The Good Work of Salvage
Bob Mesibov
Research Associate, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
PO Box 700, Burnie TAS 7320
mesibov@southcom.com.au
In Christian theology, the Elect will be saved by God while the Preterites will suffer eternal damnation. The Elect/Preterite distinction is now being drawn in conservation biology as well. For "Elect" read "species and habitats of high conservation value". For "damnation" read "extinction" and "loss". Just as battlefront medics are asked to practice triage - the sorting of casualties according to the urgency of need for treatment - biologists are today being asked to identify taxa, habitats and geographical areas that are in need of urgent attention from field researchers and conservation-minded land managers. Unfortunately, the resources available for such choices, and for subsequent conservation action, are very limited. There isn't enough money, time and enthusiasm to save every living thing and every natural area. Some, the Preterites, must be allowed to go.
This Preterite life, however, deserves something more than a lament. The damned have value; and that value can be salvaged, at least in part, by storage in seed and gene banks. Funding gene banks is a particularly sound scientific investment. Several hundred thousand dollars spent on an endangered parrot may or may not save a beautiful bird from extinction, but the same money used to freeze the DNA of marine invertebrates on a dying coral reef will secure the genetic riches of a wide range of soon-to-be-gone taxa. A similar argument can be made for the substantial expansion of museum facilities. Museums are the natural habitat of the extinct. Properly curated collections should be growing in step with species losses.
Optimists believe that Elect species and natural areas will survive the biodiversity-loss crisis. Pessimists aren't so sure, but they still favour Election. Both groups are afraid that in a biotically-impoverished world, the Elect will be the only Nature left for biologists to study. It is in such a world that the Preterites would have their greatest scientific value. The Preterites provide the Elect with a context. The more taxa that are included in a phylogenetic analysis, for example, the more useful is the result for evolutionary and biogeographic studies. It doesn't matter whether the taxa being considered by the phylogeneticist are still extant (Elect) or are recently extinct (Preterite). On a more practical level, managers of Elect natural areas will be better informed if they know how similar but now-vanished ecosystems used to function; and the future protectors of Elect species would be wise to study the biology of Preterite congeners.
I live in a part of the world where wilderness has a much higher conservation value than does remnant woodland in an agricultural district. It is far easier to get funding for a zoological or botanical study in a wild, remote National Park than for a biological inventory of a proposed dump site in "useless scrub" near a town. Research expenditure is strongly biased towards the most secure sites. The Elect, in other words, have all the luck. If the Preterites are to yield any value, this funding bias will have to be reversed, and priority in field research will have to be given to areas experiencing the most rapid loss of biodiversity. Such areas are easily picked out on satellite images and aerial photographs. We know where Preterition is occurring. Where, then, are the salvage biologists we need to recover Preterite genes, specimens and data?
I think the answer is clear enough. Salvage is the responsibility of taxonomists. No-one else is qualified to do the job. As each new taxon is recognised or an old one confirmed, the conscientious taxonomist will carefully consider the conservation status and likely future of the species concerned. Species restricted to small, doomed natural areas, and species tied to particular doomed habitats, should be collected - and fast. Underfunded taxonomists should actively recruit volunteers for field work, both to gather material of disappearing species and to exhaustively sample the biota of disappearing natural areas.
Biologists opposed to destructive developments usually take action by writing letters to the newspapers, joining protest groups and lobbying politicians. This is all well and good, and hopefully some Elect species will be better known and better protected as a result. In the meantime, while you're standing in front of that bulldozer, would you mind collecting a few potentially Preterite specimens?
