerge to be added to the list.
Why should we even care about such an effort?
Exploration is part of us. We’re all driven to know more, to see beyond what we’ve seen.
And, as John Muir once pointed out, all organisms are connected in complicated and often-unexpected ways.
We don’t need to eat it, make money from it or use it for shelter to appreciate the value of something.
And so the effort to catalog every living thing is an exploration worthy of celebrating, not in spite of its futility, but because of it. It will be the best we can do in the first years of the 21st Century, a benchmark for scientists yet to be born.
I’ll never read this compendium – team members are guessing that it will come in at around a million species – but I am profoundly glad for the effort.
