“The complexity of New York City is to a square mile of lowland tropical forest as a mouse’s squeak is to all music that has ever been produced by humanity.”
DAN JANZEN
Dan Janzen was born in 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a long way from the tropical forest. He grew up in a place of farms, young temperate forests, glacial lakes, and old fields. He grew up among turtles, frogs, and trees, in a landscape with few species. Among the cornfields and woodlots, nature could be learned on the back porch (off which Janzen shot his first pheasant). By nine, Janzen was collecting moths, tracking, hunting, trapping, and fishing. His was a landscape that could be easily known, and so Janzen, like Linnaeus, thought the world might also be easily known.1
By ninth grade, just as Dan Janzen felt as if he had collected most of what there was to collect in Minneapolis, he went down to the public library. There, in a small natural history museum, was a display on the wall of South American butterflies, none of which Janzen had ever collected, and all of which were wonderful, gaudy, and tempting. A few days later, through the kind of coincidence that would pace Janzen’s life, Janzen’s father announced he had two months of leave. “Where should we go?” he asked young Dan, to which Dan answered Mexico, the nearest tropical forest to Minnesota, the best place to go to see more moths and butterflies.
Dan’s father was of Russian and German extraction—pragmatic and stolid, meat and potatoes. He worked incessantly and thought big. His mother was, according to Dan Janzen, “a crazy, Irish, imaginative artist who tried and did everything. She was wild in her way.” The combination of those worlds and personalities made Dan Janzen what he was. He would be a mix of wild and stolid, visionary and pragmatic. It was that combination that, tinged with a young boy’s simple desires, would make him think that his parents might drive from Minnesota to Mexico for two months. It was his mother’s wildness and his father’s intensity that led his parents to say, “OK.”
Dan Janzen would use his paper route money to help pay for the trip. The family would drive to Brownsville, Texas, and then on into Mexico down through Veracruz. They crossed the cornfields and old farms of the Midwest and slowly moved south. As they did, Dan saw new species out the window. They accumulated in his mind and—each time the car stopped—in his net. The farther south the car went, the happier Dan was. When they arrived in Mexico, he collected butterflies and other insects every hour he was awake. In the process, he fell in love with the tropics, the cradle of near infinite diversity. For a collector like Dan, the tropics called. He would collect one butterfly and then another. It is possible to cover hundreds of miles this way, moving from one species to the next. Dan would fill his life like this, bug to bug. He went back to Mexico with his family in the tenth grade and then again, on his own, in the twelfth grade. On the latter trip, he rode a motor scooter all over Mexico collecting butterflies and “sleeping in gas stations, the backs of whorehouses, and cheap motels.”2 He learned Spanish, he learned a lot about people, and he found a passion—bordering on mania—for the diversity of tropical lands.
Janzen came back to the United States, joined the army for six months, and then started college at the University of Minnesota, studying civil engineering. Civil engineering was a solid career and Janzen did not know that what he really liked to do, running from bug to bug, collecting and observing, could be a job. It did not seem like a job, until one day in the spring of his second year, he was walking across campus when a lightning bolt struck the student union. Janzen ran into a building to seek cover and on the wall he saw a glass exhibit case with a stuffed wood duck in it. Here, in Janzen’s telling, was a key moment in his life. In looking around at the wood duck’s cabinet that so closely resembled the cabinets where he had first seen South American butterflies (or, for that matter, Linnaeus’s cabinets), he realized that being a biologist was a job, too. As he stood staring, the door behind him opened and an older biologist invited Janzen into his office, into a life in biology and, more immediately, to his lecture on guinea pig genetics. Janzen still remembers the slides. He loved it, and felt this world call to him, tugging at his fertile mind. In engineering, he had been wasting his life. From that day on, Janzen would spend as many of his days as he could in the tropics, outside, watching wild species live.
When Dan Janzen formally began active research in the tropics in 1961, he was a first-year graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. By then, he had already spent most of his life doing biology of one sort or another, albeit informally. It took a U-Haul truck to drive his “hobby” collection of insects to California. Once at Berkeley, his first task as a graduate student was to pick a few species to study. He went back to Veracruz, Mexico, where he had last been when he was eighteen, to collect insects for the California Insect Survey. He collected whatever he could find, but what he was looking for was something that might be interesting enough to spend years investigating.
One day while he was walking down the road a beetle flew past him and landed on a thorny acacia shrub. The beetle was promptly attacked by an ant, causing it to fly away.* It occurred to Janzen later to wonder why the ant had attacked the beetle and so he walked back to the acacia to take a second look. The acacia was covered with ants. Janzen did what any five-year-old might have done. He threw some insects to the ants. The ants attacked Janzen’s offerings, just as before with the beetle, but they did not eat them. It almost seemed like the ants were defending the shrub. These simple observations raised many questions. Fortunately for Janzen, an earlier naturalist had already offered an explanation, though it was one that was probably too strange to be true.3
Born in 1832 in England, Thomas Belt was a naturalist, geologist, and more generally an observer of his surroundings. He had studied gold in Australia to some renown and would go on to study and travel in Russia, Colorado, and elsewhere. During a four-year stint in Nicaragua, he wrote The Naturalist in Nicaragua, a book filled with observations and insights—including those germane to Janzen as he stood in the road watching the still agitated ants.
Belt had found a species of acacia, not unlike the one that Janzen chanced upon, on which “the branches and trunk are covered with strong curved spines, set in pairs, from which it receives the name of the bull’s-horn thorn….” Belt proceeded to study the tree, which, like the one Janzen saw, was covered with ants. He saw that the “thorns are hollow, and are tenanted by ants, that make a small hole for their entrance and exit near one end of the thorn, and also burrow through the partition that separates the two horns; so that the one entrance serves for both. Here they rear their young, and in the wet season every one of the thorns is tenanted; and hundreds of ants are to be seen running about, especially over the young leaves.” As Janzen would soon find out, and as many a tropical biologist has discovered for herself since, “If one of these be touched, or a branch shaken, the little ants swarm out from the hollow thorns, and attack the aggressor with jaws and sting.”
Belt would go on to offer his interpretation of what was occurring. He imagined that the ants formed “a standing army for the plant, which prevents not only [mammals] from browsing on the leaves, but delivers it from the attacks of a much more dangerous enemy—the leaf-cutting ants. For these services the ants are not only securely housed by the plant, but are provided with a bountiful supply of food, and to secure their attendance at the right time and place, the food is so arranged and distributed as to effect that object with wonderful perfection…. At the base of each pair of leaflets, on the mid-rib of the leaves, is a crater-formed gland, which, when the leaves are young, secretes a honey-like liquid. Of this the ants are very fond; and they are constantly running about from one gland to another to sip up the honey as it is secreted. But this is not all; there is still more…. At the end of each of the small divisions of the compound leaflet there is, when the leaf first unfolds, a little yellow fruit-like body united by a point at its base to the end of the pinnule. Examined through a microscope, this little appendage looks like a golden pear. When the leaf first unfolds, the little pears are not quite ripe, and the ants are continually employed going from one to another, examining them. When an ant finds one sufficiently advanced, it bites the small point of attachment; then, bending down the fruit-like body, it breaks it off and bears it away in triumph to the nest.”4
If true, the story would be remarkable. It seemed, however, too elaborate, a kind of just-so story, and although Belt had observed the relationship, he hadn’t done any experiments. He hadn’t seen what happened if you removed the ants or added beetles. He hadn’t tested his hypotheses. During Belt’s time, and really up until Janzen saw the beetle scared by the ants, tropical biology was not an experimental science. One did experiments in old fields in Minnesota, but in the tropics one just took notes.
Janzen seized on the ant-acacia relationship. He would observe, but he would also test whether Belt’s idea really made sense. If Belt was right, then if you removed the ants from the trees, the trees should be eaten by herbivores. Janzen did just that. He removed ants from a random subset of the acacia trees he was studying, either by spraying insecticide or cutting off the bull thorns. When he did, the acacias were eaten more rapidly by herbivores and grew more slowly.5 Here was, though simple, one of the first experiments in tropical ecology, a project that would prove to be a classic study—perhaps the classic study—in coevolutionary relationships between plants and animals. The trees had evolved, and the ants had evolved in response, again and again in a long, evolutionary tit-for-tat relationship in which both ant and plant benefited. Belt had been, more than a hundred years prior, right.
Janzen started with ants and acacias, but he would in time do much more than that. He would study the ecology of black water rivers, the dispersal of seeds, the effects of megafauna extinction, and many other obscure aspects of the tropical world. Janzen would, over the next five years, propose a dozen theories that would each blossom into a new area of research. He offered explanations for why mountain passes were higher in the tropics, how disturbance affects mutualisms, what happens when one mutualist partner disappears and the other does not, why dry forest trees flower at the same time, how the body sizes of temperate and tropical species compare, why ants don’t pollinate flowers, and on and on. His was an exciting mind lit by the fire of observation. Once Janzen started researching the tropics, he would never stop. His intellect had found its slightly wild home—the landscape in which it could be left to explore without bounds.
Janzen’s tropical research began in Mexico, but it would move to Costa Rica. When Janzen first visited Costa Rica, its forests seemed to him like a more wonderful, less degraded version of Mexican tropical forest. As he worked, he watched that change. He watched his favorite forests fall. He did more and more research, offered more and more wild ideas and then, because it seemed as though he had to, began one of the most ambitious conservation projects in the neotropics—the Guanacaste Conservation Area in the dry forest region of Costa Rica. Guanacaste was to be his holdout, his reserve against deforestation and species loss, so that Costa Rica might still be special. Janzen’s leadership of the Guanacaste Conservation Area would win him accolades, prizes, and, most important, a successful conservation program. Through that program, and innovative approaches both to management of the reserve and resource conservation, Janzen would restore a forest where there had been, largely, degraded lands. He had begun by filling books and journals with ideas. Now, he was raising a forest from seed and dirt. It was hardly the most ambitious thing he would do.
By the time Terry Erwin published his humble paper in the Coleopterist’s Bulletin in 1982, Janzen was already a hero of tropical biology, a fixture in Costa Rican conservation, and a man with a big collection of bugs. Somewhere along the line, he had also become a field biologist’s field biologist.* His uniform of work-stained khakis, a well-worn button-up shirt, and mussed hair and beard was practical. There was little in the way of pretense. To the extent that he massaged his image, it was to look more weathered, more as if he had just stepped out of a hollow log in which he had spent the night. Janzen’s friends added to his eccentric reputation; for example, offering in an interview that he smells like a peccary. Journalists helped, too. A recent image of Janzen, published in the scientific journal Nature, shows him with his shirt off, surrounded by specimens, looking every bit the biologist or missionary gone bush. The author of a Smithsonian Magazine article in 1986, Don Lessem, said Janzen “looks less an academic than a prophet.”6 He has earned this image as the grizzled prophet of tropical life, both in the field and in the fields of the mind. He tested dozens of new hypotheses, wrote hundreds of papers, and generated many ideas that he would leave to other biologists to test. He began what he has repeatedly called the biggest tropical forest restoration project in the world. He was ambitious, often right, and just a little bit wild.
Today Dan Janzen is a tenured faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, where he stays only long enough to teach two classes in the fall of each year. The rest of the year, he and his wife, Winnie Hallwachs, live in a rented cabin—their home—in the dry forests of the Guanacaste Conservation Area. The walls of their home are decorated with plastic bags, each of which contains a living caterpillar—one of Dan’s projects. The caterpillar bags spread around the room are both science and decoration, not unlike the botanical prints that graced the walls of Linnaeus’s room. For Linnaeus the prints were used for the occasional comparison, but more so they were a daily reminder of the diversity of the living world. For both men, the reminder was meager—like a map of the universe on an astronomer’s wall—but a reminder all the same, both of the variety of the natural world and of what was crammed into their humming minds.
Janzen’s life has been dedicated to the study of the conservation of species and their interactions. All the rest is secondary. Like much in his life, his project to inventory species began accidentally. He is not a taxonomist, not an expert at identifying and naming species. However, in 1978 when he was scrambling along a ravine working on seed predators, he slipped and broke a rib (or perhaps several—he never went to a hospital to have them checked).* Immobilized, he sat for a month in a chair under a sixty-watt lightbulb powered by a generator from dusk to 9 p.m. As moths flew to the lightbulb, he collected them—a fat gecko waiting for his sup. It was, by good fortune, the best year in memory for moths. They came and came, and Janzen picked them off the wall by the light, killed them, pinned them, and then delicately spread them for later study and identification. It was tedious work, but since he could not move from his chair he had nothing but time. He waited, collected, and waited more. Within a month, he had collected thousands of moths. Of those thousands, many were collected only once or a few times. When he grabbed a moth, it was often one he had not collected before. Many were new to science.
When he could walk again, he walked into the forest a few hundred meters in front of his house to look for the caterpillars that might correspond to the moths he had seen. A moth is the last stage of a caterpillar’s life cycle—more conspicuous, more mobile, but shorter lived and less important to an ecologist. To understand a moth you need to learn about their corresponding caterpillar, what they do and where they do it. Watching the caterpillars on the leaves, gnawing, munching, and grinding, it occurred to Janzen how little was known about which caterpillars belonged with which moths. Each moth must correspond to a caterpillar, but which? At the time, most of the caterpillars in Guanacaste (or in the rest of the world, for that matter) could not be linked with the moths they would become. As he began to raise the caterpillars in leaf-filled bags hanging from nails on his walls, bags that would become a permanent fixture of his and Winnie’s lives, most of the bags would eventually contain not moths, but parasitoid wasps. Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in caterpillars (or other insects) and as the eggs mature in the living tissue, they develop into wasps.* However, some caterpillars would avoid the parasitoids long enough to turn into moths. When they did, Janzen killed them for his collection.
Janzen’s collection grew larger and larger. He began to need more help from experts to name the species he was finding. He found himself, in time, talking to more and more taxonomists—the Linnaean librarians of life. Janzen’s curiosity led him step-by-step to his next great undertaking.
As he thought about his growing moth problem, his vision became to survey not just the moths of Guanacaste, but all of the species in all the parks of Costa Rica. Costa Rica had become many a biologist’s favorite haunt. It was both tropical and a relatively easy place to work. He had already begun working with Costa Rican biologists to develop INBio, a national center for studying and conserving Costa Rican biodiversity. Janzen had in the back of his mind that the center could ultimately lay the foundation for an inventory. There would be a plan, a network, and a formal system. The basics seemed simple. Biologists would go and find every species in the group they work on. They would name new species. They would list all species. They would get some help from locals. The idea was still more imaginative than pragmatic, more Janzen’s mother than his father, but that would begin to change.
As these thoughts began to form in his mind, he found himself attending a UNESCO meeting of reserve designers, held in Costa Rica in 1992. It was there that Jim Edwards, then a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), said he wanted to fund a project to do something crazy like, say, finding all the species in some place. It was a surprising statement, one that no one expected.* The room went quiet for a moment and then Janzen said, “What about Costa Rica?” “No, not Costa Rica, some smaller area,” came the response. At this point he thought about, but did not mention, the Guanacaste reserve. No one had considered the possibility that such a task might be undertaken. No one had a clue how many species might be found. If Erwin were right, there would be hundreds of thousands of new species just in the Guanacaste, not to mention the rest of Costa Rica. If he were wrong, we would be closer to knowing the world than he had thought. It was a kind of test, Janzen thought. “Erwin was full of shit. His method was ecological nonsense,” simply too crude to be useful. Janzen vacillated as to whether he thought there were far more species than Erwin estimated there to be, or far fewer.† It did not matter anyway; Janzen did not want to estimate, he wanted to go out and name those species, to count them by hand.
After the meeting at which Edwards announced his wish to fund a full inventory, the NSF sponsored a meeting in 1993 at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss the possibility of such a survey.7 Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs led. The meeting was not yet about Guanacaste, but that was where Janzen would push it. He wanted to survey his backyard, just as Bates once had in Tefé. He wanted badly to know what was there, to know how much could live in one hunk of forest. The project needed a leader wherever it would be, and Dan Janzen seemed a likely candidate. He yelled a little. He pointed, grumbled, and offered grand possibilities. He was the one, the jungle prophet.
People began to ask Janzen how much it would cost. He started at 90 million dollars. He wrote down a justification for that value, but he might as well have pulled it from a hat. He would go on to get 22 million dollars from private donations, from U.S. conservation organizations and then from the Costa Rican National Government. It would be a start.
What Janzen had planned was an enormous task. It is hard to overestimate the magnitude of the project at hand; Janzen had bitten the apple from the tree of knowledge. The snakes and, for that matter, the moths and mites, had lured him in. Now, driven by the same desires as Linnaeus, he would try to name everything. One participant at the NSF meeting, Robert K. Colwell from the University of Connecticut, described the undertaking as, “like knowing for the first time what the face of the moon looks like. This is the first time we’d know what a whole tropical forest really looks like, what’s in it.”8 It was a more modest project than Linnaeus’s, a single forest instead of the world, but Linnaeus had not understood the task before him. Linnaeus had thought that with ten thousand species he was almost done. How many species Janzen and his teams would have to name was anyone’s guess. The vertebrates were easy (170 species of birds, 115 species of mammals, and 100 reptile and amphibian species) and unlikely to accumulate many more species, but the invertebrates and everything smaller were still wild and unknown. Dan Janzen had found, at the time, 3,140 caterpillar species in the reserve and nearly ten thousand moth species. There were more moth species in Guanacaste than Linnaeus thought there were species in the world. And the moths are, when compared to beetles, not particularly diverse.
In the movie Fitzcarraldo, the protagonist moves to the Peruvian rubber town of Iquitos, where he wants to build the most beautiful opera house in the world. He will fill that house, and the surrounding forest, with music. It must be so wonderful that even Enrico Caruso, the world’s most famous tenor, will come to perform. After years of searching, he finally finds the perfect place for the opera house, in a place on the river that is unreachable from downstream. There are rapids that a boat carrying opera building materials cannot go over. The only way to bring them to the site is to carry the boat up and over a mountain and lower it into a parallel river on the other side.
The real ordeal of making the movie Fitzcarraldo was as grand as the imagined ordeal of making the opera house. The director, Werner Herzog, hired men to put the boat on wooden sliders, and with a minimum of levers and mostly brute force pull it up and over an Amazonian hill. No one before had attempted such a thing, not in a movie, and certainly not in real life. Herzog would call himself the Conquistador of the Useless as he orchestrated the scene.
Janzen might have felt like Herzog’s protagonist as he began his grand venture. He talked about the jungle as an orchestra, not an opera, of species and their names, but it was music all the same. If he could name everything, the performance would sound clearer: the brass sounds of the frogs, the flutelike chirp of katydids. Here, unlike anywhere else in the world, Janzen might know the name of each thing that called in the night, each voice, each instrument of evolution’s song.
But Janzen pressed forward. He would lead the project to name every living species in the Guanacaste reserve. In moments of confidence, or perhaps hubris, he was sure of it. Other biologists were skeptical, but tended to echo a sentiment I would often hear with regard to the project, something along the lines of, “I thought it was a crazy idea at first, impossible, but then I thought, well, it is Dan.” Soon, he had convinced “three hundred PhDs” to come to Guanacaste to work. The mite people, the fly people, the worm people, and so on, would work together to name all things living in the park.
To a biologist it is obvious why anyone would want to find all of the species in a place or even in the world. This quest is, for field biologists in particular, akin to climbing a mountain or, at the age of 18, following butterflies across Mexico on a motor scooter. But there were also more practical reasons for the endeavor. Once species were named, they could be checked for useful drugs and considered more generally for their value to humans. Their functions could be understood. Which species help with decomposition? Which species help prevent disease? (The species of ants that defend Janzen’s acacia plants are widely used by native peoples of the Amazon to treat rheumatism, for example.) Once species were named, we could understand, or begin to understand, their biology. Once species were named, we could make them useful (“Use it or lose it” was Janzen’s motto). However, the potential utility of named species was only part of why Janzen began the project, and why others become involved. It was also, simply put, inconceivable that it had not been done already. The species were there, as they had been for millions of years, calling to each other in nameless tongues. Here was the first thing any people did when they settled a place. Yet scientists had never done it right, had never come close to finishing. Here it would finally be done. Here, Janzen would be able to grab a handful of dirt and as the creatures struggled to flee from his fingers back to safety, call out each of their Linnaean names.
Sometimes Janzen’s project in Costa Rica, which would come to be called the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI), seemed like the most ridiculously ambitious endeavor ever launched by man. Other times it seemed meek. After all, Costa Rica is far from the most diverse country in tropical America. Within Costa Rica, the dry forest is perhaps the easiest to study (its canopy is lower to the ground, among other conveniences). In any case, the little patch of forest where Janzen works is relatively modest in size. Why not start somewhere in the “real tropics,” dirty, grumpy, cheap-bus riding, tropical biologists sometimes asked Janzen. Why not start in the wet forest where Erwin had estimated all of his species to be? Why not start in the Amazon or the Congo?
In talks, Janzen replied by showing a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane. The Wright Brothers, Janzen offered, did not take off in a thunderstorm from a jagged mountain for their first flight. They chose a calm wind on a long flat plain. So Janzen chose what he thought was a long flat biological plain. He hoped to catch a tailwind.
Even before the starting pistol went off, new species rolled in from those who came early and who had already been working in the region. Janzen himself toiled, both in preparing the project and in his continuing sampling. He worked with teams to name the moths. He collected caterpillars and raised them. His house was ever more covered with cocoons. He pinned moths while on the phone, while listening to seminars, while eating dinner. Plastic bags filled his tiny rooms. His whole life smelled like leaves and caterpillar shit. He sent out students. He sent out employees.
There were auspicious moments in those early days, but also from the very beginning there were things that would be difficult. If everything worked perfectly, systematists were to work as if on a series of parallel assembly lines—sharing specimens, identifying things for each other, systematically sampling Janzen’s single site. However, systematists are not accustomed to broad collaborations, particularly those that transcend taxonomic lines. Beetle people do not work with ant people. Termite people do not work with anyone. Systematics, the naming of creatures, is an endeavor that favors quiet hours of solitary work, not complex interactions with a team. Systematists collect specimens and then go back to rooms smelling of naphthalene, the chemical used to preserve insects. In those rooms, their very best days are spent looking through microscopes. Such efforts are not social. If systematists are socializing, it means, to many of them, simply time they are not spending looking at the organisms they really love. The obscurity of the things on which taxonomists work does not lessen their focus. In fact, it may heighten it. To dig into their subject, they have to dig so far in, focus so intensely, that the rest of the world seems farther and farther away.
The sword of Damocles hung over Janzen, and no one else. If the project failed, it was his failure, not theirs. He and others worried about the systematists. He worried that instead of working as a team, they would each go off down an interesting trail, find a cool bug, and then go down another trail, unsystematically, in search of one more. To make matters worse, even once they have found a new species, most systematists work slowly. They brood. They tend not to publish. They tend, even when they find a new unnamed thing, to sit on it, just to make sure.* Janzen wanted the project to work collectively—a cattle drive of science—but systematists, like cats, do not herd.
The Guanacaste ATBI was never meant to be Janzen’s only project. He too moved easily down side trails. But it was, for a while, his big project. A great deal was wrapped up in its completion. Janzen burned years of his life trying to get the project moving smoothly, to get the species named one after the other. The project was not just science; it was, for Janzen, part of a dream. He talked often about naming all the species in Guanacaste before he died. He knew, he would say in interview after interview, what he would do for each day for the rest of his life (meaning, in large part, collecting moths). In the spring of 1997, the first big phase of the project was to start. The systematists would descend in droves on Guanacaste, like, well, locust collectors. And then the inconceivable happened.
In planning the project, Janzen had teamed up with INBio, the Costa Rican National Institute for Biodiversity. He had not wanted to officially be in charge and so let the money go through INBio, all of it.* However, INBio decided that instead of spending the money on the ATBI, they would spend it elsewhere on more relevant “social and economic considerations.”9 Gamez argued that the money might be better spent on products like field guides for ecotourism—field guides, it might be noted, for forests in which many, perhaps most of the species, still lacked names. Some biologists involved in the ATBI speculated that some of the money had already been spent by the Costa Rican government on other endeavors. Regardless, the project was killed with a series of phone calls. What had taken years to orchestrate disintegrated in days.
There was nothing stopping many of the scientists from continuing to work in Guanacaste, but many left all the same. There was no money to support them. If the biologists were the musicians in Janzen’s opera, they left the stage with a cacophony. The fly people were gone, then the fungal people, and then the mite people until it was just Janzen and Hallwachs, left on their own to name each thing.
With the fall of Janzen’s ATBI, a new, more humble, enterprise would be envisioned and initiated. Janzen talked to John Pickering, a University of Georgia entomologist, about organizing a new ATBI, one whose location would be closer to its funding. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the figurative backyard of East Coast Americans, seemed like a good target. The park, at 2,200 square kilometers, is big and varied enough to be interesting, but not so big as to have no probability of success. An ATBI for the Smokies was bold, but much less bold than the Costa Rican version. Crude guesses suggested that in the Smokies, there might be one hundred thousand multicellular species.* In comparison, there were, we now know, more than ten thousand moth species alone in Guanacaste.10 Here could be at least one place on Earth where each thing was named, one complete map of the local detail and richness of life. Pickering began to solicit funds, along with Keith Langdon from the Park Service, and soon the Great Smoky Mountains ATBI was under way.
Janzen and Pickering weren’t the only ones thinking big. Stewart Brand (founder of the WholeEarth Catalog), Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired), and a group of leaders and thinkers were asked in September of 2000 to name a cause “they deemed worthy of big financial support.” They chose, “finish the species count,” for the globe. The ball began to roll quickly. Terry Erwin, along with E. O. Wilson, Gustavo Fonseca, and other biodiversity luminaries were contacted and soon they had signed on. That same year, a million dollars in donations from Silicon Valley philanthropists started what would be called All Species Foundation with the goal to “complete the inventory of all species of life on Earth within the next 25 years—one human generation.” Erwin had been the one to suggest there were millions of unnamed species. For closure’s sake alone, he had to try to name them or at least find them. He was put in charge of the board. Newspapers all over the world covered the story.
The All Species Foundation inventory was quite possibly the most outrageous, outlandish project ever proposed in science. Janzen had tried the near impossible in the Guanacaste ATBI project. The Great Smoky Mountains ATBI proposed something more modest than the Guanacaste ATBI project, but still more difficult than anything that had been attempted before. Erwin and crew looked further into the distance and let out a battle cry. As Erwin would point out, the All Species project was so big that it made the Human Genome Project pale by comparison. Cost estimates were on the order of one to three billion dollars. The project was to train ninety thousand systematists to help name species—nine times the number currently active.
The project never got off the ground. The All Species Foundation would meet a fate similar to the ATBI’s. Within a relatively short period of time, dozens of scientists had signed on to get his ship up and over the mountain and to know the full grandeur of life’s orchestra, to hear each species calling in each place and to be able to call back their names. They picked up the ropes on the boat that had been dropped; they pointed themselves uphill and pulled. Then, without warning, the tech-economy bubble of the late 90’s that had initially fueled the project burst. The project’s money disappeared and the main office closed on December 1, 2002. The project now employs just one full-time staff member who will continue the work of naming all species on Earth.
Only the Smoky Mountains inventory continues, though slowly and with no sign of completion on the near or even far horizon. Pickering initially estimated that the Smokies ATBI would take fifteen years to complete. That means there are roughly five years left and yet, all would acknowledge, completion is not on the horizon.* The biologists working in the Smokies (of which I am one) continue to go back to the mountain. We continue to go up the hill. We continue to catalog the new species, the old species, all species, but only for one National Forest in two states (North Carolina and Tennessee), in one country of the world. Linnaeus wanted to name everything. We will have to settle for what is in our backyard. In a way, the result is a testament to what Erwin first offered, a measure of our ignorance. We remain too ignorant to say how right or wrong Erwin’s estimate might be and too impotent, too unfocused, too dedicated to other things to try to name all the species that are left.
It is, in a way, embarrassing that we have not done better at naming the species around us. So far the difficulties have been economic. If we had enough money we could train systematists and begin to collect and name species en masse. Wars have been fought for less than the inventories would cost—and it is this feeling, that we could do it if we really wanted to, that has fueled Janzen, Erwin, and others in their quest to name the species that buzz by us unnoticed.* Ultimately, however, there are other, more persistent problems than funding. Even were we to finish a project like the ATBI for the whole world, we would still not know exactly how many species there are. For one, the number of species is always changing. The most rapid change right now comes from the loss of species. The estimate for birds (the best studied animals) is that humans have already extinguished more than two thousand bird species in the last several thousand years. Even after the number of species lost to humans slows, the number of species will still keep changing both because natural extinctions do occur and because we are also gaining species. As we move about cataloging, the species are busy surviving and speciating.
The second reason we may never know how many species there are is more fundamental. The boundaries between species differ depending upon how we look at them. On April 17, 2002, six months before the fall of the All Species Foundation’s global endeavor, a group of scientists wrote to the science advisor board of the foundation. The letter began, “This letter comes to you from several evolutionary biologists who share a strong hope for the success of the All Species Inventory.”11 They then praised the goals of a global inventory, but went on to indicate that “all evolutionary biologists, and many lay persons,”* are familiar with the “species problem.” From there on, the letter began to sound less like praise.
The species problem is old. It goes back to Linnaeus and then back a little further and has occupied many tens of books, thousands of papers, and even more, angry barroom debates. It is the problem of how one identifies the boundaries of species, where one ends and another begins. The boundaries between organisms are at best fuzzy, the boundaries between species more so. Historically, most species were named on the basis of their morphology, how they look, in part because for most species it was the only practical solution. Two species that looked different were uniquely named (under the so-called morphological species concept). But species might differ in subtle traits that are hard to discern (their chemistry, for example), or two groups of individuals that look different might actually reproduce freely. There are many different rules one could use to distinguish species and because the category of “species” is subjective, none is right;† some are just more practical than others. The debate may seem academic. In part it is, but a great deal hinges on how it is resolved. Depending on which species concept you choose, the number of species in even well-studied groups is up for grabs. The number of monkey species on Earth nearly doubled a few years ago, not because of new discoveries in remote lands, but instead because it was decided a new species concept should be used. Because existing species were parsed into more species, the average monkey species also became rarer as a consequence.
The letter writers favored a particular species concept, the phylogenetic concept, in which evolutionarily distinct groups of individuals are studied and identified rather than morphological species. One, under this model, needn’t worry about species names at all and could instead focus on evolutionary units. They argued that “if the process of discovering and describing new species is undertaken in a phylogenetic context, such that new species are described concomitantly with their phylogenetic relationships to previously described taxa, then the investigators can focus their effort towards those portions of the biodiversity spectrum where evolutionary history is less well understood.”
At the time, the letter seemed to put the cart before the horse, or maybe the whine before the cheese. The All Species Foundation would soon fold and had not yet named a single new species, but since then things have begun to change, things that make the letter seem not so much like the cranky whining of a bunch of evolutionary biologists over semantics.
Again the story involves Dan Janzen. Dan Janzen, in studying the moths and butterflies around him, had noticed that sometimes the caterpillars of a single moth or butterfly species differ in predictable ways. Caterpillars with one color pattern are found on one host plant, and caterpillars of another color pattern are found on a different host plant, but the moth or butterfly the two kinds of caterpillars become is indistinguishable. Janzen wondered if his single moth or butterfly species might not be multiple cryptic species, cryptic because their differences are invisible (or at least hard to see). Perhaps there were differences among his moths that he was missing, whether subtle chemical differences or something else that the moths could detect, and so not mate with each other. Janzen’s problem of cryptic species detection was an old one; what was not old was what Janzen was about to hear at a meeting in Guelph, Ontario, about how to solve it.
According to Janzen, “This crazy guy, Paul Hebert, at Guelph,” had organized a meeting. The meeting was an exploratory workshop at Cold Spring Harbor in March of 2003, to elicit funding for a largescale DNA barcoding project. DNA barcoding is a method by which small sections of mitochondrial DNA from specimens are used to identify, rapidly, what a species is and roughly where it belongs on the evolutionary tree. The method was and remains controversial and so was the meeting. Janzen says, it “turned into a catfight between Paul Hebert and the phylogeneticists.”* The phylogeneticists doubted that species could be reliably identified with such a small snippet of mitochondrial DNA and were outspoken enough that nothing happened. Janzen thought that the meeting was not going the way he would like it to. “It was a failure.” He pulled his comb out of his pocket and threw it across the room and said that he wanted to do barcoding, but more to the point that “he wanted to be able to do it for a penny, anytime, anywhere.” Some wondered, perhaps aloud, who had invited him.
The meeting was a new beginning for Janzen. Later, he would ask Hebert if the method actually worked. It does, said Hebert. Janzen sent Hebert some of his problematic moths, the species in which the caterpillars seemed variable but the moths themselves were not. Janzen, or Janzen’s moths at least, would become a guinea pig.† One of the first species that was barcoded for Janzen was Astraptes fulgerator, a common skipper butterfly from the neotropics for which the extremely variable caterpillars seemed to use too many kinds of host plants, more than was expected anyway. When Hebert barcoded Astraptes fulgerator, the barcoding indicated there were at least ten genetically distinct species. The lineage had evolved and diverged but had done so without noticeable changes in adult morphology. The butterflies all looked the same. Once distinguished though, the species stories became clear. The different species seemed to favor different food plants and, now that they were known, their biology could be studied in greater detail.12
Suddenly Erwin’s estimates of global diversity seemed as though perhaps they were low again. If each butterfly, moth or beetle species, as identified by morphology, is actually multiple species, then the number of species in Erwin’s samples might be twice or three times as high as he had imagined. Who knows. So far, as Janzen has barcoded his moths from Guanacaste, the number of species has gone up by about 10 percent, “particularly for the small things.”13 Janzen thinks that barcoding could double the estimates of the number of parasitoids. Tachinid flies “are going to get much more diverse.” And then, of course, there are the beetles, the damned beetles. The answers that Janzen gets from barcoding, that there are more species in his backyard or even on the wall of his house than he had imagined, might give one pause. It might make an ATBI project seem even less likely than it had been before. Of course, this is not how Janzen responded.
Janzen is now talking about an ATBI again, but a different kind. He wants to make handheld DNA barcoding machines and to make them cheap. He wants to sell them for a penny to every person in the world that they might identify, in a second, all the species around them. Take a snip of the plant in your backyard and put it into the machine. On the screen you will see its name and everything that is known about it. It is pie in the sky, but Janzen goes on, as ferociously as ever, trying. He has barcoded about eighty thousand specimens from Guanacaste. Paul Hebert has barcoded about half a million specimens, including many that have been sent to him by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park ATBI. Janzen and Hebert are now trying to find $150 million to jump-start the world project.
Time will tell what happens to Janzen’s newest endeavor with Hebert. There remain criticisms of the method and we are still a long way from handheld DNA barcoders that cost a penny a piece. The nameless remain nearly infinite. The projects to find them have either failed or, as in the case of the Smokies, are modest. We can put a man on the moon, people involved in biodiversity inventories continue to say, but we do not know what is in our backyard.* For now, it will stay that way, but Janzen is back in his shop building again, and he is done with his Wright Brothers analogy. What he is trying to build now is much more like a space shuttle than a primitive-winged plane. “To the moon,” or at least to every backyard—with a name for every species any child ever picks up in a moment of curious play.
In the meantime, Janzen still walks the forests around his cabin. He picks up caterpillars on leaves, raises them to adulthood—to moths, butterflies, or, more often, parasitoids—and looks for new species. He might finish at least the butterflies and moths, of at least Guanacaste, before he dies. He also might not. When I talked to him, he was working to buy a piece of forest adjacent to the Guanacaste reserve, to expand the reserve and further local conservation. He bought it without ever seeing it. If it were degraded, he would restore it. If it were not, he would simply conserve it. After he bought it, he went to explore his new patch of forest. It had cost him two hundred thousand dollars—something like, accounting for inflation, what he was awarded from the Swedish National Academy for his Crafoord prize. The forest was just thirty kilometers from his house, thirty kilometers from where he had spent most of his adult life. As he stepped into it for the first time, he felt like he could not identify anything. Janzen is among the most skilled living tropical natural historians and in this forest he was lost in a place without names. It was, he said, “quite startling.” Here were thousands of species he did not know. He had exhausted the species of Minnesota as a child and here, near his new home, he would not come close in a lifetime to knowing every form. If someone had asked him to name the species at that moment, he would have been speechless. He was, ever the boy explorer inside the man, thrilled.