{"id":124811,"date":"2013-07-18T16:25:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-18T19:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=124811"},"modified":"2015-08-06T15:11:40","modified_gmt":"2015-08-06T18:11:40","slug":"a-sharp-eye-on-biodiversity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/a-sharp-eye-on-biodiversity\/","title":{"rendered":"A sharp eye on biodiversity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sketch

Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span>Sketch of the wooden structure of the Lindolpho R. Guimar\u00e3es, by Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leresParaguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Very few doctorates have influenced an area of Brazilian science as much as the one completed at Harvard University by S\u00e3o Paulo zoologist Paulo Em\u00edlio Vanzolini. After working alongside biologists who were exploring the formation and diversification of species from an evolutionary perspective, Vanzolini returned to Brazil in 1951 advocating concepts that revolutionized Brazilian zoology and that are still used to understand biodiversity today. Vanzolini argued that it was vital to study species not only through isolated specimens, which had been the approach until then, but also by looking at the distribution of populations of one same species across time and space. He later proposed that the marked diversity of animal species in the Amazon Region was the result of the geographic isolation of animal populations prompted by climate changes that took place thousands of years ago. According to Vanzolini, during eras when the climate was colder and drier, forests would fragment and form islands of plant life \u2013 called refugia \u2013 where animals were able to survive and form new species.<\/p>\n

Although this perspective, like any other, has revealed its limitations over time, it can still be useful. \u201cThe refugia alone were not responsible for these patterns of biological diversity,\u201d underscores C\u00e9lio Haddad, professor at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) in Rio Claro. In his opinion, phylogenetic, climatic, and geological questions should generally be examined jointly if the formation and diversification of species are to be properly understood. \u201cThe same idea or hypothesis can be used in different contexts,\u201d says biologist Jo\u00e3o Alexandrino, professor at the Federal University of S\u00e3o Paulo (Unifesp). In early May of this year, one of Alexandrino\u2019s students began analyzing the genetic diversity of populations of a species of tree frog found in the Atlantic Forest and in the fields of southern Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. After examining the diversity patterns suggested by preliminary findings, Alexandrino advised the young man to read an article that Vanzolini had published in 1981, in which he proposed the concept of vanishing refugia, according to which forest islands could suffer fragmentation and thereby force less specialized species to adapt to open environments.<\/p>\n

\"Support

Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span>Support team with the first load of Bel\u00e9m-Bras\u00edlia collections in May 1967Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe refugia approach was innovative at the time it was presented, and it guided several generations of researchers,\u201d observed Hussam Zaher, director of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) Zoology Museum, which Vanzolini headed for three decades as tenured director, appointed by former S\u00e3o Paulo governor Carvalho Pinto. \u201cRefugia were talked about for a long time,\u201d says Zaher. The director says he believes that Vanzolini\u2019s greatest merit as a scientist was that he introduced Brazil to the \u201cmodern synthesis\u201d \u2013 which consolidated the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky in genetics, of Ernest Mayr in zoology, and of George Simpson in paleontology \u2013 and encouraged its adoption here. Vanzolini studied under Mayr and Simpson at Harvard, already a center for modern science back then. Dobzhansky, who also spent time at Harvard, paid four visits to Brazil and played a valuable role in the training of the country\u2019s first geneticists. Vanzo, as he liked to be called, was used to keeping company with intellectuals: his great-grandfather translated the six books of Roman poet Lucretius\u2019 De rerum natura<\/em> (On the Nature of Things<\/em>) from Latin to Italian and his grandfather was in the habit of sending interesting Brazilian animal species to museums in Europe. In an interview given to zoologist William Ronald Heyer, Vanzolini said he learned English by reading Shakespeare\u2019s plays in the original.<\/p>\n

The so-called refuge theory was introduced by German geologist J\u00fcrgen Haffer in the journal Science<\/em> in 1969. Haffer showed that there was a higher concentration of populations of different species of toucans in areas that had received more rainfall. Three years earlier, the British ornithologist Reginald Moreau had highlighted the influence of climate alterations and refugia on the distribution and differentiation of bird populations in Africa, but he did not go much farther than this. Around the same time, Vanzolini and a former Harvard colleague, Ernest Williams, did a study on the geographic variation and distribution of a species of lizard of the genus Anolis<\/em> in the Amazon Region, which could be explained by climate variations; they published their paper one year after Haffer. In an interview with Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em> in 2012, Vanzolini reported that his and Williams\u2019 research was \u201ca practical example of what Haffer had posited from a theoretical perspective. It\u2019s nothing more than a [conceptual] model that can in fact be replicated in other regions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The

Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span>The Lindolpho ready for installation of the propeller shaft and rudder (Vanzolini in canoe)Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres Collection<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1970, the year his study of Anolis<\/em> came out, Vanzolini acknowledged that it takes more than the biologist\u2019s point of view to understand the distribution of animal populations in Brazil\u2019s forests. \u201cI\u2019ve been studying the evolutionary patterns of South American lizards for 20 years. Although I had already refined the theory in 1951, my research always proceeded very slowly because there was paleoclimatic information missing, until I was able to rely on the outstanding geographical assistance of Aziz N. Ab\u2019Saber, some six or seven years ago. After this new data was obtained, the research started flowing and I\u2019ve attained rewarding results,\u201d he wrote in a funding application submitted to FAPESP in 1970. \u201cI feel I am ready to take on research of a broader scope, that is, an overall study of the speciation patterns of South American lizards on the whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

Applications and limitations<\/strong>
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t deny that the refuge model, as he preferred to call it, applies to part of our fauna,\u201d says zoologist Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues, professor at USP. Today, brejos de altitude \u2013 Caatinga moist forest enclaves found on hilltops surrounded by open fields, especially in the Northeast \u2013 are \u201cthe most consistent evidence of refugia,\u201d he says. These brejos de altitude are still areas of climate stability, which favors the diversification of species. \u201cEach brejo has a unique set of fauna, but being a brejo is not enough to make it a refuge.\u201d In 1980, on the only expedition that Rodrigues and Vanzolini took together, the former, then a doctoral candidate, and the latter, his advisor, went to northern Bahia to gather specimens in the municipality of Caatinga do Moura, which Vanzolini believed to have been a refuge. \u201cIt was only 10 years after this trip,\u201d says Rodrigues, \u201cthat I realized that the area of climate stability was really in the highlands near the Diamantina Plateau.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Vanzolini

MZ-USP COLLECTION<\/span><\/a> Vanzolini with classmates and professors at Harvard in 1951MZ-USP COLLECTION<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Vanzolini liked to travel but he hardly ever engaged in field collection, arguing that he wasn\u2019t any good at it. But in his own way, he was always adding precious material to the museum\u2019s collections. Whenever he went somewhere, he would spread the word that he had a bag full of coins with him and was interested in buying animals. \u201cAmong the 400 lizards of the genus Tropidurus<\/em> that he bought from a bunch of kids in Cocorob\u00f3, Bahia, I found six specimens of a new species,\u201d says Rodrigues.<\/p>\n

From 1967 to the mid-1980s, through the Ongoing Expedition to the Amazon Region, Vanzolini and other researchers from Brazil and abroad visited unexplored areas along the region\u2019s main rivers, sailing in two boats, which were the first to be funded by FAPESP: the 11.5-meter-long Lindolpho R. Guimar\u00e3es and the 18-meter-long Garbe. In April of that same year, Paraguass\u00fa \u00c9leres, a naval construction researcher, completed a report on the building of these two boats. He had designed them and oversaw their construction at Oriximin\u00e1, Par\u00e1 (1965), along with Paulo Vanzolini (the rare photographs of the boats shown in this article are from his collection; the full text of \u00c9leres\u2019 report<\/a> and the travel diary of Vanzolini and other zoologists who visited the Amazon Region<\/a> are available on the magazine\u2019s site, in Portuguese<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The concept of a refuge does not always apply. In a study published in March 2013, Tiago Porto and Luis Rocha, of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and Ana Carnaval, of New York University, determined that the distribution of the populations of 14 species of different animal groups \u2013 spiders, harvestmen, scorpions, amphibians, birds, lizards, and mammals \u2013 does not coincide with the refuge areas as previously identified. Moreover, in the past 20 years, genetic and molecular analyses have indicated that most animal species likely formed about 11 million years ago rather than during the geological period known as the Quaternary, which was only one million years ago, as Haffer, Vanzolini, and scientists from other continents had suggested. \u201cThere is indeed evidence that forests shrank during the Quaternary but this was essentially a time of species extinction, because it was relatively short,\u201d observes Zaher. \u201cThe evolutionary processes that led to the formation of most species are much older.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor do the latest approaches account for everything. Geographical obstacles like rivers can favor the isolation and differentiation of species of mammals, birds, and insects, but sometimes they are irrelevant. In short, as stated by researchers from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and the Botanical Institute of S\u00e3o Paulo in an article released in March 2013, South America\u2019s biological diversity reflects a complex space that is the result of climatic, geological, and biological influences, for which there is as yet no single explanation.<\/p>\n

Read the article The freedom of the bohemian<\/em><\/a> about Paulo Vanzolini\u2019s musical work.<\/p>\n

Scientific articles<\/strong>
\nVANZOLINI, P.E. Paleoclimas e especia\u00e7\u00e3o em animais da Am\u00e9rica do Sul tropical<\/a>. Estudos avan\u00e7ados<\/strong>. v. 6, no. 15, pp. 41-65, 1992.
\nPORTO, T.J. et al<\/em>. Evaluating forest refugial models using species distribution models, model filling and inclusion: a case study with 14 Brazilian species<\/a>. Diversity and Distributions<\/strong>. v. 19, pp. 330-40, 2013.
\nTURCHETTO-ZOLET, A.C. et al.<\/em> Phylogeographical patterns shed light on evolutionary process in South America<\/a>. Molecular Ecology<\/strong>. v. 22, pp. 1,193-213, 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evolutionary outlook set Vanzolini\u2019s scientific work apart","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[159],"tags":[206,209,231,241],"coauthors":[5968],"class_list":["post-124811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-biodiversity","tag-biology","tag-evolution","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124811"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=124811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}