Chicago Tribune
Even as public concern grows over the accelerating extinction of species, the scientists who traverse the globe to collect, identify, and enumerate the world's plants and animals also have been disappearing at an alarming rate.
They are called taxonomists, and in the last 20 years their field has been crushed like a hapless bug wandering into the path of speeding technology.
Almost all research funding and prestige have shifted to biologists, who use electron microscopes and DNA sequencing to study life processes on a molecular and genetic level.
As a result, the taxonomists who remain fear that their branch of science is disintegrating—with grave implications for the conservation and ecology movements.
"The scholars we rely on to keep track of biodiversity are becoming extinct," said Petra Sierwald, a spider taxonomist and curator of insects at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Gap of Expertise
Beetles, for instance, are by far the biggest category of any life-form, with 417,000 known species and perhaps 2 million to 2.5 million species. But only a handful of experts remain to look for and identify them.
Only four taxonomists are left who specialize in mites, tiny bugs that wreak serious havoc by carrying disease to plants and mammals, and only three for centipedes, none in the United States. Thirteen bivalve taxonomists are studying clams, but two of the three saltwater bivalve experts in the U.S. recently retired.
Concerned for the future, the National Science Foundation began six years ago to parcel out $750,000 awards to leading taxonomists. The five-year Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) grants are to be used to convince promising biology students that taxonomy remains a vital and crucial scientific pursuit.
The grant money provides stipends for postdoctoral students and covers travel, living, research, and equipment costs for field work for students and advisers. Sierwald is using her PEET grant to recruit and prepare young biologists for a lifetime of collecting and studying millipedes.
There are 10,000 known species of millipedes and perhaps 70,000 undiscovered species, but until Sierwald got busy only five millipede experts remained.
"One was in Russia, one in Tasmania, and three were in this country," Sierwald said. "The oldest was 74 years old, the others in their late 50s and 60s, and they had no students studying under them. There had been nobody getting ready to pick up where these scientists will leave off when they retire or pass from the scene."
