A Trip to
the CalAcademy of Sciences Research Area
1 November 2004 – Scott, Merrie and I drove up to the CAS to
meet Mor and Andreas. There, we
met Stan, who showed us around.
1:55pm -- Stan gave us a short presentation on what they do at the
CAS. The main science done at the
CAS is Biological Taxonomy (classification and description of specimens and
species). There are way more
specimens coming in than can be classified, so they have to pick and choose.
The CAS is part of many hundreds of natural history museums around
the world, who collaborate for the good of science.
Their work on Biological Systematics is to study variation within
and between species.
Diagnostic – A vs. B. How do we tell the difference between
two species?
Phylogenetic – “Worms vs.
Snakes”. How do we classify them,
even though at many levels they are similar.
~10 to 100 Million species yet to be discovered, mostly in
rainforest and deep sea.
What they do
Collect
Process
Preserve
& Catalog
Study
Observe
& Analyze
Publication & Dissemination
They have their own proceedings which
hold their research findings.
Nudibranchs
We then went up to meet at lady (S) who studied nudibranchs, in
the invertebrate zoology and geology department. Linnaeus studied nudibranchs (small sea slugs) in the late
1700’s.
What
they do is dissect them (millimeter sized animals) and find characters to
classify them. Inventing and
choosing characters to classify species is part of the intellectual work that these
biologists do. There are various
contributions of nudibranch research, such as future cancer drugs.
Herpetology
Then we met a gentleman (B) who showed us their reptiles and
amphibians department. When new
specimens come in, they are packaged in containers. Each species gets a tag number and identification is written
on (presumably water/alcohol proof) paper.
Their
software database for cataloging the identification of the specimens does not
log history. If someone else comes
and says that your ID was wrong, and renames the entry, then your input is
lost. In their herpetology hall,
they get about 2 external visitors a month who’ll stay there for several days
to research specimens. He
mentioned that sometimes, they find species that he doesn’t even know
existed. Many times, the interesting
questions are similar to “Which characters, when flipped, cause ambiguity in
species identification?”
Entomology
We visited Mr. J S, who showed us a room with 5 million insect
specimens, stored in boxes, arranged by species. Each box has colored dots to also indicate the geographical
location of where the specimen was caught.
We
then went up to visit a lady who works on the AutoMontage system to take
pictures of ants for AntWeb (google: antweb). We talked about neotypes, holotypes, and paratypes. For example, a holotype (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holotype)
is the one specimen that “defines” the species. If it is destroyed, a neotype is selected. Paratypes define the range of the
species, and Allotypes are the type of the opposite sex.
GIS Work
We then met a lady (M K) who works on making map visualizations of
where amphibian specimens were caught.
They work in ArcGIS 9. She
showed us the field notes that were taken in their project in Myanmar.
The Library
Last, we visited the library where they house really really old
books. We saw some of Tracy
Storer’s handwritten field notes (Storer was a contemporary of Joseph
Grinnell). We also saw some really
big books by the Audubon Society (a book of birds).
That was it. We
learned a lot, and had a lot of fun too.
Now, to research!