every living thing. man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys, 2009, p.290

But in fact, while it is true that perhaps 80 percent of the flowering plants and 95 percent of the species of birds are known, only a small fraction of the far greater diversity of inse

Living Thing

Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life,

From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

Rob R Dunn

Preface by E O Wilson

my greatest discoveries.

v vii

9 Symbiotic Cells on the Seafloor 165

Part IV

Other Worlds

12 To Squeeze Life from a Stone 209

Preface

E O WILSON

science Aimed at a broad readership, it identifies what is tain to be a major enterprise of biology through the rest of the present century: the exploration of Earth—which, it turns out, is still

cer-a little-known plcer-anet

Most readers, including a good many biologists themselves, still think that the task of finding and classifying every species of organ-ism has been largely completed In this very erroneous conception, a new kind of frog or butterfly might indeed seem newsworthy But in fact, while it is true that perhaps 80 percent of the flowering plants and

95 percent of the species of birds are known, only a small fraction of the far greater diversity of insects and other invertebrate animals have been discovered Fewer than 10 percent of fungi and many fewer than one percent of microorganisms are known

Of the species known, less than a tenth of a percent have been studied in any depth—and even then across only part of the range of their entire biology If in-depth examination of such “model species” constitutes the first dimension of present and future biology, the dis-covery and study of the full diversity of life can be said to be the second dimension The third dimension is then the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of each species, called the Tree of Life initiative Without the second dimension better developed, humanity is flying largely blind in its endeavors to stabilize and manage the living world

We are falling far short of even imagining, much less realizing, the benefits such knowledge can bring to our own species

In Every Living Thing, Robert Dunn has made a significant

con-tribution to the true picture of biodiversity by relating the stories of some of the key contributors in the centuries-long effort to explore the second dimension To an extent that exceeds the biographies of labora-tory-bound biologists, the lives of the biodiversity pioneers are physical

as well as intellectual adventures Through his friendship with some

of the pioneers and his own experiences, Dunn conveys the spiritual commitment and excitement that biodiversity studies provide

We are now on the cusp of two new paradigms destined to form and hugely accelerate the exploration of the biosphere Both are technology-driven The first is genomics: The entire genetic code of a bacterium species can be read in only several hours, and at a rapidly dropping cost This breakthrough has begun to light up the previous vast “dark matter” of the microbiological universe, and to bring micro-bial ecology to new prominence It has also energized the Tree of Life through DNA-based phylogenetic reconstructions

trans-The second technological advance is the Encyclopedia of Life Newly launched (officially in 2008), it will in time make available ev-erything known about every species of organism, both previously cata-logued and newly discovered into the future, through a single portal

on command, any time, anywhere, to anyone, for free Like an ism, it will be constantly growing in real time The facility will be of enormous value to a large spread of human concern, from agriculture and biotechnology to medicine and public health It is being accom-panied by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, also now launched, which will eventually give free Web access to the complete original literature

organ-on each of the species The number of pages to be scanned has been estimated to be as high as 500 million

As Robert Dunn’s personality-based historical narratives show, the passion to know every living thing has been part of biology for more than 300 years Now, what remains to be accomplished in this Great Linnaean Enterprise will be multiplied many times over, and most of the life of Earth illuminated during the present century

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E , H A M L E T

The idea of writing this book came to me in the middle of the

Amazon My wife was there as a medical anthropologist I was baggage We flew on a small plane to a faraway place where we did not speak the local language, did not know the customs, and more often than not, did not entirely recognize the food We were often the only ones fully clothed We were the only ones who did not sleep in a handmade hammock We were the only ones who complained about the bugs We could not have felt more foreign

We were Westerners raised on books and computers, highways and cell phones, living in a village without running water or electric-ity There was also the small matter, parenthetically, that everyone in town believed that we were a “commission” sent to lead an indigenous revolution against the navy It was easy to go to sleep at the end of the day feeling a little misunderstood

Then one perfect Amazonian evening, with macaws hanging in midair and monkeys calling from beyond the village green, we played soccer I am not good at soccer, but that evening it was wonderful Everyone knew the rules We all spoke the same language of passes and shots We understood one another perfectly It seemed like a transcen-dent moment I was, as the photos show, smiling widely As darkness came over the field and the match ended, the goalie, Juan, walked over

to me and, leaning in, said in a matter-of-fact way, “In your home, do you have a moon too?” So much for transcendence.

After I explained to Juan that yes, we did have a moon and yes, it was remarkably similar to his, I felt a sort of awe at the possibilities that existed in his world In Juan’s world, each village could have its own moon In Juan’s world, the unknown and undiscovered was immense and marvelous The known was a small field in the jungle, the local trees, some bugs, and a livelihood Juan knew his daily life, and all the rest was conjecture He had never seen the Andes Mountains, which begin their rise into the clouds just twenty miles south of Juan’s home, just beyond the distance Juan could run Anything was possible

In Western society, we know that Earth has only one moon We have looked at our planet from every angle and found all of the wildest things left to find I can, from my computer at home, pull up satellite images of Juan’s village There are no more continents and no more moons to search for, little left to discover At least it seems that way Yet, as I thought about Juan’s question, I was not sure how much more

we could really rule out I am, in part, an ant biologist, so my thoughts turned to what we know about insect life and I knew that much in the world of insects remains unknown How much, though? How ignorant are we? The question of what we know and do not know clung to me.The next step in my nascent obsession with what we know about the world was simple I began collecting newspaper articles about new spe-cies Articles would, it seemed, come out almost every week New monkey discovered New phylum discovered New spider, new rat, new porcu-pine, new whale, new relative of the giraffe, and on and on they appear

My drawer quickly filled, and this was just with big things My own cialty is ants, but “new ant” never makes it into the paper I have an ant

spe-named after me and no one has ever called me from the New York Times

to talk about it I have never even seen it again after I first collected it

No one has

I began a second drawer for more general discoveries: new cave system discovered with dozens of nameless species, new mountain of

life discovered in Papua New Guinea, new lineage of microbes, four hundred species of bacteria found in the human gut The second drawer began to fill and as it did, I wondered whether there were bigger discoveries out there, not just species or lineages, but entire basic kinds

of life that are all around us but invisible, life on other planets, life that lives off substances thought to be useless, life even without DNA I started a third drawer for these big discoveries It fills more slowly, but all the same, it fills

In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to find something else, a collection of scientists, often obsessive, usually brilliant, occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries It is easy

to imagine that most new discoveries come from global collaborations and expensive research programs in which progress is incremental and dependent on many individuals Yet to a surprising extent the biggest recent discoveries in biological science appear to still depend on the observations and insights of just one or a few people Those individu-als very often see the same things that other scientists see, but they pay more attention to them, and they focus on them to the point of exhaustion, and at the risk of the ridicule of their peers In looking for the stories of discovery and what is left to discover I found the stories

of these people and the ways in which their lives, little known to me before I began writing this book and probably little known to you, have changed how we see the world

I began to see similarities not only among the scientists who made big discoveries, but also in how Western scientists and society responded to those discoveries For one, we are, before these discov-eries, always more ignorant than we imagine ourselves to be Unlike Juan, we are repeatedly willing to imagine we have found most of what

is left to discover Before microbes were discovered, scientists were confident that insects were the smallest organisms Before life was dis-covered at the bottom of the ocean, many scientists were confident that nothing lived deeper than three hundred fathoms Once we made a tree of life that included four kingdoms (animals, plants, fungi, and

prokaryotes), we were confident that there would be no more major branches to reveal.

Here I tell the stories of some of the biologists whose discoveries have shaped what we know about the dimensions of the living world

I focus on those discoverers who found entirely new realms of life whether at the bottom of the ocean or in our own cells We are again

at a stage when we believe we have found most of what might be found, but we are wrong The more I have acquainted myself with the sto-ries of the biological discoveries, the more I have been convinced that whole realms of life remain to be found

I began by thinking that Juan, in asking if we too had a moon, was the naive one, not me But my view of the world has changed While I sat talking to scientists for this book, none of them asked if I too had

a moon, but one admitted that he was looking for a fourth domain of life Another believes he has discovered the cause of more than half

of all diseases on Earth Yet another believes that more than half of all life on Earth can be found in the crust and subsurface beneath the ocean and our feet We will not find another moon, but what these scientists imagine is just as surprising And even before a new realm or kind of life is found, we still have to explore the realms we have already discovered Most species on Earth are not yet named Most named spe-cies have not yet been studied When we lived in small communities, hunting and gathering, we knew only the animals and plants around

us, particularly those that were useful or dangerous Living on the thin green surface of our small planet in a universe full of stars, we are not

so different today The wild leaps up and more often than not we do not even know its name

Beginnings

1 What We All Used to Know

For most of human history and prehistory, we lived in small, illiterate communities We began in the savannas where we for-aged and hunted We collected the animals and plants and named what we found Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left

on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people They traveled along routes about which we continue to speculate With time, they forgot where they had been They carried no record of their past with them, beyond what survived in myth Any story or name not mentioned in a lifetime disappeared

Every year the front line of villages moved farther out It was a slow wave of bodies and livelihoods Individuals in that front line found, with each move, new animals, new plants, and more generally, new life Collectively, humanity revealed pieces of the story of life Because nothing was written and languages, as we spread, diverged, each dis-covery was local, each lesson learned repeatedly Communities landed

on the new landscape like a reader landing on a random page in a book They found themselves surrounded by but a few paragraphs of some-thing much larger They set about translating those paragraphs In each place, on each page, people would have to give names not only to all the

wild beasts, but also to the plants, the fungi, the beetles, and the ants,

and anything else that was to be used, avoided, or simply discussed

On these organisms and their new names they hung knowledge, ries, and belief.

sto-That was the first great wave of discovery It is a forgotten part of our scientific story Long before Columbus or Magellan, much of the world had been found Seldom do we consider what those first great explorers in small, fire-lit communities understood of Earth

While drinking an espresso and reading People magazine, it is hard

to imagine our kin ever ate shoots and leaves, that they ever knew most

of the animals and plants by name.* We look out now and see pigeons

We see the nameless green of the trees, and of the unclassifiable weeds among the sidewalk cracks Insects bat at our screens and we swat them without partiality We imagine now that the “natives” (of no relation

to us) were ignorant or at least simple, but a few generations ago, we were “those people.” We all lived in small communities, hunted, and foraged We shat in the woods

Clear views of how we once lived and what we once knew are lusive History has left us potsherds and ruins, but little in the way

il-of records il-of the knowledge our ancestors had il-of the species around them Contemporary communities where people gather and hunt or even farm can, however, be models of parts of the past In many such communities, people still record little, know mostly what they have heard and remember, and name new things they find As long as we are careful to remember that they are also, in important ways, differ-ent from ancient communities, we can use these contemporary com-munities to understand aspects of how life might have been in the past

In these communities, we can find something of who we once were Having a measure of what we once were and knew is necessary if we are

to understand how far we have come and how far we might go

• • •

* Of course the espresso comes from a bean, the seed of the coffee tree that was planted and mesticated nearly a thousand years ago through traditional ecological knowledge in Ethiopia.

do-One could go almost anywhere in the world to find communities of people living off the land in ways that require traditional oral knowl-edge of the species around them, knowledge our ancestors would have needed I started in Cavinas, Bolivia The road to Cavinas is long and

in most places not a road at all, but instead a river or a footpath To get

to Cavinas our first big step would be to get to Riberalta, the biggest city in the northern Bolivian Amazon.*

To get to Riberalta, my wife Monica and I flew to Santa Cruz, livia From Santa Cruz, we took a bus to Trinidad, a sleepy town at the southern edge of Bolivia’s great, flooded Amazonian savannas From Trinidad, we took the long bus north We were traveling in what was

Bo-to be the dry season, but the water had not yet drained out of the land The floods still clung to grasses, forest and, as would soon be relevant,

to the roads

The going was slow A bus ride that was to take one day took several Mosquitoes flew in the windows, fed on us, and flew back out The heat came in and stayed Day came and was replaced by night, once, twice, and then a third time For several days, the bus passed through what remains largely unbroken forest and savanna, a landscape populated with a billion insects, a dozen primate species, caimans, anacondas, and the occasional forlorn cow During that journey, the bus made a single planned stop (in a one-hut town majestically named Sheraton)

Of course, that excludes the stops for flat tires, broken axles (fixed with rope), and a six-hour period during which the driver of the bus tried

to get it unstuck by hitching it to horses, cows, and then, all at once, a truck, two horses, and a cow We suffered the same things that ailed the early Western explorers: bad food, bad transport, long days, and—let’s face it—our own lack of fortitude In retrospect, the trip was a kind of earned joy During those days though, it was nearly all miserable

As we rode into Riberalta, the roadsides turned from forest to

agri-* The inhabitants of Riberalta refer to it as a city, though there are few buildings over one story and, at the time of our last visit, only one paved road Nonetheless, it is the most urban center most people of the region are likely to ever know.

culture, to the point where we could almost have been driving through any Midwestern farmland—but Riberalta is not Iowa Despite the cows and crops, it is isolated, tropical, and wild Seen from above, Riberalta

is a kind of settled island, surrounded by forest and water To its north

is the Madre de Dios River, which bends and bows its way back up to the Andes To the east of Riberalta is the Beni River, which meets the Madre de Dios at the edge of town The Beni River drains the long, flat, seasonally flooded plains of Bolivia, on which a large civilization once rose and, somewhat mysteriously, fell The rest of the surroundings are forest, punctuated by small fields, pastures, savannas, and more rivers (all draining into the Madre de Dios River, which itself drains into the mouth of the Amazon some two thousand miles away) Within the city are small houses, many of which are still roofed with thatch, and a single city block with paved streets On that paved block are most of the town’s two-story houses, all owned at one time or another by rubber barons, Brazil nut barons, or the odd mayor Each night the wealthy

of Riberalta (a relative kind of wealth) get into their cars or onto their motorcycles and circle the single plaza, cruising The poorer, motorless masses look on, faces powdered with the ever-present ether of ancient red dust winnowed from the mountains by time

When we arrived, we took motorcycle taxis to a hotel at the edge of town run by a woman named Doña Rosa Our backpacks still on our backs, we had to flex our stomach muscles to keep from tipping back-ward with the weight of our books, shoes, and clothes at each bump

in the road At the hotel, we moved into a first-floor room beside the Beni River, unpacked our things, and proceeded to sleep for the first day and a half We would stay here, our home base, off and on over the next several years

Our room had its drawbacks It was close enough to the neighbor’s house for us to hear them fighting, close enough to the street to hear the bread boy’s horn each morning, and close enough to the kitchen to

go to sleep to the washing of pans But it was also so close to the Beni

River that we woke up the first night, and each subsequent one, to hear the brown water tumbling by beside us We dreamed of rivers Rivers, like the Beni, carried the first Amazonians around the forests Rivers flooded the lands where agriculture emerged It was the rivers in which the debris of the Amazon’s forests steeped The rivers saw it all and carried it with them—the wild cries of animals or the fragments of words, the residues of dozens of languages being spoken on the banks

as people went to the water to wash, to fish, or even just to admire the reflection of their moon

We needed to go upstream, to see what was farther in, beyond the roads We needed to go upstream to get to Cavinas Upstream, from the perspective of the people of Riberalta, the forests are populated more densely by myth than by humans There, “the Indians still live in the old way,” Doña Rosa’s Croatian husband told us Some of them can turn into jaguars, so we should be careful if we go The scientist in me is annoyed by stories about man-jaguars, yet there is undeniable mystery left in the deep forest, mystery enough to lure me farther in Science requires skepticism, and yet discovery, more often than not, requires

a temporary relaxation of that skepticism To discover something, you first have to believe it is possible I wanted to see what lurked between the far-off trees, where a little bird seemed to call out my name.*One floor above us, in the same hotel, lived Sarah Osterhoudt, then working for the New York Botanical Garden Sarah introduced

us to the Confederation of Indigenous People of Bolivia (CIDOB) The members of CIDOB wanted someone to go and work in the indigenous communities deep in the forest to document local knowledge Within

a few weeks, we were packing our bags to make a trip to Cavinas, a Cavineño community southwest of Riberalta, to document the inhab-itants’ use of medicinal plants, bring in some school supplies, and un-

* I mean this literally There was a small night bird that very clearly seemed to call out, “Rob, Rob, Rob.”

derstand what a community so far from the road, so far from anything but the forest and the river, knew of the world.

We imagined ourselves brave explorers, but the land of the ineño had been visited by scientists as early as 1900.* We brought a nice tent and some of our favorite foods Still, we could not escape the feeling that far from the main road, there was something left to learn

Cav-We chartered a small plane from Riberalta to fly the three of us and a local guide to Cavinas The plane was old Nervous about the age, but more specifically about the dangling bits of metal below the engine,

I asked the pilot how the plane was doing “Great,” he offered, “we bought it from the Summer Linguistics Institute and we haven’t had

to do anything to it since.” That seemed well enough, except that, as Monica yelled to me over the sound of the motor, “the Summer Lin-guistics Institute got kicked out of Bolivia twenty years ago.” Too late

We were off, a thirty-year-old clunker of a plane, our four-person team, the pilot, and a small parrot that sat above the front passenger’s seat and looked at us as we rose above its kin

Words fail in describing the low flight over the Amazon to nas It was most like snorkeling slowly over trees The shades of green seemed infinitely varied, with no two the same and each shade bearing meaning and life In northern Bolivia, the forest stretches for many hundreds of miles in every direction but east, where one finds the boundary of Bolivia and Brazil, and efficient Brazilian timber harvest-ing Flashes of color emerged and, as we neared, turned into macaws, flowers, and fruits Below us were the Beni River and its ancient oxbows, grown up in sweeping, verdant swaths of lighter and darker green As we began to land, the colors grew even brighter and more surreal As we came closer and closer to the trees, we could see termite

Cavi-* Ironically, one of those few scientists was also an ant biologist, W M Mann I would not even be the first person to ask the Cavineño what they knew about ants See, for example, Wheeler, W M

and W M Mann 1923 A Singular habit of sawfly larvae Psyche 30: 9–12.

mounds We saw them with more and more detail until it became clear they were on what was to be our runway.

We landed awkwardly, bouncing as the landing gear connected with the cement-hard termite mounds I had barely enough time to wonder what kind of termites they were before the door opened The community had come out to meet our plane Our guide quickly jumped out of the plane and walked in the opposite direction We were left standing by the still-turning propellers, looking at two long lines of families, many people half dressed, farmers in hand-me-down suits with the zippers missing, babies clinging to mothers We walked toward the lines and said hello One man greeted us and offered us a handshake The shake was followed

by a back slap, a handshake, a back slap, and another handshake We struggled to learn this local greeting as quickly as possible and shook and patted each adult who came forward, one by one, until we reached the end of the rows and watched the plane take off, leaving us in the middle

of the Amazon, without a guide

We would not know it until much later, but our arrival had been entirely unannounced; everyone had simply heard the airplane and run to the landing strip One of those who had greeted us was a local emissary of the navy (After a series of losses of territory through un-successful wars, Bolivia is now landlocked, but the navy, now more humble, persists.)* He asked us what we were doing in Cavinas Monica explained that she had come to learn about the people’s treatment of illness and their access to health care The emissary scowled to indi-cate his incredulousness Sarah explained that she had come to study local knowledge of plants A more worried scowl I explained that I had come to study ants, at which point the emissary turned and left If this was the revolutionary commission, he had nothing to worry about As the emissary walked away, we looked around at the community gath-ered before us We had arrived

• • •

* Cavinas itself, where the navy emissary was based, is not even directly on the river.

How or when humans first migrated into the New World tens of sands of years ago from places more like Alaska than the Amazon basin remains contentious New genetic analyses suggest that migration pro-ceeded in two separate stages: an initial buildup of populations in what are now Alaska and northwestern Canada followed by the migration south of a small number of individuals, perhaps just a few hundred,

lines of anthropology, even so timid an assertion invites hate mail But regardless of just when and how, we know that humans arrived and upon arrival, some individuals continued to move

The migration from the Bering Strait to the Andes and Amazon is thought to have taken hundreds of generations, but it could have easily been much quicker We imagine our ancestors as slow and plodding Yet they, like us, would have occasionally felt the need to keep walk-ing, to see what was over one hill and then the next, telling the kids the whole while, “We’re almost there.”

Many things changed as humans migrated south from the cold north Walk among the conifer forests of the Arctic Circle and you will find just one or two species of ants, only a dozen kinds of trees, and cold, modest, flowers The indigenous people of those places, like the people who kept moving, know or knew these ants and trees and the local birds and mammals well, as there are relatively few to know As humans migrated farther south, they would have to learn many more species The average acre of Amazonian forest hosts hundreds of tree species Within walking distance of a house are hundreds of bird spe-cies To try to name even just the obvious or important plants and ani-mals of a tropical forest is to attempt to write a very large book without

a pen It is to build out of language and memory an encyclopedia of life—biased, no doubt, toward the useful and common—but poten-tially enormous all the same Where the people of the Arctic Circle distinguish the parts and habits of reindeer or caribou, the native Am-azonians had to distinguish hundreds of species of plants, even if only

to label them as good, bad, or deadly

• • •

Naming species is not big science It is like mapmaking or dictionary work and, on its own, of relatively little use But it is the first step It

is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings

It is the simplest measure of the world It is analogous to finding and naming the planets and the stars Once named, it is another matter altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning Every culture known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into knowledge and stories Naming, and the learning associated with it,

is part of what makes us human The closest of our primate kin can name just a few species Researchers have shown that vervet monkeys respond differently to calls that seem to indicate different predators They look down for “snake,” up for “eagle,” and run into the trees for

“holy shit, leopard.”2 Many species call out more general aspects of the world, whether “danger,” or “I’m so sexy,” but we are the only ones who can (or would want to), say “black-capped chickadee,” or to call out the

name of the more rare but ever observant protist, Kamera lens.

In addition to the names themselves, we might guess that ditional peoples, in naming plants and animals, also knew or know about their uses By learning from locals, anthropologists have sought

tra-to identify the most useful plants and animals They have sought tra-to learn how much local peoples know, how much they can know, and what of that knowledge can be put to use

In Cavinas, whatever the old ways were, they were lost long ago sionaries had settled with the Cavineño in Cavinas by the end of the eighteenth century The missionaries used the Cavineño to help them extract the cinchona bark used to treat malaria Missionaries sold cin-chona, which was abundant around Cavinas, for export to Europe Then, in about 1869, with the rivers of the Bolivian Amazon still left

Mis-unfinished on maps, an American geographer reported rubber in Cavinas.

Rubber would change life dramatically for all those who happened

to live near where it grew The demand for rubber in Europe and North America dragged indigenous people out of their houses and down clay paths to trees At those trees, the people would make rows of angled cuts in the bark to drain the trees of their latex Each morning they placed a bucket below the cuts Each afternoon, they returned to the buckets to collect the pooling, white gold It is scarcely an exaggera-tion to say that by 1900 every rubber tree in the Bolivian Amazon was discovered and tapped If Cavinas was like other communities where rubber was discovered, it is safe to assume that for a while every man and most women of Cavinas went to the forest every morning and every night to tap the rubber trees, collect the latex, burn it, ball it and drag it to the shore for transport.* The sap of trees, drawn to protect delicate European feet from the rain, burned the fingers of men and

Rubber boomed and then it busted For a while after the rubber bust, life may have returned to something like it used to be Now, how-ever, there was a demand for Western goods and therefore a need for money Matches, oil, and frying pans had been discovered It was hard

to go back to the old days Then the cycle began again Brazil nuts, from trees that also happen to be abundant around Cavinas, became popular in North American Christmas bowls It was enough to send the Cavineños back out to the woods They hauled Brazil nuts in ex-change for pennies Daily life turned on distant whimsy

We had no way of knowing whether, after the two hundred years that Cavinas had been adrift on the tides of the Western economy, there was any traditional knowledge left of the forest, any knowledge

* Church reports that in 1880 there were 185 individuals, men, women, and children, employed in Cavinas in the extraction of rubber and that they, in that single year, carried out, bucket to ball, 104,000 pounds of rubber, which is to say more than five hundred and fifty pounds per person

Church, G E 1901 Northern Bolivia and President Pando’s New Map The Geographical Journal

18: 144–153.

codified in the native language and not supplanted by Western culture and tradition.

Cavinas, as we found it, was a small village of mud and palm-thatch houses The land around the houses had been cleared, and perhaps with the help of fire, left as grassland Around each house there was

a circle of bare ground, swept daily, where the children, pigs, and pet monkeys played (While we lived in Cavinas, a pet capuchin monkey took to riding a pig around town, pulling its ears left and right to guide it.) The houses were mostly of palm: palm sides, palm-thatch roofs, palm hammocks, palm seats Commercial society turned up in the form of a metal pot, a box of matches, and oil in every house Most else was found or made from forest products, grown, or killed Sur-rounding the village is forest It was a landscape tangled with foot-paths worn deep by use It was, at least in terms of our own quest, an auspicious place, a place where people might still, despite everything, name, know, and understand the biota around them If anywhere, we thought, then here

Because we were unannounced, it was not immediately clear where

in town we would sleep, how we would get food, or, really, what we would do at all Our guide had returned from whereabouts unknown and was negotiating in Cavineño for what was either a place for us to sleep or—our own Cavineño still nonexistent—a way to take all our things and drop us off with the navy Fortunately, it was the former

We were given a small space in the radio room, a house at the center of the village whose sole inhabitant was a CB radio that broadcast day and night, almost without stop, in Cavineño We put up a tent inside the small room (the windows had no screens) and settled in

With time, negotiation, and explanations for why we did not really want to eat monkey, however tasty, we made a deal with a family in town to cook for us, hired guides to show us local plants and animals and began the work we had come to do Because the oldest people in

the community spoke only Cavineño, we began working with a lator The children were our greatest help in translating At least they seemed to be, until we realized we had spent several days saying “penis” instead of “eat.”

trans-Each morning we went out to learn with a local expert To our deep pleasure, there was much to see We went out with several such men, but came to depend on one, Felipe, who was most willing to be our guide Felipe had some plants he wanted to look for anyway (miracle sex plants, we would later learn, that were very popular and therefore hard to find nearby), so it was useful for him to walk along Felipe pointed to plants as we walked and indicated their uses One by one, Felipe named the plants of his world, calling aloud a kind of dictionary

In the area closest to the community, nearly all plants we encountered were used by Felipe Some of the plants had Spanish names (which is to say, borrowed relatively recently), but most had names that were either apparently Cavineño or borrowed from other indigenous languages we did not yet know

Where Felipe identified things quickly, by eye, we had to collect them We whined about the lack of fruits and flowers (the characteristics

we needed to see, thanks to a penchant of Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, for identifying plants based on their sex parts) and we wrote and wrote and wrote Felipe did not use the fruit and flowers for iden-tification He looked at the bark He looked at the leaves and the shape

of the trunk He even looked at the holes caused by beetles in the leaves and the marks left on the leaves by viruses Because tropical beetles and plant viruses often specialize on single plant species, even their tracks could be used to read the land and species Felipe’s method was prac-tical, honed by ancestors who did not have the luxury of field guides Our ability to identify plants relied on Sarah’s curiosity, but Felipe’s de-pended on his need to find food and medicine, to eat and survive

On these trips, I began to ask about insects I focused on ants, which I had some chance of identifying in the field and which, in other indigenous groups, are very often named, studied, and mythologized

Among the Kayapo, an indigenous group in neighboring Brazil, more

hoped ants might provide a measure of the broader knowledge of the Cavineños about their world If individuals know about ants, they might know about other insects However, if they do not know about ants, a group that’s obvious and easy to find, people are unlikely to know about beetles and other tropical insects, which are both far harder to find and far more diverse One by one, I would hold ants up

by a leg or two to Felipe Many ant species simply did not have names

or elicited inconsistent or vague and seemingly improvisational names Felipe might call one, “big, black ant that stings hard,” at which point

I would let it go

In walking with Felipe, I found what I would later learn was a new species of ant (neither Felipe nor Western science had a name for it),

which the entomologist Bill Mackay would later name Camponotus

dunni Many more of the species I turned up still have yet to be named,

but were probably also new Much was unknown here and it seemed, at least in terms of the ants, unknown to Felipe as well Of the few hun-dred ant species around Cavinas, Felipe had names for perhaps forty, about the same number that non indigenous peoples of more urban parts of the Amazon can name It was, no doubt, more than the aver-age scientist not specializing in ants might name, but not astounding Either the Cavineño had chosen not to name the ants, or the names had been lost to time They did, it would later turn out, know about bees, but for the insects at large, the ants were probably more represen-tative The bugs may have called to each other beyond the edge of the village, or even in the thatch roofs of houses, but the Cavineño did not call back There were simply too many species to know them all, even though many might be useful The big ones, the tasty ones, and the bothersome ones were named and the rest, however many they might

be, were left to chase one another in the dark

Felipe’s world was, in his day-to-day actions, centered on Felipe, the Cavineños and what could be seen, perceived, and noticed locally Life

circled Felipe The animals and plants were there to eat.* The cies named by other cultures—cultures less directly influenced by missionaries—suggest similar, if sometimes more rich views of the diversity of the biological world The Kayapo, for example, imagine the world to be like a beehive divided into parallel plains that are sus-pended “just like the layers of the universe.” Most of the Kayapo live

spe-on a middle plain, but they spe-once all lived spe-on a higher plain, above the sky until they all fell It is the campfires of those who did not fall that light the stars and the moon Below the Kayapo, on the lowest plain, where the lights of the stars and moon do not reach, is the level of the worthless men, the non-Kayapo, and the termites that are in alliance with all that is worthless and weak Maybe the Cavineño moon, too, was once a campfire, but it is now for them just a mystery like much

in the world beyond Cavinas—a world inaudible over the calls of the katydids and the sounds of billions of termites cutting dead leaves and

By the end of our time in Cavinas, Sarah had collected more than a hundred species of plants The vast majority of them had local, and in most cases Cavineño, names, and many of them also had uses, whether for house materials, medicine, or just to make strings on which to tie pet beetles for children The Cavineño knowledge of plants suggests that a great deal of traditional knowledge is still around Even without comparing the Cavineño knowledge to that of other groups living in the tropics or elsewhere, it is clear that they know a great deal Names

of plants, as well as those of birds and mammals, are codified not only

in language, but also in myth and story

The sheer number of species the Cavineño can name is similar

* When asked about their worldview and origin stories, two of the Cavineño elders began to tell

us a story involving a man, a woman, an anaconda, and a mango The Cavineño had now taken

up a jungle version of the Adam and Eve story as their origin myth When pressed about their religious views before they had become evangelical, no one had an answer Finally, a woman sit- ting more distant to the conversation answered back, “We were Catholic.”

to that of many largely illiterate, forest-dwelling communities The Tacana, a group of people who once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the Bolivian Amazon, are kin to the Cavineños in lan-guage and culture and, presumably, origin In a Tacana village upriver from Cavinas, a group of scientists recently conducted an inventory of all of the local plants, and the number and kind of those plants that the Tacana could identify or use Despite the disappearance of many tra-ditional beliefs and practices, nearly all of the 185 plants the scientists showed to their Tacana guides were identified with a local name Of those plant species named, the Tacana used a third for either medicine

Boliv-ian Amazon, but from an entirely different language group, can tively name hundreds of species of plants, as can the Chimane farther south or the Tupi-Guarani groups in the dry Chaco near Argentina.All around the world, the people of small communities, hunting and gathering and farming, knew or know many if not most of the plant and large-animal species around them What few in those villages know is much about the next village over, or the next village beyond that Even among the Amazonian groups in Bolivia, the Cavineño do not seem to know the same plants as the Chácobo, the Chácobo as the Chimane, and the Chimane as the Tacana No two communities know exactly the same species and many species are known by just one or a few communities Exactly which species a community knows depends

collec-on which are present and which are locally useful, but also which are culturally important The Kayapo have named many of the ant spe-cies but few of the termite species, because the ants are looked upon as being strong and the termites are considered weak In parts of Thai-land, all insects are viewed as the mistakes of the gods, and apparently

as a consequence few species are named The indigenous peoples of the world named the species of their surroundings in different ways, but they all named species, typically hundreds if not thousands of them.Historically, the people of each of tens of thousands of communi-ties must have known and named the things around them Each com-

munity would have thought itself chosen, special, “the people.” Each community had gods and myths Each community believed the stars were their stars, and the moon their moon The animals and plants were theirs alone, and inexhaustible Few had the perspective to be able

to understand from a distance their surroundings We had not yet seen the Earth from space, not yet understood our context Yet collectively the mammals, birds, and plants of the world would have been largely known, each found and named at least once, in at least one place By the time humans had arrived in most parts of the world, perhaps as early

as ten thousand years ago, most mammals, birds, and trees, maybe even most freshwater fish would have had names to be called out when used, eaten, or just mentioned in a long story Humanity might have once been quite close to naming every big species on Earth In Cavinas,

we had “discovered” one of these communities There were thousands more

The first challenge then for Western scientists was not so much to discover the birds and the monkeys, the Brazil nuts and the bamboo,

as to find the indigenous peoples who already had discovered them Then a second step was necessary This next step required a mix of humility and hubris The humility was in realizing that our commu-nity, the one we grew up in, was not special, that there were thousands

of others—each of which had found and named some of the things around them The hubris was that the species from each place and tongue then had to be renamed by someone in a single, common lan-guage The alternative was that the same species would be named dif-ferently in each language of the world, or even by different scientists

in the same country

The need for a common list of names would quickly become ous Someone would need to name everything, with disregard both for those who came before and for those currently living in other coun-tries, whether France, England, or Mali Sweden would provide such a character His name was Carl Linnaeus Linnaeus was not only willing;

obvi-he thought obvi-he had been chosen by God for tobvi-he task I will get to him soon Before that, we still have to get out of Cavinas and back home.

While we were in Cavinas, we would often hear stories of the animals that lived, or used to live, beyond the edge of the village Some seemed pure fiction (the little men in the termite mounds), but with other stories, it was harder to know One late night we heard the story of the giant monkeys As the children walked around burning incense

to ward off mosquitoes, one of the older men said, “Up in the hills are

giant monkeys, marimonos [spider monkeys] the size of a man My

father talked about them They are there, or used to be I know of it Sometimes at night, they come into the village I hear them scare the horses as they move near my house.”

The story of the giant monkeys was a persistent one, told to us repeatedly both in Cavinas and beyond Each time we were told about the monkeys, it was mentioned that they were dangerous, “very dan-gerous.” We sat up some nights in our tent, wondering whether there might really be, beyond the neighboring forests, something as large and strange as a new giant spider monkey In that dark and expansive forest, it seemed possible

One night, with the giant monkeys fresh in our minds, we heard

a bang and then a clawing at the window to our house We sat straight

up, levitating just a little, and looked around Monica asked me to go see what it was I picked up my small flashlight and lit the room, and then the window, looking in every corner as I did Then, carefully, I opened the door Jaguars are common near Cavinas, but I was wonder-ing about giant monkeys I remembered that earlier, I had heard the horses spook at something moving through the village I moved slowly and looked around Suddenly, there it was, wide-eyed and as sinister-looking as a domestic cat can be

It would be easy to disregard as merely stories the hard-to-find

animals—giant monkeys and the like—beyond Cavinas or beyond the edge of any such community That would be mostly right It would also be partly wrong Of those large vertebrates “discovered” by sci-entists in the last ten years, several were thought by scientists to be hoaxes or myths In 2008, for example, a giant turtle, Swinhoe’s soft-shelled turtle, long thought by scientists to be extinct in the wild, was discovered in Vietnam The turtle is the largest freshwater species in the world and had gone undetected by scientists even though locals had said for years that a big three-hundred-pound turtle-like monster could be found in the lake Nature delights in making fools of the bi-ologists who seek to limit its bounds No one in Cavinas is prepared

to rule out any possibilities, not of a new moon or a giant monkey, not of a siren or a troll Nor should they be Going west from Cavinas, toward Peru, are nearly five hundred miles of uninterrupted forests and grasslands, area enough to hide vast troops of giant monkeys and whatever else our eyes or brains might dream up, land enough to hide

an unknown that is both wide and deep

In many ways Cavinas was, for us, not just a model of what we all once knew, but also a model of how we still see the world With each stage of biological discovery, we populate the next frontier with mon-sters in the way that the Cavineños had populated the more distant forest When we went to sea, we initially filled the ocean depths with krakens We filled space with humanoid Martians What we could imagine of the unknown was something like us, but a little different What could be more like us than a giant monkey or a little green man?

At every pass, the true unknown would be far stranger than these dictions.” Anyone can conjure up a man-beast, but no one in those first communities could have imagined what was really around the next bend, be they mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, or, over those still farther hills, protists, bacteria, and giant flailing squid

“pre-• “pre-• “pre-•

On the last days of our trip to Cavineño land, I began to think of other questions—things I really wanted to know I asked some, but our in-formants grew weary of our curiosity We were bordering on overstay-ing our welcome It was time to leave.

We could fly out of Cavinas by chartering a plane, but we were

in the mood to explore, and so we made plans to hitch a ride down the river on a fishing boat We walked one town over to Puerto Cavi-nas, the naval base, and waited by the shore of the Mamoré River We watched as it tumbled downhill, carrying with it the calls of unknown species and twenty different fading indigenous languages We waited and every so often asked, “When is the fish boat coming?” “When it

is done fishing,” came the answer “When will it be done fishing?”

“When it has enough fish.” We waited, for luck, for good fishing, for a stinky raft full of dead creatures We waited for three days and when finally nothing came, we decided to walk

The walk would be more than 60 kilometers, but we were, by that time, eager to get going Unfortunately, no one would guide us in the rain It seemed as though Cavineños, raised on rain and rivers, were afraid of the falling water We waited for hours for the rain to end; finally, we gave up We set off on our own, with a map drawn on Sar-ah’s journal The line on the map vaguely resembled a circle, which was worrisome We started west, out of the forest in which Cavinas

is nested and into the wet savannas It continued to rain and we soon realized why no one would go with us The savanna, which we would have to walk through for a day, was a foot deep in water

We slogged on, and the farther we got, the hotter and wetter we became, and the more I complained to Sarah about collecting so many damned plant samples (which I bore in my pack) We waded through the wet savannas of anacondas, mosquitoes, and sand flies, and of gen-eral damp malaise There was water, water everywhere and coinciden-tally, just a little to drink All of our water filters finally gave out and

so we carried a too-limited supply of boiled water, with no easy way of replenishing By midday, we ran out of water and we had little in the

way of food Hungry and thirsty, we stopped in the middle of a land that seemed to stretch to the horizon and shared the last bits of Kool-Aid powder from a package Sarah had at the bottom of her pack

grass-We began to fear that we were lost until we found an eight-year-old boy, walking on his own from village to village, who we followed for as long as we could keep up Eventually he went on ahead and we followed his tracks in the wet mud

And then it appeared, twelve hours into our hike, a place marked literally as “Paraiso,” Paradise, on our simple map, a forest island I have since seen it on government maps It was once a village Thirsty and tired, we walked the narrow footpath between the grasses until

it met the forest, where Paradise literally lay Within the forest, we climbed down a small hill and then up another There we found a single abandoned palm house Around it were fruit trees—mandarins, mangoes, grapefruits, and oranges (all native to Asia, but planted long ago here)— heavy with the burden of unpicked fruits We did the only thing imaginable: we set our packs down and began to eat We ate fruit until our lips burned and our fingers tingled We were exhausted and a little lost, but wonderfully content

As we indulged in Paradise, I wondered how long would it take

us to find the visible species and name them, to learn which could be eaten and which should not be, to populate the land we had not yet explored with unknown creatures, moons, and dreams Where would

we even begin?

The scientists of the next generation of explorers, after the first peoples, had they happened on our situation, lost in a garden of fruits

in the middle of the Amazon, would have set about collecting Around

us were unnamed species, and hence work to do It has been said, “The sciences are the light that will lead the people that wander in the dark-ness.” We needed to be led out of the dark, but were tired and still too busy stuffing our mouths

2 Common Names

“‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language ing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’” G E N E S I S 1 1 : 6 – 7

Upp-sala It was his birthday The horse sighed under the weight and then stumbled forward, but the going was slow Not far from his starting point Linnaeus got off his mount and pulled out his writing pad He had seen a flower on the ground, something yellowish and intriguing A little farther on, he stopped again and got down He would make thousands more such stops He was, like most biologists, a difficult travel companion.* A trip that should have taken a day would take three Another flower and then another and then a bird and then a beetle called his attention If the horse could have talked, it might have

On this particular day, at the beginning of this journey, financed by the Royal Academy of Sciences, Linnaeus’s horse was listless and ready

to move on Later in the journey, he would describe himself as having had barely a pen, a change of clothes, a plant press, and a wig To have seen him then, however, it would have been clear that he had brought much more, too much, in fact, for he also had taken with him, among other things, books of ornithology and plant biology The trip would come to mark the beginning of an age of discovery grander than the

* My wife vouches for this generality.

discovery of the New World He was to go from Uppsala in the south, north along the Gulf of Bothnia on relatively well-trodden trails, until reaching Umea From Umea, the journey would travel inland, toward the Arctic Circle and the mysterious land of the Sami (more commonly referred to as the Lapps) Although northern Sweden does not now seem like a far and untrammeled realm, in 1732 it was, by Linnaeus’s

Linnaeus imagined that he would one day rise to greatness But since at this point he was still green and not yet well known, he would first have to go to the field His motivations were ones many biolo-gists today would recognize: He was taking a journey because he was broke, he felt adventurous, and he wanted to collect plants His father told him to go boldly His mother did not approve He was naive and unprepared, and yet on this journey he would begin to change biology forever

Two thousand years ago there might have been ten thousand groups like the Sami or the Cavineños, with ten thousand languages, nearly all of them unwritten Each language had its own names for the plants and animals As the cultures associated with these languages changed with the invention of agriculture, cities, and writing, there were many possible futures In most scenarios, most potential futures, the world would remain fragmented, named a thousand times in a thousand tongues The cow might spread from place to place because of its value, but its name would be new in each place

Eventually scientists became aware of this potential problem and tried to avoid naming species multiple times by making the names of species long and descriptive When one had only to identify the species nearby, it was sufficient to have simple names But when one needed

to know, for example, whether the yarrow that has just been shipped from Spain is the same species that is used medicinally back home, one had to distinguish more kinds of species, many more The effort

would have to be Herculean These new names had to convey thing about a species, everything necessary to identify it when it was seen again For most of human history, so-called folk species had been named locally by a pair of words, a general name (army ant), and a more specific modifier on that general name (red) It is how the Cav-ineño name things It is how nearly every group on Earth names the things around them The scientists of the 1700s wanted better descrip-tions of species They needed them There were, by then, tens of species

every-of red army ants The scientists did what seemed obvious; they made the names longer, and longer, and longer, until the name of a single species might have ten or even several dozen words

But this system of longer and longer names was not working Worse yet, the problems appeared just as the number of species being discovered was dramatically expanding Ships were bringing back spe-cies from all over the world, and even within Europe; many thousands

of species were being discovered It was rarely clear whether a species named in England and one named in Sweden, for example, were the same Their names might be different, but describe the same species Alternatively, the names might be the same, but describe different spe-cies Common yarrow, a rather undistinguished plant long used in

traditional medicine, became Achillea foliis duplicatopinnatis glabris,

laciniis linearibus acute laciniatus, to distinguish it not just from other

yarrows (of which there would eventually be dozens) but to distinguish

in sufficient detail as to be able to compare it, on the basis of that string

of adjectives, with all other plant species There were thousands and soon to be tens of thousands of species to name and not enough adjec-tives What was more, there was no good way to organize the species

A new plant species was compared to all other plant species, not just those it most resembled With the system as it stood, no one could tell how many species there were, or even how many times a species had been named

The language of science was disassembling just as many new cies were being found, as societies were trying to figure out which of

spe-these new species could be put to use The push to find new species was ultimately pragmatic Europeans were looking for new crops, medi-cines, materials, and spices The push to fix the system, to understand nature, was also to be largely pragmatic Like the Tower of Babel, our library of life, our record of what was around us, was falling down.Carl Linnaeus would save the common language of science He would rescue it from the stew of names in which it was brewing As a boy, he would call out the Latin names of the species around his house His cradle was decorated in flowers Put a flower in his hand and he would calm, his mother would later say His father was an amateur botanist He was also a minister and would instill, somehow, a particu-lar sort of religiosity in Linnaeus, one that would allow him to believe himself chosen for this mission His last name came from the word for the linden tree (Linnaeus would later rename the linden tree, calling

it Tilia).

Linnaeus, of the linden tree, would save the language of science, but not yet He was still traveling As he traveled, the possibility of great discoveries was exhilarating However, this exhilaration was balanced

by the stresses of life on the road Thunder rattled around him, ing the horse and threatening, already, his delicate samples Six days into the trip, he felt the need to stop and rest The world outside Upp-sala was hard and Linnaeus was soft He already complained of his shaken body He would soon complain of loneliness and wish he had

spook-a compspook-anion He hspook-ad not yet trspook-aveled spook-a tenth of the distspook-ance he hspook-ad planned to traverse He was not yet off the main road He was still staying in hotels

After traveling on a broad road along the coast from sala through smaller cities to the north, Linnaeus left Umea on foot

Upp-to travel inland up the Umea River For three days he traveled stream With each day, travel grew more difficult Wide roads turned

up-to narrow roads, narrow roads up-to scrambles over boulders He would

write of those days, “Never have I known a worse road the elements combined against me It was a mass of boulders, with great twisted tree-roots and between them potholes full of water.” Despite the dif-ficulties, he kept collecting.

With the on-again, off-again help of local Sami guides, Linnaeus would continue both by day and, since this was summer in the Arctic,

by the light of the midnight sun The going had become “dreadful.”

He and the assistants he had hired scrambled over logs and trees in the wind and the rain They waded knee-deep through bogs and streams For Linnaeus, had it been a punishment for a “capital offense it would still have been a cruel one.” He wished that he had never undertaken the journey He had run out of food and none was to be had They had gone hungry for a day and then finally, coming over a hill, found tents There in the tents they found no one and no food Finally, they found

an older woman who, before helping Linnaeus, saw fit to remark upon his ignorance What a poor man he was, traveling intentionally to this place of miserable dwelling, hard labor, cold, and difficulty Hadn’t he

a better place to be? He was, by his own reckoning, tired of being “like

a salmon, swimming upstream to ruin.”

The farther Linnaeus went from home, the more he depended on the kindness of locals More often than not, these locals were Sami The Sami have lived in northern Scandinavia for thousands of years They were there long before the Finns, Swedes, or Vikings The first seven Sami men Linnaeus met were driving reindeer They spoke Swedish, so Linnaeus was able to converse Later, translation was to become more difficult, but with each interaction with the Sami, Linnaeus grew more intrigued He drew sketches of the Sami people He drew their boats.Each time the Sami rescued Linnaeus from some real or perceived travail, he would describe what they did when they helped him When they offered him a bed, he, growing perhaps more lonely, described

in detail how the Sami “sleep stark naked, with only reindeer-skin

coverlets.” “There is no embarrassment [except, one can presume, for Linnaeus’s], when a man or a woman stands up naked.” When he felt ill, he documented traditional medicines and delighted in the use of a fungus as an aphrodisiac He observed a Sami man playing a magical drum And, at every chance, he learned the names of plants and ani-mals from the Sami.

He took much from the Sami Much to his horse’s dismay, that included Sami clothes, drums, boots, and even a hat He was to wear them on important occasions for the rest of his life The most impor-tant thing he learned from the Sami, the first big lesson of his trip, was that the native peoples of the world had names for the species and land-scape around them, as well as knowledge of their values and uses.Linnaeus saw very clearly that the Sami knew things he didn’t, for he owed his very survival to their skills They had separate names for species, separate ways of grouping species, separate uses of species

It was almost as if they had a separate science He did not know, but there were thousands of other cultures on Earth that knew as much about the species around them as did the Sami These other sciences, other systems of knowledge, presented problems as well as solutions for Linnaeus The solution was that to know all the species on Earth, which he sought to do sometime soon, he might not have to track down

every species de novo, not if many were known by local groups like the

Sami He was to be at the beginning of the wave of discovery of the native peoples who had themselves gone forth and discovered places all around the world

And because ultimately Linnaeus was charged on this trip and in his later work with finding useful things for Sweden, for the good of the kingdom, it was important that he save time by talking to the locals

to learn what it was in their environment that they made use of He was to be, in part, a translator of the diverse sciences of the cultures

of the world These separate cultures, languages, and names were, he believed, the result of the destruction of the Tower of Babel by God The realization that there were peoples like the Sami all over the world