A Web Page For Every Species - Brief Article

Whole Earth, Fall, 2000

Consider: There may be 30 million species and 6 billion humans on the planet. That's 200 people per species. What if every 200 humans adopted a species and allied themselves with it throughout their lives? Some might choose to oversee the critter's Web page. Others might report news about the species--When was it seen last? Where? Is it a subspecies? Is it threatened? How many are there? Has it appeared in films or poems? Who has a new recipe?

A CLAN FOR EVERY LIFE-FORM

The species' allies might start up postmodern "clans" to honor their life-form with a totemic icon. At birth, you might become a member of the Sago Palm Clan or the Gila Monster Clan. As always, some would take their totemic species as a spiritual ally and others might use their clan name as an icebreaker ("Are you a Diamond Jack fish?"). Some might take pilgrimages to find their species in its habitat, some might invent ways to join other clans, and some might ignore the whole enterprise altogether.

Sure it's a futuristic tribal fantasy. But we can certainly do better than we do now with no multispecies dialogs (except with pets) and with no nonhuman life-forms connected to our passage from birth to adulthood to marriage to death. Sadly, the only daily connection to living creatures appears vicariously through brand names like Jaguar and Impala and their TV-ad portrayals.

FROM PAPER TO DIGITAL BESTIARIES

Linneaus wrote species descriptions in Latin on paper without illustrations. It was an elite style, in contrast with the popular bestiaries. In the last centuries, the two styles--bestiary and scholarly--have slowly converged. Species descriptions are now more intelligible, illustrative, and democratic. Field guides supplement technical floras, faunas, and monographs. But the technical vs. intelligible tension remains. Recent embryonic attempts to create Web pages for species reflect the old historical dichotomy. Species 2000, the main organization working on a master list (www.sp2000.org/Standarddata.html), is a boring technical taxonomist site, listing current name, synonyms, location of holotype. It has interesting "optionals," such as common names and natural history, but they are rarely attended to. There are no depictions or keys to identification. The Web pages proposed by Whole Earth are closer to INBio's (darnis.inbio.ac.cr/ubis/default.htm) --readable, with illustrations, geographical distribution, population viability, food, references, etc. (INBio is in Spanish and regional.) We would add opportunities for adding natural history anecdotes, interesting chat, less turgid ID keys, and links to the more technical taxonomy.

A whole Earth species inventory needs small groups of dedicated citizens to fall in love with each species and create Web 'zines for them. The technical taxonomic and the readable dynamic natural history beg for convergence and nature-freak custodians. --PW

The story of species is the story of change, played out through an intense, diffuse drama of interaction. Creatures, plants, parasites, etc. are all stepping on and bolstering each other, and their shared habitats are simultaneously constraining or releasing everybody's opportunities, And those habitats are largely made up of the very interactions they contain.

Some species lose, some win. Isabella Kirkland's remarkable paintings reflect the current state of play. With rare objectivity, Descendant shows a bouquet of sixty-one species described as "descendant" (i.e., endangered); Ascendant hands us an equally beautiful bouquet of sixty-six "ascendant" (usually described as "invader" or "weed") species. The ring-billed gull is busy winning these days, and the golden-cheeked warbler is busy losing. Fade up background music of the old disco tune--"Ah, ah, ah, ah. Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive."

Is there a "so what"? These paintings, which are on exhibit at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology from September, 2000 to Jaunary, 2001, give pleasure by putting species endangerment into perspective. We get to revisit why we care. 1) Winning is always temporary; extinction always permanent--that ratchet forces our attention toward the extinction side. 2) These particular winners are major displacers; when they arrive, other species disappear, often resulting in net impoverishment of local biocomplexity. 3) The current high rate of displacement and extinction is our doing. We're the ones disrupting habitat so much that "weed" species get the advantage; we're the ones globalizing species dispersal, to the great advantage of invaders.

In Ascendant, where is the most displacing species of all, Homo sapiens? (A typical statistic: there were once ninety-nine species of land birds in the Hawaiian Islands; the arrival of Polynesians and then Europeans reduced that number to thirty-two, of which nineteen are approaching extinction.) The human in the picture is the one behind your eye.

The other human manifest in both paintings is the artist. Isabella Kirkland (a CoEvolution Quarterly staffer from 1976 to 1980) adopted the oil and varnish techniques of the old European masters, so that she could combine great permanence in the images with fine depiction of detail. The paintings are 3 feet by 4 feet, with each species portrayed life-size, yet they reward study with a magnifying glass--in fact study that close is needed to complete the "Where's Waldo?" game of finding every species in each painting. That's appropriate. Finding those species in the real world is even harder. The story of species is also a detective story. --Stewart Brand