Calling all catfish: Census going on

By Bryn Nelson
Newsday

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In his 1941 guidebook, "Key to Fishes of Alachua County, Florida," noted conservation biologist Archie Carr wrote, "Any damned fool knows a catfish."

If he were alive today, Carr might be surprised to learn there are now 2,855 species of catfish known from around the world, representing one out of every four types of freshwater fish. But Larry Page, an ichthyologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, estimates that an additional 1,000 to 2,000 catfish species remain to be discovered.

An ambitious project funded by the National Science Foundation is seeking to fill in the gaps by directing Page and three other teams of researchers to create comprehensive biological inventories of four eclectic taxonomic groups: catfish, plant bugs, slime molds and plants in the nightshade family.

The five-year Planetary Biodiversity Inventory resembles a worldwide scavenger hunt, only one in which no one knows exactly what will be found. The $14 million effort also is something of a trial balloon for supporters, who hope to persuade Congress to help fund a much larger goal: the discovery, identification and cataloging of every species on Earth in a massive virtual encyclopedia — within 25 years.

"We can't care about what we don't know about," said Kevin Kelly, chairman of ALL Species Foundation, which proposed the undertaking. And scientists agree there is still much we don't know. Although more than 1.5 million of Earth's species have been described in some detail, scientists estimate that 7 million to 100 million remain unknown.

Completing a biological inventory of the world is no small feat, of course, and not everyone believes such an ambitious goal is achievable.

But advocates are quick to point out that the successful Human Genome Project had plenty of initial detractors as well, and they credit advances in digital photography, computational power and Internet technology with transforming their dream into at least a possibility.

Page said most of the new catfish discoveries await expeditions to the tropics. His catfish group will make use of the new Trans-Amazonian Highway, with one team working its way east from Peru and the other working its way west from Brazil.

American Museum of Natural History entomologist Randall Schuh said the two insect families he is investigating contain about 4,000 known species. Both families belong to the insect suborder Heteroptera, or the "true bugs," whose other members include such notables as aphids, scales and bedbugs.

Schuh estimated that the researchers will describe an additional 1,000 species, mostly from Australia.

University of Arkansas researcher Fred Spiegel's study subjects regularly morph from something vaguely resembling a forest of microscopic balloons on sticks to something akin to amoebas.

"Imagine being the size of an ant and walking into a world like this," he said while showing selections from his slime-mold family album. "Truly spectacular."

Beauty is perhaps in the eye of the beholder, but there's no denying the international flair of the slime-mold family.

Since the microscopic organisms prey on the bacteria and fungi that cling to decaying plant matter, they can exist anywhere from the sub-Antarctic to the tropics to the near-Arctic. In Hawaii, researchers have found what they believe might be 50 new mold species. Spiegel estimated that about 1,200 to 1,300 more species could be described by the project's completion.

University of Utah botanist Lynn Bohs and her colleagues received funding to identify species in the nightshade family, whose better-known members include tomatoes, chili peppers, tobacco, petunias, eggplants, potatoes and, of course, the deadly nightshade.

Boasting an estimated 1,500 species, the targeted plant genus Solanum is thought to be particularly diverse in places such as Australia, South Africa, the South American rain forest, Madagascar and the Caribbean.

Among other benefits, Page said the newfound knowledge will assist researchers in making difficult conservation decisions.

A similar rationale has been espoused by supporters of a separate project known as the Census of Marine Life, which seeks to document life in the seas. So far, the census has documented more than 15,000 species of fish and 195,000 to 215,000 species of marine plants and animals — a tally scientists say is still only an estimated 10 percent of the world's total.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company