Diving Deep into Biodiversity

Minutes

On April 19th, 2024, in the Powell Auditorium of the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., President Larry Millstein called the 2,494th meeting of the Society to order at 8:04 p.m. ET. He began by welcoming attendees, thanking sponsors for their support and announcing new members. Scott Mathews then read the minutes of the previous meeting which included the lecture by Philip DeShong, titled “We Have You Surrounded: Encapsulation and Its Application to Vaccine Formulation and Drug Delivery”. The minutes were approved as read.

President Millstein then introduced the speaker for the evening, Rich Pyle, Senior Curator of Ichthyology at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum & Director of EXCORE. His lecture was titled “Diving Deep into Biodiversity: Leveraging the Latest Technology to Explore Deep Coral Reefs”.

The speaker began by presenting a metaphor of a burning library, and the fire fighters trying to both put out the fire and save as many books as possible. He then went on to discuss biodiversity, and the fact that the DNA of every species contains information that has been passed down for billions of years. Therefore, he claimed, each species can be thought of as a book, and biodiversity can be thought of as “Earth’s greatest library”. Climate change and the increasing rate of extinction is therefore analogous to the burning library.

Pyle emphasized the fact that conservation is as much about preserving unknown species as it is about preserving known species. He indicated that because about 99% of the Earth’s habitable ecological volume is in the oceans, the oceans are the most important place to “scout” for unknown species. He noted that humans have had considerable success cataloguing biodiversity on land, but we have barely begun to explore the extent of marine biodiversity. He said, “As terrestrial mammals, we have been limited to the briefest excursions to the shallowest depths.” Pyle explained that his primary goal as Director of EXCORE (The Center for the Exploration of Coral Reef Ecosystems) and Senior Curator at the Bishop Museum is to leverage modern technology to overcome these limitations and extend the range over which humans can explore marine biodiversity.

Pyle then discussed the “Mesophotic Coral Ecosystem”, the so-called twilight zone between 50- and 200-meter depths. This region is generally too deep for conventional SCUBA and too shallow for most submarine expeditions. He described how mixed-gas rebreathers allowed he and his colleagues to explore this twilight zone more extensively than ever before. He then discussed other technologies that have increased the range of human exploration in the maritime environment. These included: submersibles, submersibles coordinating with human divers, human controlled underwater robots, autonomous underwater robots, 3D imaging, stereo videogrammetry, and environmental sensor arrays.

Pyle claimed the EXCORE project has discovered close to 1,000 new fish species, and is finding them at a rate of 12 new species per hour of bottom time. He said that EXCORE is responsible for creating “ZooBank”, the official online registration system for scientific names of animals. He ended his lecture by saying “We cannot afford to continue the status quo in battling the fire that engulfs the global biodiversity library”.

The lecture was followed by a Question and Answer session:

A member asked how the data being gathered by EXCORE could be used to guide decisions and policy moving forward. Pyle responded first by saying that this data could be important for genetically modifying certain species, particularly corals, to be more robust or resilient to climate change, but he doubted such efforts could be implemented on a scale that would make a difference. He went on to say that there are too many “unknown unknowns”, and that we therefore do not know in advance what the value of this data will be.

A guest asked about efforts to look for the species of folklore, like the Loch Ness Monster. Pyle replied that the Loch Ness Monster was “not on his radar”, but that folklore plays an important role in his work. He said that in several Pacific Island regions the indigenous knowledge of fish species vastly exceeded what scientist understood, and that the oral history and folklore of local peoples has benefited our understanding of marine life.

A member asked if Pyle and his team are studying cold-water, deep species of coral like the ones living off the coast of Norway. Pyle responded that these corals are essentially “mono-cultures”, and are therefore less interesting from the point of view of biodiversity.

A member asked why there are more endemic species on deeper reefs than in shallow waters, and what effect that has on loss and recovery of biodiversity. Pyle responded that the likely mechanism is related to glacial cycles and the rise and fall of sea level. Shallow coral reefs tend to form on sloped regions of the sea floor, while deep corals tend to grow on more vertical structures. As sea levels rise and fall, shallow coral habitat appears and disappears, whereas the deep coral habitat can rise and fall with sea level like a tide gauge. He said that endemic species are the most sensitive in terms of biodiversity loss because, by definition, they only exist in one place.

After the question and answer period, President Millstein thanked the speaker and presented him with a PSW rosette, a signed copy of the announcement of his talk, and a signed copy of Volume 1 of the PSW Bulletin. He then announced speakers of up-coming lectures, made a number of housekeeping announcements, and invited guests to join the Society. He adjourned the 2494th meeting of the society at 10:07 pm ET.

Temperature in Washington, DC: 13.9° Celsius
Weather: Cloudy
Audience in the Powell auditorium: 73
Viewers on live stream: 35 …for a total of 108 live viewers
Views of the video in the first two weeks: 301

Respectfully submitted, Scott Mathews: Recording Secretary