Carnegie Museum Scientists Are Busy Uncovering the Present — and Future

By Mary Ann Thomas

When government authorities in South Carolina fretted over a potential influx of the light brown apple moth earlier this year, they contacted the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

John Rawlins, the museum’s head of invertebrate zoology — essentially all things that are not mammals, birds, reptiles, fish or frogs — took on the rush job.

The light brown apple moth is a nasty invasive species from Australia that doesn’t just devour one or two types of plants, but many. If it spreads in the United States, the moth has the potential to defoliate a wide variety of vegetation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service frequently turn to Rawlins’ section to identify insects for general surveys or specific monitoring of problematic pests.

With 11 million prepared specimens and another 2 million to 3 million still to be cataloged, the Carnegie has one of the largest insect collections in the world. Its holdings of Lepidoptera — moths and butterflies — is ranked in the world’s top 10 collections. If any insect needs to be identified, Rawlins’ section has the specimens for reference and the scientific expertise to know what to look for.

According to Rawlins, the federal government is panicking over the Australian moth. “It’s so difficult and obscure to identify,” he says.

After conducting a micro-dissection of the moth from South Carolina, the examination determined that it was not the dreaded light brown apple moth.

“It’s about identification and screening,” Rawlins says, looking at a freezer full of specimens that his staff still has to process.

“One of the things that worry me most,” he says, “what if, say, there is a purple-eyed zingo bug out there? Who is watching for the unknown?”

Sometimes, the answer is: the scientists of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

With less than 1 percent of its holdings on display, the public sees a mere sliver of the work and collection efforts of the 25 scientists found hovering over specimens and high-tech equipment examining DNA, and working on their other duties.

Unlike the exhibits, these Carnegie researchers are behind closed doors, down long corridors in a maze of offices with century-old oak shelves broken up by sections of modern, air-tight, environmentally controlled storage cases.

The researchers also are scattered throughout the world collecting specimens.

With more than 20 galleries and the Powdermill Nature Reserve research field station in Rector, the natural history museum has amassed more than 21 million objects.

Although most famous to the general public for its dinosaurs, with the largest collection of Jurassic dinosaurs in the world, most of the museum’s research staff is dedicated to the collection and identification of other specimens from all corners of the globe.

“Visitors would be stunned to know what we really do,” says Bob Androw, a scientific preparator. He can be found sifting through tree samples with wood-boring insects looking for known pests such as the destructive emerald ash borer, an exotic Asian beetle that had been decimating ash trees. He and others will process about 10,000 samples for the USDA in a six-month period, screening for certain species and archiving the specimens.

Experts on identification

Because Carnegie scientists are in the business of documenting all life, they are called upon frequently to identify a pantheon of specimens.

“In the old days, it was about research,” Rawlins says. “However for us, it’s very important for the museum not just to educate and entertain and not just to be scientific, it’s also important to serve people now.”

Federal and state governments contract with the museum for identification, research and help with wildlife surveys.

“Since we are specialists, sort of like medical pathologists, we can tell what species there are,” Rawlins says.

To the public, museums hold dead things, but its research mission is to actually document as many living organisms as possible.

The museum’s holdings of insects continues to grow, with about 300,000 bugs coming in a year. “It’s important to have a collection from the past, but it is extremely important to have the collection growing — it’s documentation tools for things that might seem inconsequential now but might become critically important later,” Rawlins says.

And the museum’s current research turns up new species on a regular basis.

About 40 bugs have been named after Bob Davidson, collection manager in invertebrate zoology. He is an international expert in beetles, the most successful of life forms boasting the largest number of known species — more than 400,000 — in the animal kingdom.

“I spend half of my time identifying,” says Davidson, who sits next to boxes of beetles, with contents of individually pinned beetles with tags and descriptions — written in very small type — of capture date, place, species and the name of the collector.

In addition to examining specimens, Davidson spends a considerable amount of time shipping the creatures out.

He lends out more than 1 million specimens to more than 150 scientists a year. Currently, about a quarter of a million species are not in the building; they’re in the laboratories of researchers in South Africa, Poland, Brazil and elsewhere.

Davidson often is on-loan himself, out of the building as he continues to gather new specimens from all over the world. He recently spent a month in Alaska above the Arctic Circle collecting beetles as part of a larger effort for long-term monitoring of wildlife.

While Carnegie researchers continue to identify and survey animals and send them around the globe, others are posting their work on species in cyberspace.

Chen Young, associate curator in invertebrate zoology, has posted a field guide of crane flies of Pennsylvania. With drawings, identification information and distribution, Young has attracted several thousand visitors since he set up his Web site late last year.

While the crane fly might not be a household name, the insect, which looks likes a mosquito, is an important food source for a number of animals and is a good indicator of water quality and, as such, is a popular study creature.

Young’s Web site landed him an invitation to conduct research on the crane flies in the Arctic.

“You want to do basic surveys,” Young says. “For example, to study global warming and its effect, you have to look back 50 years ago and have data available.”

The CSI of the natural history

While some scientists focus on building their collections, others relay on the decades of collecting to help with research on issues such as global warming.

Researchers are looking at samples of the plant gallium, a native ground cover known for its airy and elegant shape, collected in Pennsylvania from the late 1700s to the present. They will try to demonstrate that the plant is flowering 14 days later that it did a century ago.

Cynthia Morton, associate curator and head of botany uses her collection to study changes in plants over time and uses the specimens for DNA research.

Specifically, Morton extracts DNA from a plant and develops “relationship trees,” which are blueprints of the genetic material of specific varieties of plants.

“So a cancer researcher will look at these ‘relationship trees’ and if they know of a plant that has properties for a drug, but it’s difficult to grow, then that researcher can look at another plant closely related to it and that’s where our research can help,” Morton says.

Morton’s department conducts DNA research on local plants for public projects. Several years ago, they extracted and examined the DNA of London Plane trees that were planted in the Schenley Plaza in Oakland.

Working with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Morton made a startling discovery: The DNA for the Schenley Plaza London Plane trees was the same as the DNA from other plane trees secured from a number of growers on the East Coast.

If the trees all have the same genetic make-up — grown from generations of the same cuttings — they are sitting ducks for the next blight or disease. Essentially, swatches of this popular tree planted in parks and yards throughout the Eastern United States could be easily wiped out.

“We’re so concerned about the biodiversity in the wild,” Morton says, “but what about the biodiversity of the plants we use in our parks and backyards?”

Because governments and homeowners buy their stock from commercial nurseries, which many times propagate their products from the most successfully grown trees, scientists like Morton can assess genetically what is growing in our urban environment.

“We don’t know how widespread our urban diversity is declining but we would like to be able to help give some biodiversity back and work with the nursery industry,” Morton says.

Finding what’s there

The smallest North American land snail, Punctum Minutissimum, is now the most common snail in the state.

Or is it?

Timothy Pearce, head of the section of mollusks, is trying to learn how many types of snails live in the state and where. So far his multi-year project has turned up 125 species.

“If you think it’s important to preserve all species, you need to know what is rare and where it lives,” he says.

People bring in leaf litter for Pearce to examine and extract the tiny creatures such as Punctum Minutissimum, which is the size of a pinhead.

Pearce is looking at county-level distributions of snails and has made only a dent in the state. So far, he and his predecessors have identified 112 snail species in Allegheny County. It will take him visiting sites throughout the commonwealth — and processing the specimens — for a true reading on the snail population.

And he is puzzled by the low number of species in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

For example, existing records show that Columbia County has only three species of snails. That cannot be.

“So, I had two hypotheses, is it low diversity or low sampling?”

So, Pearce and his wife, Alice Doolittle, who works for the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, took a trip to Columbia County earlier this year to sample the local snail population.

They turned up 37 species, demonstrating a woeful lack of information and field work.

And these are not idle numbers. Pearce’s work will serve as a baseline from which scientists can measure the snail population in years to come. “I’m late, but somebody in the future will be grateful for this,” he says.

Although not sexy like dinosaurs, or as Pearce put its, they’re no “charismatic megafauna,” snails and other mollusks are the nuts and bolts of everyday life and their populations affect the food chain.

“They’re the ones doing the work but not getting any glory,” he says.

They are the food supply for mammals, birds, baby fireflies and other insects. In fact, female birds consume snails for calcium to produce egg shells that are sturdy.

Although snails recycle nutrients, turning leaves into soil, their existence often is taken for granted. That is until there’s a population crash or another disturbance affecting animals.

“They could be the canary in coal mine,” Pearce says. “But we don’t know what the canary sounds like at this point, and if it would stop singing, we wouldn’t notice.”

(c) 2008 Tribune-Review/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.