Examination of Witness (Questions 224-239)
Dr Richard Fortey
29 APRIL 2008
Q224 Chairman: Now I welcome Dr Richard
Fortey. I know you were able to hear the earlier session so I
do not need to repeat myself. Is there anything you would like
to say by way of introduction?
Dr Fortey: Just about myself. I am that rarity
of a practising taxonomist and I have worked at the Natural History
Museum for more than 35 years. I have been President of various
societies that deal with the palaeontological side of taxonomy.
I am currently President of the Geological Society of London and
as well as working on trilobites, my own particular theme, partly
in response to some of the things we have been talking about earlier,
in the last decade I have devoted a lot of time to writing books
for the general public most of which are designed to explain why
taxonomy matters.
Chairman: And that is a subject we would like
to return to in a moment but I would like to ask Lord Soulsby
if he would like to start.
Q225 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
Good afternoon. I was interested in your comments about taxonomy.
Some nearly 50 years ago I started cutting my teeth in taxonomy
and enjoyed it thoroughly but then moved away from that. My question
basically is, in your summary of your 2006 Michael Farraday Lecture
you stated: "The business of taxonomy and systematics remains
the shop floor of biology research". Do you think that that
view that you expressed in 2006 is widely held still amongst the
biological research community and the environmental policy people?
Dr Fortey: I think widely, not actually. Quite
a lot of what we might describe as cutting-edge scientists are
interested in what they do. A lot of them, as we have heard earlier,
these days deal with various kinds of molecular techniques. The
shop-floor taxonomists relying, as we have heard already, more
and more on an amateur community are not regarded in general as,
what shall we say, the kind of people that the research councils
like to fund. People who do taxonomy who do the basic stuff find
getting external funding progressively difficult, and so to that
extent I think there is a feeling that it has moved from centre
stage.
Q226 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
What in your opinion needs to be done to give it a higher profile
and make it more readily fundable by research councils and the
rest?
Dr Fortey: I think there are two issues here
which we have also heard about briefly and there are two sides
to thinking about taxonomy. The first is, what you say, the national
interest and the other one is the international issues about taxonomy.
It is true that there has never been a more desperate time to
have taxonomic expertise on a global scale simply because we are
losing habitat at quite an astonishing rate particularly in places
like Indonesia where deforestations continues apace. We do not
even know what organisms there are there. This is not a luxury;
this is a necessity. We have to know what these animals are. There
are things that are probably going extinct that have not even
had the blessing of a scientific name, we have not really identified
them, let alone doing the interesting stuff, the Attenborough
stuff, which you might describe as writing the biography of those
organisms. Any species you like to look at will have a history
as interesting as a tiger if you only knew about it. I saw a wonderful
TV documentary about the tiny wasps that live inside figs and
the wasps that live on those wasps and so on, marvellous stuff,
really dramatic, and we simply do not know enough about organisms
yet to get to that stage, so I think it is urgent, really I do,
that taxonomy is focused on these areas where otherwise we might
lose species. I think that is an agenda which can appeal to a
lot of thinking people.
Q227 Lord Soulsby of Swaffham Prior:
From the last witnesses there was a very nice example given of
projecting from a potential model of transmission by insect vectors,
especially given the point we were hearing about in the United
States, and it does seem to me that it is important being able
to say sooner or later that one is going to have a problem of
whatever it is, based on the ecology and the knowledge of species
and of the species that might occur because, as you say, half
the species we do not know exist, and it is the projection forward
of the potential problems that I think is very important in the
whole field of taxonomy.
Dr Fortey: I could not identify that particular
mosquito you were talking about. It is very important that you
have people who can. A lot of insects in particular and fungi
have been mentioned, and I have long been an amateur mycologist
so I know about the fungal field, these are difficult organisms
which require expertise. They do not necessarily require a home-made
molecular sequencing kit. I know one or two amateur mycologists
who are so enthusiastic about finding the answers about their
particular organism that they actually pay out of their own pocket
to have the sequencing done—and it can be done—but
most taxonomists most of the time work on morphology, and you
can do that these days, you can have a microscope at home (I have
got one myself), you can acquire literature, and the web is a
fantastic resource. This allows us to get at literature which
was formally the province of only people that worked in the national
museums. There is a much greater facility for getting out there
to get at the more esoteric literature so amateur taxonomists
can be better and more professional. That is important but of
course it is equally important that there should be ground truthing,
a real body of expertise, who can check the veracity of records,
otherwise standards could slip and there will be nobody to notice
that they are slipping. We have heard about the last remaining
flea recorder. Would it not be good if there were a second person
who could actually back up those identifications? That is not
unusual. There are some groups of organisms which have hardly
any or even no experts at all on them. I think this is wrong;
it is not how it should be.
Q228 Lord Colwyn: The current interest
in climate change issues has focused attention on the fossil record
as a source of knowledge on responses of organisms to past change.
Obviously from your self introduction I imagine that this is something
that is of great interest to you, but is taxonomy generally relevant
to this and has it benefited from this increased interest?
Dr Fortey: I am not sure it has benefited but
is it relevant? Absolutely. For example, if you go through the
changes of climate in the Ice Age and so on, you have climatic
oscillations which are recorded in changes in the beetle fauna,
they are cold beetles at some stage, warm beetles at others and
they move backwards and forwards. They are a thermometer which
tells you what is going on. It takes tremendous skill to be able
to identify a beetle from its elytra, the hard wing cases that
are the only things preserved as fossils. That is a real skill.
There is a man called Russell Coope in Birmingham who practically
alone is able to do that work. I think he is still going strong
even now but as we were talking about before, when he goes I do
not think there is anybody who will that have very specific skill
with that particular group of organisms. We have somebody in the
Natural History Museum who works on chironomid midge mouth parts
and is doing extraordinarily important work on the climate oscillations
that are happening in Scandinavia now and have happened in historical
times from lake-bottom sediments, so taxonomy is absolutely vital
to understanding past climatic change and I suspect will be just
as vital in predicting the future.
Q229 Lord Colwyn: Your examples sound
like professional taxonomists; what about the amateurs?
Dr Fortey: There are some amateurs that do this
but the examples I know about are actually professionals.
Q230 Baroness Walmsley: That takes
us nicely to the next question because we have had evidence of
the decline in the number of taxonomists in university biology
departments. In your experience, is the same thing happening with
paleotaxonomists in geology and palaeontology departments?
Dr Fortey: Yes it has been a slow and rather
relentless decline. There are reasons for it. The principal reason
I guess is that university academics are hired more and more for
their grant-raising potential and bodies like NERC, with respect,
do not hand out money for grant proposals that are primarily taxonomically
aimed. I can speak from personal experience here. The grants I
have been successful in getting have got taxonomy in them hidden
away or rather cunningly concealed under a scientific hypothesis—perfectly
genuine I might say—which needs the taxonomy to solve it.
It is not duplicity; it is a certain measure of cunning. When
I have put in a grant which is pure taxonomy I am afraid it has
got bounced. I have done it several times so I can speak from
my own personal experience and I am sure it measures up with others.
To return to your point, if you have got a hiring situation in
a university department you are going to have somebody who is
going to cover the lecturing base but also is going to be a glamorous
grant raiser and that will not be somebody whose PhD was primarily
taxonomically directed; that is just the way it has gone.
Q231 Baroness Walmsley: So the finger
points at NERC again or BBSRC?
Dr Fortey: Yes it becomes self-fulfilling in
a way because, after a while, the people—I have sat on the
boards myself and I know they strive to be fair, they really do,
but once you have got a university department of the kind I have
described the people you recruit to the NERC committees will of
course be scientists who are not taxonomists, so even though they
may make friendly noises occasionally at taxonomists when they
come across one in the street, they are not dealing with them
on a day-to-day basis and they will tend to favour the kind of
research they do, which these days, as we heard, is increasingly
molecular or theoretical.
Q232 Lord Krebs: If I can just come
back to your point about cunning concealment, one could actually
put that as a rather positive feature given all the interest in
climate change and the research councils, particularly NERC, do
fund a lot of work on climate change, surely that gives a window
of opportunity to the skilful grant writer who wants to do taxonomic
research to increase funding in the area under the badge of understanding
past (and therefore future) climate change. As a supplementary
to that, some of the people who do this kind of work are actually
not in geology or palaeontology departments but in geography departments
for example. We have heard from Rick Battarbee of UCL and Kathy
Willis in Oxford, who will be doing similar kind of work, so are
there people benefiting from the new relevance of palaeotaxonomy
to climate change?
Dr Fortey: There will be a few beneficiaries
of course. Maybe Russell Coope has a successor and I hope he does,
but of course that will not deal with the totality of the fossil
record, it will not go back to the part of the geological column
I am interested in hundreds of millions of years ago. The kind
of people who would work in a geography department are those who
can top slice the last million years at most, or maybe two million.
That still leaves 3.5 billion years of very interesting fossils
records to look at. If you were very, very cunning indeed, perhaps
you might compare the Ordovician Ice Age and what happened afterwards
with what might happen over the next century or so, but I suspect
that would be a step of ingenuity too far which the panel would
probably see through.
Q233 Lord Krebs: Is your point that
in terms of palaeotaxonomy, it is taxonomy over the last million
years that is relevant to the climate change agenda in terms of
research?
Dr Fortey: Yes exactly, and there are certain
groups of course that you can name, obviously palynomorphs, diatoms,
beetles, midges and so on which will be important to that particular
issue, but of course that is a minute part of the natural world
they are concerned with and is it right, should there be one national
expert on, let us say, ammonites, a group of organisms that lived
for a couple of hundred million years with tens of thousands of
species and wonderfully varied, is it right to have one person
paid out of the public purse even though they are not necessarily
relevant to climate change? My view is of course yes it is right,
but if you are going to justify everything in pragmatic terms
then you let the ammonite expertise go, which is exactly what
is happening.
Q234 Lord Haskel: You spoke of the
web being a great resource. Others have told us about significant
progress towards creating a new e-taxonomy on the web. Have there
been any particular advances in the web-based taxonomy of palaeontology?
Dr Fortey: It is in its infancy. There are good
web resources. For example I have been terribly impressed by my
own speciality, trilobites. There is a very, very good website
set up by somebody, of all absurd places, who lives in Hawaii,
which is the furthest you can go on this planet from any trilobite.
Maybe that is why, I do not know, but the people that log into
that site swap literature and they are tremendously up-to-date.
They exchange views, they exchange photographs, an expert will
occasionally chime in and say, "This is something I really
know about; I think it is that." It is an extraordinary thing
and it was not happening a few years ago. If you think back to
the great days of Darwin and his friends when they would despatch
a letter on the Friday morning and it would be received 150 miles
away perhaps the following day and then a reply would come back,
it is almost as intimate as that. I think it is a tremendous thing.
On the mycological side, the number of macro fungal taxonomists
in this country has dwindled to the fingers of one hand or maybe
less. I can speak from experience here because I take out an Oxford
University party into the woods around Oxford because as an amateur
I can identify the macro fungi, and the specialist in the department
cannot do it, and then they do very, very clever things with the
microrisal DNA and other molecules that they collect from the
soil, but I am the person that has to say what the fruit bodies
are. However in the mycological community there is a network at
a national level of people who are amateurs in correspondence
with one another who I think get pretty good identifications and,
significantly, when they do not know what something is they know
who to send it to, so they are not endlessly bombarding the world
authority on some genus or other with rather unpleasant dried
specimens. They will send the person something when it matters.
I have named my first fungus last year—I have named many,
many trilobites—having sent a specimen to the expert on
this particular group who happens to be Norwegian, and one of
two people who could have probably told the world it was a new
species, so, yes, is the short answer, it is working very well.
Q235 Lord Haskel: But you say it
is in its infancy. Is there anything holding it back, is it developing?
Dr Fortey: I think there is enough amateur interest
to drive it. The thing which concerns me is that it would take
off all by itself and there will not be the equivalent of my friend
in Norway or the man in the Natural History Museum who knows about
the group and can be critical about taxonomy. The trouble with
amateurs if they are working with a difficult group is that they
tend to like to make a species, there is something rather glamorous
about it, which means that they might tend to overemphasise certain
rather trivial features which might, if you really knew the organism,
just be a matter of variation within a species. The shell world
for example, my friends in the Museum tell me has been troubled
by this for many years. Cowries, those wonderful shells, have
an infinite variety of colour patterns and it is very easy to
convince yourself that you have a new species in hand. There has
to be somebody that acts as quality control. This is part of the
problem with para-taxonomy which I suspect you have heard about
or will hear about. This is training people from a base of expertise
like the Natural History Museum to go back to Paraguay, or wherever
it happens to be, to do their own taxonomy. It depends on the
talent of the people in the first place, it depends on the quality
of the teaching, but still the reference collections, which are
the ultimate ground truthing, will be held in somewhere like the
Natural History Museum and the comparisons need to be made back
again if you are not going to start creating nonsense taxonomy.
Q236 Lord Methuen: As a well-known
author of popular science books, how do you think the role of
the taxonomist is perceived by the general public?
Dr Fortey: My own mission has been to slightly
improve it, I should say. There is an image which might be a 19th
century hangover which is a slightly dusty one which is somebody
peering over a drawer and blowing the dust off a tome published
in 1843.
Q237 Lord Methuen: You should have
been to Calke Abbey!
Dr Fortey: That is the image I would wish to
dispel because I think it is far too important. What we have to
do, and one of the previous speakers is absolutely right, is we
have to release the image of taxonomy from any hint of antiquarianism
for example. David Attenborough has been a spokesman for taxonomy
but it would be nice to think that there would be somebody, perhaps
it should be a future Director of the Natural History Museum,
to whom the world would naturally turn if any taxonomic question
was going to be discussed. In other words, you want to invest
it with a certain amount of glamour. It should have glamour because
it has urgency for the reasons I have explained about wanting
to know what is going on in the parts of the world which are under
threat. I would have thought it should be extraordinarily glamorous
and important but it has not got there yet.
Q238 Lord Haskel: How would you encourage
the next generation of amateur naturalists and taxonomic enthusiasts?
Do you go out to the schools and talk to them?
Dr Fortey: I speak to a lot of people, yes.
Mostly I speak to amateur clubs, though, people like that up and
down the country. There is an astonishing number in palaeontology.
Somebody else will know this better than I do what part taxonomy
plays in the school curriculum. Do people explain what it is about?
Do people explain the urgency of it? I think it should be on the
school curriculum.
Baroness Walmsley: It is not.
Q239 Chairman: I think we have been
advised that it is very rarely in the undergraduate syllabus let
alone schools.
Dr Fortey: This is one of the problems, again
for reasons which have now become self-fulfilling, that if there
are fewer taxonomists in the department, there will be fewer people
to teach it. In particular, one of the hangovers from this previous
era of taxonomy was there was a rather dreary flog through the
natural kingdoms or "go up the geological column" way
of teaching taxonomy which was pretty deadly honestly. I would
like to think that when I teach about trilobites that I bring
them back to life and I engage with their biology. The interesting
scientific challenges that you can do with dead organisms, or
climate change; approach it from that angle; not "there are
72 genera in a particular family and you will now learn them",
that is not the way to enthuse people about taxonomy, but that
just requires a little creative thought about teaching and getting
the right people in place to do it.
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