Imagine a private island in the Caribbean, uninhabited save for the dozen bungalows of a high-end resort. A tropical breeze rustles the trees, the aqua waters surrounding the island sparkle in the sun.
Joel "Jody" Martin and Todd Zimmerman survey the scene, armed with a bottle of 151-proof Cruzan rum.
But the two biologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County won't be sipping daiquiris by the beach.
Instead, they are spending a summer month on Guana Island combing its shallow waters for new species of cryptofauna--the "hidden animals" of the coral reefs. They use cement and PVC pipe to create an artificial reef to lure creatures for study; the rum to preserve them.
These days the word "species" is likely to be paired with "endangered," or even "extinct." But of the hundreds of species Martin and Zimmerman have collected in the last couple of years--they are now on their third trip to Guana--they estimate that one-third are new discoveries.
Scientists are in a race against time to catalog new species before they disappear, says Martin, the museum's curator of crustacea. "This is not the time to ignore natural history."
Unfortunately, ignoring it seems to be a trend in science. As research dollars and training are focused on molecular biology research like mapping the genome, whole-animal biology is falling by the wayside. "We're losing the -ologists," laments Martin.
This loss could be detrimental to our understanding of biodiversity. Preservation is all the rage these days, but trying to understand an ecosystem without knowing the individual animals that make it up is like building a house without a foundation, Martin says.
The foundation of the research these beachcombers conduct is the reef. But because they couldn't very well haul up the natural coral reef system to find the animals hidden within its crevices, the two created a fake one that could be lowered to the ocean floor and later recovered. They call the fake reefs ARMS, for Artificial Reef Matrix Systems.
Martin says that when he saw Zimmerman pouring cement in the tropics, he thought his colleague had gone crazy. But Zimmerman's design of these miniature fake reefs has been the key to their success. The fake reefs consist of slabs of concrete, stacked one upon another, with various sizes of tunnels to entice crawling critters inside.
