SCOTT V. EDWARDS: Thanks, everyone.
It's great to be here.
And today we're going to hear a little bit
about how we can traverse the world in all its biodiversity
through some of the amazing institutions and museums we have right here
at Harvard.
Here's a picture of me teaching a few undergraduates
in my ornithology class in Palo Verde National Park, Costa Rica.
And one of the things I want to impress upon you
is that I think the most important thing you
can do after taking classes wherever you go is to get involved with research.
Many of the classes that we have here in Biology, Environmental Sciences,
we won't be just talking about the problems out there.
We'll be visiting them and looking at them directly.
And this is one of the great aspects of teaching here
at Harvard is the ability to really give students a first row
seat to all the really incredible changes
that are happening to our planet right now.
Now in addition to all the great students and all the great faculty
we have here at Harvard, the bottom line is
that Harvard also has a lot of stuff.
We have millions of specimens in various kinds of museums.
We've got art museums, natural history museums, ancient Egyptian museums.
All of these are freely accessible to Harvard students.
And for teachers like me, they allow us to unveil
the amazing world of biodiversity by really traversing the planet right
in the confines of Harvard campus.
This is the venerable Museum of Comparative Zoology,
which is the largest university-based natural history museum in the world.
You can see here we're able to look at the subtle variations that
occur in species across the landscape.
We can look at living species such as the orioles you see on the top row
or we can look at extinct species, such as the Carolina parakeets which
you see on the bottom left.
We also have incredible resources in genomic resources.
These are tissue or blood samples from species
sampled all over the planet that allow us
to probe the genomes of these extraordinary species.
Through that, we can understand how these species have changed through time
and how they're responding to pressing issues like climate change.
I view specimens not simply as a particular bird,
or a particular insect, or a particular plant
but really as snapshots of biodiversity of a particular place in time
during the history of our planet.
So for example, on these extinct Hawaiian honeycreepers-- well,
some are extinct.
Others are still with us--
we can find, for example, pollen from flowers that they have pollinated.
We can find chemical residues of chemicals
that have wafted into the Hawaiian islands over time.
We can use high energy physics to look at the nanostructures of their feathers
to understand the colors that they produce.
And so a specimen is not simply a bird or an insect.
It's really a window into an historical place and time.
Here are just a few examples of some of the field trips
that we take as part of our classes.
We've got field trips here from ornithology,
from herpetology, which is the study of reptiles and amphibians.
We've also got botany in the lower left and we have
paleontology, the study of fossils.
These field trips are an integral part of the classes that we teach
and they allow students to visit the sites where
many of the great discoveries are made.
We also strive to give students the skills
to record biodiversity in ways that will allow researchers
from around the world to harvest that information.
And so here you see a student taking sound recordings of a bird singing.
It's actually a really challenging thing to do.
As you take your recording, you become attuned to your environment
and you realize how many planes are passing over, how many folks
are talking right next to you.
It's really a challenge to get a really pristine recording of a species.
We use scopes and we catch birds with mist nets to look at their details
very closely.
So here's a picture taken by a student on one
of my trips of the white-collared manakin, which
is a species of neotropical bird which is found in Panama.
And I thought I'd show you a quick clip of what
this bird does when it's excited getting together
with other members of its own sex.
So you can see it's a so-called lekking species, meaning the males actually
display communally.
Now you can see that this student has actually lost
sight of this really interesting bird.
She's trying to find it.
And this really illustrates some of the challenges of studying animal behavior.
It's not easy.
It's not a laboratory controlled environment.
But you can see that eventually she does capture it again.
And we were really able to witness some remarkable behaviors this way.
We also do a lot of cool stuff at night.
For those of you who are night owls, ornithology is the place for you.
This is a common paraque, a very interesting nocturnal species
that feeds on insects.
And we also find lots of other creepy crawly things like spiders.
Here's a bunch of students just grooving out on a spider on the road at night.
Now we also get a little bit crazy on these trips.
And here's a video that my students put together just having fun.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- As a biologist, I know how important it is to bring students into the field,
to make them see the diversity of birds, to come to places like Costa Rica,
and, most importantly, talk birdie to me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- (SINGING TOGETHER) Get chirpy on him.
I'm that [INAUDIBLE] that you get on international.
Fold out seat in my thrifty, riding bumpy roads cause I know all the birds.
[END PLAYBACK]
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
SCOTT V. EDWARDS: They need a little work on their harmony
but you can get the sense.
So I just wanted to end with two little vignettes of research in my laboratory.
And again, both of these projects were actually done by undergraduates.
And one of the best things about being a Harvard professor
is to welcome students into the lab.
And that's honestly the best way you can get value for your college education.
So the black-footed albatross, this is my favorite bird
so you don't have to ask me what my favorite bird is.
This is it.
It's a really interesting seabird, a member of the albatross family,
which in this case breeds in Hawaii and in Japan.
You can see that its population numbers are not particularly high.
There's less than 100,000 of them on the entire planet.
And their movements-- these albatrosses are famous for traversing the globe
seemingly effortlessly--
raise an issue about how we can best conserve them.
And so for example, the black-footed albatross
is found both on islands of the so-called leeward Hawaiian islands,
which are the many small islands and coral
atolls to the northwest of the main eight Hawaiian islands.
So when I go to Hawaii, I don't go to Waikiki or Kauai.
Even I go to Midway and Tern Island, which
are these remarkable atolls to the northwest that you see there.
They breed there and they also breed islands in Southern Japan.
And so it's an incredibly widespread species.
And in fact, individuals will fly all the way from Hawaii
to the west coast of North America just for a meal for their chick.
And so we need to know how genetically different
are populations in Hawaii and Japan and should we manage them as a single unit
or as separate units.
Well, an undergraduate took this on and applied
high throughput genetic techniques.
And she found that, as you can see from this plot,
we can easily separate the Hawaiian and Japanese populations on the left
and right side of the graph.
So this tells us that, in fact, these populations
are genetically differentiated and that we
might want to consider managing them separately according to their own life
histories and ecologies.
And then finally, I just wanted to mention a really interesting project
where we're using an animal model to understand
the spread of zoonotic diseases, very much a simulation
as if we were studying COVID in humans.
So house finches are a very common species here in Massachusetts.
And about 30 years ago, they were invaded by a bacterial pathogen
called a mycoplasma.
And you can see the spread of that pathogen up on the map there.
And we've essentially been taking museum specimens going back in time to study
the bird before the pathogen spread-- you can see there on the blue
on the map--
as it was spreading in the east, and then finally as it
continued to spread through the West Coast using.
Museum specimens, we can essentially go back in time and look at this process
historically.
And this is, I think, one of the great values of these amazing collections.
So I just want to suggest that you come here, you'll go far,
and that biodiversity needs the best and brightest minds.
And we've got some great resources on campus to do just that.
So thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]