Off The Map

Suriname Wildlife, as depicted by Maria Sibylla Merian, the German artist and naturalist in the eighteenth century.

I arrived last night in Paramaribo, Suriname, to join an expedition in search of new species, in the unexplored southeastern corner of the country, deep rainforest on the northern border of Brazil.  It’s a big expedition, including 20 or so scientists from all specialties, and also requiring lots of logistical advance work.

A Cessna Caravan will ferry us out Thursday from the capital city of Paramaribo maybe 175 miles south to our jumping off point at Palumeu.  Then on Friday, we’ll travel by helicopter over the Kasikasima outcrop out to our first research camp, where an advance party should have cleared a heli-pad out of the forest.  After nine days there we’ll traveling down along the Palumeu River to a second camp for a six-day stay.

But there are lots of uncertainties in this kind of trip.  We’ll also be out of internet contact till the end of the month, though it may be possible to send Twitter messages out via satellite phone (you can follow me @RichardConniff).

Meanwhile, I’m taking in Paramaribo, and thinking about early explorers like Maria Sybella Merian, an eighteenth-century artist, who painted one of my favorite images of Suriname wildlife (above), a blend of fantasy from the Bestiary era with the astonishing real-world finds of the Great Age of Discovery.

Also thinking about John Stedman, a mercenary who came here in the eighteenth-century as part of a Dutch expedition to suppresst runaway slaves.  I wrote about him in The Species Seekers:

Stedman

Stedman’s colorful memoir was a bestseller of 1796, under the ponderous title Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America, from the year 1772 to 1777. The book was partly a picaresque adventure tale, told on the ribald model of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. It was also an indictment of slavery, though the author was hardly an abolitionist.  And, oddly, it was a celebration of South American wildlife.

The mix of elements could be jarring.  Along with an account of how a planter’s jealous wife had slit a slave girl’s throat, stabbed her repeatedly in the breast, and tossed her into a river with hands bound behind, Stedman also offered his readers loving descriptions of spider monkeys, flying squirrels, cockatoos, and coatimundis.  One illustration, by Stedman’s friend, the poet and artist William Blake, depicted a slave hung from the gallows, still living, by a hook jammed under his ribs, and the next showed

Spur-winged water hen

“The Toucan and the Fly-catcher.” After “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave,” the reader could contemplate “The Spur winged Water hen” and “the Red Curlew.”

Taking delight in the natural world was a way of coping that suited Stedman’s “incurable romanticism,” according to the historians Richard and Sally Price.  His descriptions of the natural world were vivid enough that they may have served as a source for Blake’s famous verse “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright/In the forests of the night …” (Stedman wrote of a “Tiger-cat,” or jaguar, “its Eyes Emitting flashes of lightning.”)

Everybody’s a little nervous about the expedition ahead, but also excited.  At lunch today, one of the scientists was talking about having once previously had a chance to visit a place like this, so untouched that the animals came close, curious, and unafraid, not knowing yet what humans could be.

Victory to the Shaggy

Carpet shark swallows a bamboo shark whole (courtesy Tom Mannering)

We like to believe that victory belongs to the sleek and the strong.  But sometimes being shaggy and obscure works better.  Daniela Ceccarelli and David Williamson, from the  Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, were doing research on the Great Barrier Reef when they spotted the spectacle of one shark swallowing another whole.

Bamboo sharks, looking as slick and smooth as an Apple product, forage for food by nosing into nooks and crannies along the bottom.  Carpet sharks, by contrast, are shaggy, camouflaged creatures that lie on the bottom and do nothing.  (Think of them as Microsoft products.)

But when dinner comes to them, they snap it up.

The “Germs” that Keep Us Healthy (Save the Planet–Conclusion)

There is one other big reason guys (and drug companies) may soon find themselves paying more attention to biodiversity.  “Our minds are going to explode over the next ten years,” University of Maryland ecologist Dan Gruner, PhD,  told me, “as we learn more about the microbes that are everywhere, including on our bodies, and that keep us healthy all the time.”

Gruner studies the complex ways plants and animals interact in habitats from Hawaii to Florida.    The hidden players in these transactions are often bacteria, fungi, and other microbial organisms.  And with the help of genetic analysis, he says, we are beginning to identify them and understand how they work.  Instead of the old “war on germs” mentality, researchers are discovering that having the right balance of microbes is essential to well-being, for both ecosystems and individuals.

People who are obese, for instance, tend to have less microbial diversity in their digestive tracts and more of a bacterial group that’s highly efficient at extracting nutrients.  That may turn out to be why fat people can eat the same diet as thin people, but still stay  fat .  Understanding biodiversity on that level and learning how to tinker with it may eventually give doctors a subtle new tool for keeping us healthy—and even for helping fat people become thin.

Understanding diversity on the larger scale, says Gruner, is also likely to show us how thoroughly we depend on an abundance of plants, animals, and microbes for every aspect of our survival.  In a world with so much variety, it’s easy to shrug it off, or not even notice, when a species goes extinct.  But as the number of species thins out, Gruner suspects we may find that wetlands no longer purify our water as efficiently, or the oceans do not produce quite as much oxygen, or our farmlands become just a little less fertile.

Gruner has special reason to believe biodiversity matters.  At age 15, he survived leukemia—another win for that little pink flower, the rosy periwinkle.  For the rest of us, the real question is whether the natural world will still have the answers, and whether the species that could have saved our lives will still be there, when it’s our turn to look death in the eye.

END

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Looking for the next Viagra (Save the Planet–5)

In Durban's Berea Herbal Market

One standard shortcut, for instance, is to look for remedies from traditional medicine.  That’s how researchers found metformin, and the drugs derived from the rosy periwinkle, among many others.  Even so, I didn’t expect much, as an outsider and a product of the technological world, when I visited one such traditional medicine market not long ago in downtown Durban, South Africa.  To be honest, I was imagining a single dusty shop with an aging witch doctor gathering cobwebs behind the counter.  Instead, I found myself wandering through a vast sprawl of vendors’ booths, extending down rows the length of a football field.  Plump women in kerchiefs, some of them with their faces painted clay-colored against sunburn, sat behind bin after bin of woody and leafy products, all labeled with Zulu names that meant nothing to me.

But my guide, a traditional medicine practitioner named Jabu Ndholovu, once showed up at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with a bag of woody chips from the roots of a flowering grassland plant said to cure male impotence.  The plant’s scientific name is Eriosema kraussianum, but the Zulu name has more poetry:  bangalala.   University chemists duly extracted 50 compounds from the plant and put four of them through the standard laboratory test, using rabbit penile tissue.   One turned out to be 85 percent as effective as Viagra.  And unlike Viagra, bangalala is a product local people can afford.  Biodiversity might thus, in fact, be a means of having better sex.  For that matter, Viagra itself is a naturally-derived product, a close chemical variant on a substance, theophylline, originally found in tea.  So the future of life on earth and the possibility of sex tonight might, in truth, be closely related propositions.

Researchers who seek clues in traditional medicine markets like the one in Durban mostly run into dead ends.  That’s the nature of such research.  But they persist because local knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years now and then tips the odds in favor of finding something useful.   The hitch is that the only people paying attention these days are underfunded government and academic researchers.

Most big pharmaceutical companies don’t bother much with drug discoveries from the natural world any more.  Instead, beginning in the 1980s, they bought into the myth of humans as a technological super-species.  So they now rely mostly on computers and combinatorial chemistry to spin out thousands of closely-related variants on a given molecule.   The idea is that they can then browse through this library of synthetic compounds to find substances effective for almost any condition.  But so far, critics say, this has turned out to be roughly as effective as working your way through the Manhattan phone directory asking strangers if they happen to have a cure for the common cold.  After 25 years of work, and tens of billions of dollars invested, says David Newman, D. Phil., of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), combinatorial chemistry has so far produced only a single new FDA-approved drug.

Natural pharmacy

Newman,who heads the NCI’s natural products branch, isn’t suggesting that drug companies should give up on the technology.  But a better way to make it work, he argues, is by starting with compounds known to be biologically active—that is, the ones found in the natural world.  Then you use combinatorial chemistry to add or subtract traits until you arrive at a drug that meets human needs.   “As a discovery tool, combinatorial chemistry is terrible,” he says, but as “an optimization tool it is magnificent.”   We just need to acknowledge at the outset that the basic playbook still comes from Mother Nature.

Losing the Drug that Could’ve Saved Your Kid’s Life (Save The Planet 4)

Look closely in the medicine cabinet, in fact, and what’s striking is just how pervasively nature has shaped our entire pharmaceutical repertoire.   Even aspirin was derived originally from the bark of the willow tree.  It’s also striking just how unpredictable and even downright weird this influence continues to be.

Who would have imagined, for instance, that a marine snail from the Philippines, Conus magus, would give us a new pain killer, Prialt, that lacks the terrible addictiveness of morphine—and yet is 1000 times more potent?

Who would have predicted that a bacterium found in the dirt on Easter Island would provide a powerful immune suppressant, rapamycin, that’s now routinely used in organ transplants and as a coating on heart stents?  (In experiments on mice, it also seems to have the potential to extend the lifespan of individuals already past middle age.)

Who would have figured that the Pacific yew tree, long considered a trash species, would become the source of the most successful modern drug, taxol, for treating cancers of the breast, ovaries, and if current experiments play out, perhaps also the prostate?

And once we get our minds around the astonishing healing power of these natural medicines, you start to wonder:  How come we don’t know more?  That is, if species are going extinct at a catastrophic rate, what life-altering products are we losing along the way?  There are an estimated 350,000 flowering plant species in the world, plus an ungodly number of insects, marine invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria—each equipped with a unique chemical arsenal of some kind.

At most 10 percent of the plants have been tested for their medical potential, says James Miller, PhD, vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden, and even those have been tested against only a small number of diseases, mostly cancers.  The insects and other small species have hardly even been classified by science, much less tested for their potential usefulness.

So when a forest disappears, what may be disappearing at the same time is the drug that could have kept your hair from falling out, or your prostate from moving in where your bladder’s supposed to be.  We may be losing the drug that could have kept your eight-year-old from dying of a hospital infection, or your mom from fading into dementia.  You would think scientists and drug companies would be racing to make these discoveries and figure out what’s valuable before it vanishes.

Continued tomorrow, when I’ll talk more about looking at traditional medicines.

How Nature Saves Your Balls–and Your Heart. (Save the Planet–3)

The rate of testicular cancer among white males has almost doubled in the past 40 years, for unknown reasons, and it is now the most common cancer among men ages 15 to 34.

Fortunately, it is also one of the most curable.

Jonny Imerman was 26 and selling commercial real estate in Michigan when he got it.  His oncologist started him on a chemotherapy regimen that featured three potent drugs:  Cisplatin, from the heavy metal platinum, bleomycin, an antibiotic from a bacterium, and etoposide, from the roots of the Indian mayapple in the Himalayas.   The result?   Before this kind of treatment was developed in about 1970, testicular cancer typically spread to other parts of the body and killed 95 percent of its victims.  Today, if diagnosed in time, 95 percent of victims recover and go on to lead normal lives.

When he got his health back, Imerman quit real estate to set up a non-profit, Imerman’s Angels, which matches cancer victims with mentors of the same age, gender, background, and cancer type.  But even with “my head in the middle of all this” cancer stuff, he says, he did not realize that the natural world had saved his life.  “You break down the word ‘chemotherapy’ into ‘chemical therapy’ and we just assume these are all chemicals.  I did not know that so many of them derive from natural things.  I bet most doctors don’t even know.”

It’s the same with cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death for American men and also accounts for 30 percent of mortality worldwide.  In the United States, deaths from cardiovascular diseases have decreased sharply over the past 15 years.   It would be nice to say to that this is because we have learned how important it is to eat smart and exercise more.  But the truth is, it’s a gift from the natural world.

Researchers from Japan and England first discovered the class of drugs called statins in the 1970s, from close relatives of the fungus that gave us penicillin.  Statins went on to demonstrate a remarkable ability to knock down levels of bad cholesterol, the low-density lipoproteins (or LDLs) largely responsible for clogging arteries.  That’s meant fewer heart attacks and strokes since statins became widely available in the 1990s.  Though some critics worry that statins are now overprescribed, British researchers have calculated that giving statins to 10 million high-risk people results in 50,000 lives saved per year.

Our improving cardiovascular health also comes courtesy of a pit viper. 

Save The Planet, Save Your Ass (Part 1)

The March issue of Men’s Health features my article on why guys should care more about the natural world.  My working title was “Biodiversity for Guys,” and then, “Manhood, Naturally.”  But I think MH writes better headlines (above) than me.  I’ll post the article in sections over the next few days.  Here’s the opener:

Hahn

David Hahn was a couple of years out of college, working gigs as a piano player and dreaming about someday making it to Broadway, when he noticed the first ten pounds come off his waistline.  “I was working out, and it was suddenly like I was doing all the right things.  I started giving people dietary advice.”  But the weight kept dropping away.  “When you lose 30 pounds and you’re not trying that hard, you start to think, ‘Wait a minute, something’s going on here.’”

Doctors diagnosed everything from allergies to tropical infection.   Then a CAT scan brought the problem into terrifying focus:  “I had a giant tumor in the middle of my chest, wrapped around my aorta, my heart, spine, and lungs.  They showed me the picture, and I thought, ‘Damn.’”  Lymphoma.  “I was 24.  Nobody gets cancer at 24.”

Though he did not know it at the time, his survival now depended on “this little pink flower” from halfway around the world.  Doctors started him on six months of chemotherapy, and it felt like there was nothing on God’s green earth remotely natural about it.

His regime was called ABVD, with the D standing, he says, for “I forget, something nasty.”  But A and B are both drugs derived directly from bacteria in the natural world.  (One strain was developed from a soil sample taken from the grounds of a thirteenth century Italian castle.)  The V is vinblastine, from that little pink flower.   Sometime in the 1950s, researchers from the drug company Eli Lilly began studying the rosy periwinkle in Madagascar, where it is endangered in the wild because of massive deforestation.  It led to two drugs, vincristine and vinblastine, and they gave life back to people facing diseases that until then were routinely fatal–leukemia and lymphoma.

Hahn was like a lot of guys I talked with in the course of researching this story:  They ate healthy, they worked out, they thought happy thoughts.  Then one day they woke up with nightsweats, a lump, a cough that wouldn’t go away.  If they were lucky enough to survive, they tended to thank their doctors or the drug companies.  Hardly any of them thought, “Whoa, that’s weird:  The natural world just saved my life.”

Maybe nobody thinks it because we take the natural world for granted.  Plants and animals do great things for us all the time, even when we are perfectly healthy:   The very air we breathe depends on biodiversity:  Prochlorococcus, an ocean-dwelling bacteria that was completely unknown until the 1980s, produces about 20 percent of the Earth’s oxygen.  Trees and other plants do the rest.

And when we’re sick?  That flower didn’t just save Hahn’s life.  It also turned around his career:  “I kind of wanted to make a go of the Broadway thing before cancer, but I just didn’t have the guts to do it,” he says.  Then, in chemo, “I was like–you know what, man?–if I’m going through all this to save my life, I’m going to have a life that’s worthwhile.”   He’s now on Broadway, playing piano for Harry Connick Jr., in “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

Continued in part two, “The Sponge that Turned the Tide against AIDS.”

Burning Down the Library of Life

Should life only matter if it has selfish value to us? A green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, phtographed by Richard Pyle by

I’ve often tried to explain why species matter, usually by emphasizing the ways they affect human health, though I am acutely aware that this is a narrow, selfish view of the life around us.  Deep sea diver Richard Pyle also does some of that in the series of columns he has been writing lately for The New York Times.  But in his latest column,  he also gets at the precious value of the larger fabric of life on earth, with or without humans.

Pyle, who works at Bishop Museum in Honolulu, is exploring and documenting marine biodiversity as a science adviser for the One World One Ocean initiative. His New York TImes series describes an expedition to Cocos Island, off the Costa Rican coast:

My overarching quest is to document biodiversity — both on this project and in general. The most extraordinary aspect of biodiversity to me is the way in which every living thing on earth, everything that has ever lived on earth, is directly connected through time by an utterly unbroken sequence of reproductive events. I can trace my ancestry back through my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on, generation after generation after generation after generation, back through time.

When we imagine our own family history, we tend to think in terms of a few centuries; but in fact, the pattern goes back much further. Not just a few thousand years, or even a few million years, but several billion years. On that scale of time, every organism that has ever lived is part of a shared family tree.

The fundamental thing that separates life from nonliving chemistry is information. Specifically, it is the way in which information is propagated through time. Much of this information is encoded in the genome, but the information content goes far beyond DNA.

It includes the vastly complex ways in which organisms interact with each other — as predator and prey (whitetip reef sharks and the fishes they hunt), as symbionts (hammerhead sharks at cleaning stations), as organisms living in the shelter of other organisms (a juvenile silverstripe chromis among the branches of a black coral tree) and indeed, as entire ecosystems of interdependent communities of organisms.

Each species is like a book, the product of literally billions of years of editing and re-editing through the process of evolution, and each species has its own unique story to tell. These stories are all nonfiction, and more important, stories of survival, of navigating billions of years of persistence. These stories include the cures to many (if not all) human diseases. They include instructions for converting sunlight into stored chemical energy with near-perfect efficiency. But the most important stories are the ones we have not yet imagined.

We are like kindergartners running through the aisles of the Library of Congress, almost completely unaware of the value of the information around us. We are surrounded by the genomic equivalents of the works of Homer and Shakespeare, or detailed plans to build a nuclear reactor, yet our ability to read and understand this information is still at the stage of “See Spot run.”

Biodiversity is earth’s greatest library, and we have not matured enough as a species, as a civilization, to realize it yet. Someday soon we will understand how to read the secrets contained within the Biodiversity Library. Unfortunately, we are on the brink of this planet’s sixth great extinction event, and each time a species goes extinct, it is like burning the last copy of a book. Once it is gone, the information it contained is lost forever. Earth’s greatest library is burning.

The taxonomists of the world, of which I am one, are the librarians. Our job is to build the card catalogs, to document not only the existence and general nature of each book, but also where they can be found.

For the past two and a half centuries, we have managed to document less than 10 percent of the estimated 20 million to 30 million species on earth. The reason it is important to use new technologies like rebreathers and submersibles is not because they are cool, but because we need their help in our race to document biodiversity before it’s gone.

The wonderful efforts by the Costa Rican government to protect Cocos Island and its inhabitants need to be expanded to many other parts of the ocean, many other parts of the planet. Efforts like the One World One Ocean campaign help people understand the importance of biodiversity and the importance of protecting it. As my friend Sylvia Earle has said, what we do in the next 10 years will define what happens in the next 10,000. There is no time to waste.

Camera Trap Art from Afghanistan

Camera traps around the world have been accumulating some spectacular and revealing images of wildlife, without disturbing the animals.  Here’s the latest.  A Wilderness Conservation Society camera trap caught this image of a snow leopard mother and cub on a craggy peak in Afghanistan’s Sarkund Valley.

How We Forget the World We Have Lost

In an article earlier this year about the hidden value of species, I wrote about how much, and in how many ways, the dramatic decline in its vultures had cost India.

When we cause a species to go into decline, we almost never know — and hardly even stop to think about — what we might be losing in the process. In truth, it may be hard to think about, because the cascading effects of our actions are sometimes freakishly distant from the original cause. So in India in the early 1990s, farmers began using the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac for the apparently worthy purpose of relieving pain and fever in their livestock. Unfortunately, vultures scavenging on livestock carcasses accumulated large quantities of the drug and promptly died of renal failure. Over a 14-year period, populations of three vulture species plummeted by between 96.8 and 99.9 percent.

Losing these efficient scavengers meant livestock carcasses often got left in the open to rot. It was one of those “ecosystem services” — manufacturing oxygen, soaking up carbon dioxide, preventing floods, taking out the garbage — that species generally provide unnoticed, until they stop. But the impacts went well beyond the stench, according to a 2008 article in Ecological Economics. Moving into the niche vacated by the vultures, feral dog populations boomed by up to 9 million animals over the same period. Dog bites and the incidence of rabies in humans also increased, and the authors conservatively estimated that an additional 48,000 people died during the 14-year period as a result. Calculating the bottom-line worth of what we get from the natural world is notoriously difficult. But even pricing lives at a fraction of developed world values, the near-total loss of three insignificant vulture species has so far cost India an estimated $24 billion.

Now Meera Subramanian has a first-hand report in the Virginia Quarterly Review.  These paragraphs near the end of the article seemed particularly poignant and powerful to me:

I realized as I spoke with Rahmani that I had come to India looking for an eco-catastrophe. Though the vulture is the unloveliest of creatures, though few cared for them while they were here nor notice that they are missing, their absence has left a void. There is a physical abyss that is filling with dogs that can be ferocious, and a spiritual vacuum that is forcing questions of adaption for the most orthodox of India’s Parsis.

Yet it didn’t feel apocalyptic to me. Maybe all of us, whether guided by God or by science, secretly want to be the ones living in the end times, as though it bestows some epic