Bruce Beehler
Williams College graduate Bruce Beehler captured the romantic notion of exploration more than your typical ornithologist/conservationist when, in February, he was lauded for his exploration of a "lost world" in New Guinea.
Expedition to New Guinea
As senior representative of the Melanesia Program at Conservation International, Beehler works to preserve areas in Papua, New Guinea. Beehler's expedition to the virtually untouched Foja Mountain region and the Mamberano Basin yielded dozens of new species of birds, frogs, and butterflies, as well as known but rare animals, including the Golden-Mantled Tree Kangaroo and the Long-Beaked Echidna, an egg-laying mammal related to the duck-billed platypus that was believed to be extinct.
Beehler personally spotted the previously undescribed honeyeater and rediscovered several lost species, including Berlepsch's Six-wired Bird of Paradise. Beehler and his team were also the first scientists to observe a male bird of paradise.
Since the area is so isolated, animals have been able to make their ways to icelets and mountain tops and differentiated from others of their close-by relatives and transform into entire new species unseen anywhere else in the world.
"This little mountain range is actually a natural laboratory in evolution because what we were finding there is actual natural selection," said Beehler, "the arising of a number of novel species that clearly evolved right there and are differentiating right there."
From the very beginning, though, the scene was set for natural selection on the island. The Foja Mountain range is very young, speaking geologically — only two or three million years old. New Guinea began as part of the Australian plain that began moving northward in the Pacific and sweeping up old pieces of the Pacific sea floor, which has been crunched together and compressed into the mountain ranges.
"We know there wasn't anything there not too long ago," said Beehler, "and these mountain ranges arose in the recent past, they were populated by forest, then birds and animals and other plants, and there differentiated into new species."
The region had been visited before by Pulitzer Prize winning scientist Jared Diamond, once in 1979 and again in 1981, and then lay untouched for just short of a quarter of a century before Beehler and his team arrived to build on that work.
"We went in and found all these things that Jared Diamond didn't find," said Beehler, "and the next people who go in there will find new stuff as well. It's a long slog in a big tropical rainforest to find all the things that live there, but that's how science works, we build on the shoulders of giants, our predecessors."
Beehler says that in the realm of science, his team's achievement is both stunning and not surprising at all and, for these reasons, science still has a lot of work to do, but it is work that they can be assured is there to be done.
"Depending on what you are looking for, there are millions of new species waiting to be discovered and described on this earth," said Beehler. "Our earth is really quite poorly known, especially the little things, the insects, some of the lesser invertebrates, a lot of the organisms that live in the deep sea have not been encountered. There are probably more undescribed species on earth than there are described species and not everyone realizes that."
Beehler estimates that undocumented species will be particularly bountiful in New Guinea, with at least 150 new species of beetles waiting to be described. In addition, his team did not properly study insects or snakes, and the plants need a whole team to themselves — an orchid specialist will be required to get anything done.
Beehler credits the locals with keeping the area safe from exploitation. The expedition was done cooperatively with the natives of the island, who Beehler found to be better experts on the natural world of the island than any scientist.
"The people are so close to nature, they're so knowledgeable, these are barefoot naturalists," said Beehler. "This is their patrimony, this is their whole world, everything they depend on comes from the forest, so they know what they need. The forest is their supermarket. It's also their Home Depot or their Loew's. It's also their bottled water factory."
One of the purposes of Beehler's work is to discern the lessons of managing that wilderness, making it a sustainable system where the inhabitants live off what the forests produce, but do not decimate it in the process.
"They've been the stewards of these forests for a millennia and they've done a pretty darn good job," said Beehler. "And they're using it, they're sustainably using it. Their plan is not protection per say, but the idea of separating the people and moving them out, we're totally against that. We are for helping the local people become the rangers and protectors of these lands that belong to them. People are part of the puzzle here."
Beehler hopes that his work in New Guinea translates into lessons learned in our own country.
"The Papuan people can still drink out of a stream because they've taken care of their environment and I think there is a lesson to learn from that," said Beehler. "Time will show that one can grow and develop in ways and have an industrial society that allow the environmental services to continue to produce things for us, it's just a matter of following the principles of physics and understanding how nature works."
More than just a school education on nature, Beehler believes the best way to understand it is just to go out and be in it — hiking can do more to that aim than any amount of textbooks and can often build first hand interests. As Beehler sees it, to learn the simple pleasures of being outdoors is to experience the same pleasures of his job as a naturalist.
"It's like going on an extended camping trip," said Beehler. "Sleeping in a tent, cooking over a fire, getting up in the morning or sitting around the fire at night - all those fun things, those really satisfying things, you get to do on an expedition like this. It's all pretty darn exciting to get away from the office, away from the email, away from the phone calls, that sort of things. It's nice to be out on the end of the world, looking over the edge. That's fun. It reminds me of how lucky I am."
