4 January, 1999
Scientists plan a massive effort to catalog life forms in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where biodiversity reaches stunning levels. Protection of the Smokies should acquire a new sense of urgency. If Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a spider coming along to sit down beside her could belong to any one of the 456 species of spiders that have been identified in the 800-square-mile park. The words "could belong" are used advisedly, for no one really knows how many species of spiders are park residents. And, in a small but significant way, this suggests how much remains to be learned about the vast varieties of animal and plant life in this extraordinary federal preserve that North Carolina proudly shares with Tennessee. Over the past three years, reports Seth Borenstein of Knight-Ridder News-papers, researcher Fred Coyle of West-ern Carolina University and his students have collected 180,000 spiders and classified them into 456 species, including 38 never previously identified. That's enough to make the average fellow's skin crawl a bit, but the Coyle team has apparently just dented the surface. By his estimate, with $220,000 and a dozen graduate students to shake the bushes and poke around the rocks and logs of the Smokies, the spider study should be finished in another five years. But this is a small piece of the detective work foreseen for the park by 100 scientists from around the world. They hope to transfer strategies developed in a census of the park's flora and fauna to other life-form studies at home and abroad. And they seek to carry out this enormous biodiversity project through a private, non-profit, volunteer program. Considering that scientists already know of 10,000 species of life in the park, not counting bacteria, it hardly seems a wild guess on their part that at least 100,000 species populate the Smokies. But researchers estimate it will take a decade of sifting through the mountains to find out for sure. The cause of ecology might even be served by the variety of life forms around one abandoned corn-liquor still. More seriously, this scientific venture should be of more than passing interest to North Carolinians who have been dedicated to "saving the Smokies" from an assortment of environmental threats. They haven't been able to be entirely sure of what was being saved, apart from the black bear, the wild boar and a few other critters, imposing numbers of plants and some 130 kinds of native trees. But the scope of the planned species inventory in the Smokies staggers the imagination. As insect ecologist John Pickering of the University of Georgia has commented, the scientists involved speak of the project in terms of walking on the moon, or going to Mars, or building the space station. This is no piddling head count. As the center of biological diversity in the Eastern United States, the Smokies are a great natural laboratory for the pioneering research that is scheduled to begin in March. We can await with eager anticipation the surprising number and varieties of life forms -- probably not including Eric Rudolph -- that are bound to be uncovered.
Discover Life in America | Great Smokies | Communications | Seyden - 4 January, 1999 |