As of this writing, the top Science stories on CNN.com are about Harry, the 6-legged octopus, and a sighting of a legendary white killer whale. In recent months, giant frogs, Antarctic sea spiders, and big-mouthed sharks have all made the news (see “similar entries” for more examples). Bizarre, strange and mutated animals of any kind are big attractions at zoos, aquariums, and the Internet, and we seem to find new living ones or new dead ones all the time. The people go ape over them.
This leads me to the following question:
When will zoology fail because that Mama Nature just can’t keep up with the times?
It seems like we should eventually see all the major forms of life, and their minor variations, that exist on this planet. Evolution simply can’t produce newer species faster then National Geographic can film them. Eventually we may not be able to find any more ancient fossils from creatures that we haven’t seen before. What happens when the age of macroorganism discovery wanes? There will still be behavioral research to be done, but will the public interest be sustained?
I know, I know, scientists say things like that all the time, and they always turn out wrong. “Oh, Dr. so-and-so said that we had learned everything there is to know about toes, but now this other guy has discovered something that is making us rethink everything we thought we knew about cuticles.” It’s a common story. But in the case of zoology, I think there has to be an upper limit. The day may come when there are no animal species left to describe.
When that happens, my concern for zoologists is that they might become desperate. Only so many people take Zoo 101 in college, so professorships are limited. They could start pushing ethical boundaries. My concern isn’t that they’ll start fabricating data about species in order to survive. My concern is that they’ll start generating real data about fabricated species.
Here’ s a hypothetical scenario. A researcher in Papua New Guinea has dedicated his life to studying the amazing biodiversity of the island rainforest. Eventually, because it’s an island, he can’t find anything new. So he uses the last of his grant money to build a lab in his garage in Madang, and starts playing with the embryonic development of the local Pygmy shrew. This leads to the creation of the world’s first rodent that walks on four tails (feel free to look up tail and limb morphogenesis research). After some careful training, breeding and studying, he introduces a population into the wild, then documents their “discovery” on PBS. Within a year, all the kids want a Pygmey Squidshrew of their very own.
Now, that may seem a little far fetched. I’ll admit that I don’t know if people actually have garages in Madang. But it is interesting to consider the possibilities of what we know about developmental biology and genetics, and further consider what one could conceive in desperation or overzealousness (remember how we got killer bees?). Who’s to say that a case of organism fabrication would never occur? In fact, who’s to say that someone couldn’t plagiarize a fabricated organism? It should not surprise our hypothetical fraud to start seeing Octo-voles popping up in Zaire.
All I’m saying is this: we humans have a hard time dealing with mutated humans, (and you don’t have to read X-men comics to know that,) but we love seeing starfish with eyes and centipedes with only four feet. The possibilities of discovery keep the field well-funded. Nature hasn’t shown any sign of showing us undreamed-of diversity. But she’s an old woman. How long could she keep it up?
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