Editorial: Life in the Smokies

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