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Giving
Lip(arid) Service to Taxonomy
By Jana Goldman
Public Affairs Officer, NOAA Research
Taxonomists are the inventory-takers of the natural world. They collect,
study and add to the list of the world's inhabitants from the smallest
bacteria to the largest mammal. They look for similarities and differences,
no matter how small, to determine just what the relationships of a particular
species are. This work is fundamental to all of biology - if you can't
identify and distinguish organisms from one another, how can you study
them and their systems?
Photo by Jana Goldman
NOAA Research's David Stein, a taxonomist or inventory-taker of the
natural world, just returned from St. Petersburg, Russia. "St. Petersburg
in winter is magic," he said, but we spent most of our time inside
looking at fish!" Here David holds a large snailfish (careproctus
ovigerum) collected 35 years ago in deep water off Oregon's coast.
David Stein is a taxonomist who works in NOAA Research. Before joining
NOAA, he was a deep-sea fish taxonomist and biologist at Oregon State
University. Although he is not required to do research, he has continued,
largely on his own time and with his own money.
He is a Research Associate in the Fish Division of the Smithsonian Museum
of Natural History, hosted there by the National Systematics Laboratory
of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service. His 11th floor office in
Silver Spring is far above the deep-sea creatures he studies. A poster
on his office wall shows these "monsters" of the deep, their large mouths,
pale colors, and unusual shapes conjuring tantalizing images of life in
the very deep, dark, cold, and food-scarce ocean.
Stein is one of five experts in the world on the Family Liparidae (snailfishes,
or liparids) including at least 300 species, which he has studied since
the early 1970s. Although not well-known to the public (they are of no
commercial value, and even the largest is only about 1 ½ feet long), they
occur in all oceans in cool and cold waters from intertidal depths to
over 6000 meters, and are notably abundant in the Antarctic and Bering
Sea.
They are particularly interesting because they have a wide variety of
shapes, adaptations, and living habits; for instance, many lay their eggs
inside the gill cavities of king crabs and their relatives. In 1990, Stein
and a Russian colleague, Anatoly Andriashev, reviewed Antarctic snailfishes
as a chapter of "Fishes of the Southern Ocean"; continuing these studies,
in 1998 they published a paper describing 18 new species of Antarctic
liparids and redescribing 4 more.
These publications made clear the significance of liparids in the Antarctic
fish fauna: they have the most species within a family of any fishes there.
While doing that work, he discovered recently collected but unidentified
specimens of liparids at the CSIRO Marine Laboratory in Hobart, Tasmania.
He enlisted Andriashev and another Russian colleague, Natalia Chernova,
both of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to help solve the difficult taxonomic
problems involved in distinguishing among the species.
Stein credits NOAA Research and a previous grant from the National Science
Foundation that enabled him to travel to Australia to study these snailfishes.
In their recent work, "Snailfishes (Pisces: Liparidae) of Australia, including
descriptions of 30 new species," Stein and his colleagues provide the
first published descriptions of liparids from Australia, and the second
records from the Indian Ocean. The work, which includes drawings of the
fishes, will be published this month in the Records of the Australian
Museum.
"There was interest in exploring and describing the fishes of Australian
waters because of recent interest in deep-water fisheries in that area,"
Stein said. "Samples were taken from previously uncollected areas and
depths, mostly from around Tasmania. When we looked at what was there,
we found 30 new species spread among three genera. It was astonishing.
"In looking at the Australian liparids, although at first there seemed
to be only three or four species, the more we looked, the smaller but
significant morphological differences we noticed among them, such as patterns
of sensory pores on the head, skin thickness, mouth position, and other
characters."
"The amazing occurrence of so many species from the same region and
similar depths suggest that the family has more taxonomic and ecological
diversity than previously thought." In addition, "they are very similar,
suggesting that they evolved fairly recently and are (as a group) closely
related to each another but distinct from other snailfishes, such as those
in the Antarctic." The new discoveries were presented this fall at the
10th European Congress of Ichthyology in Prague, Czech Republic.
In many regions, snailfishes are generally not abundant or occur in places
where few collections have been made, which may explain why many have
often been overlooked and rarely collected. For instance, Stein and Chernova
have also submitted a paper identifying an additional 13 species of small,
easily damaged liparids in the genus Psednos from the North Atlantic and
the North and South Pacific. These bring the total of described species
in the genus to 28.
That work was based on a decade of examining material from collections
around the world which revealed specimens from all oceans except the South
Atlantic. Several years ago, an expedition to the Galapagos collected
two more new species of a different genus for Stein and colleagues to
identify - the first from that part of the world. The expedition was supported
by the Smithsonian, National Science Foundation, and IMAX and is depicted
in the film "Galapagos" showing at the IMAX theater at the Natural History
Museum in Washington, D.C.
Stein traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia to work with Chernova at the
Academy of Sciences on a paper about the Galapagos discoveries. He hopes
to submit it for publication in the spring. Although the prospect of a
winter visit to Russia may not seem attractive, Stein stayed with his
Russian colleagues. "The people are wonderful," he said, "and
St. Petersburg in the winter is magic - besides, we spent most of our
time inside looking at fish!"
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