SUBJECT: Some answers
AUTHOR: Ferdinando Boero
DATE: 15th April 2003

Here are my answers to the questions posed by Tasso:

i. What is the value of change of Marine Biodiversity? What is the meaning of value? Is it the gain that we can get from it? or the loss? There can be valuable changes (i.e. positive) and not so valuable
changes (i.e. negative). A non valuable change was the decline of Tapes decussatus (so that we Italians had no longer the opportunity to have spaghetti con le vongole). A valuable change was the introduction of Tapes philippinarum (spaghetti con le vongole again!). If we look at things in this way, if a change is in our favour then it is good, if it is not, then it is bad. Maybe the Eastern mediterranean was poorer than the western mediterranean because its conditions are different and, since the species that enter the Med have to arrive from Gibraltar, they had to pass an ecological filter that prevented tropical species to arrive at East, where the potential conditions were good for them. The opening of the Suez canal maybe let in species that were preadapted to those conditions, filling an ecological vacuum and forming what Por called the Lessepsian province. In this case the inflow of species was positive, and an ecological semi-vacuum started to be filled, increasing diversity and also economic yields.

ii. what can we do to know the presently unknown?
This is a tricky question. Biodiversity is defined as a three level phenomenon. The easiest thing to do is to identify community types, and related habitats, and map them. In the Mediterranean, Peres and Picard gave a good example of how this can be done for the benthos. Dealing with plankton and nekton is a little bit more difficult. RAC-SPA provided a list of habitat types. We do not have the mapping of these habitats. It has been argued that focusing on species is a sterile enterprise, since we do not know most species, whereas, if we protect the diversity of habitats we protect also the diversity of species. I agree with the operational view. But I do not agree that knowing species is not so important. I think that we have also to know all species, we have to answer Bob May's basic question: How many species are there on Earth?

Astrophysicists claim that it is important to count the stars, and they obtain outrageous amounts of money to do so. If somebody asks them what is the use of all this, they say that this is a rude question, posed by insensitive people who deny the value of our sake for knowledge. It is our human nature that pushes us to investigate. OK, there are much more reasons to explore biodiversity at a species level than to count stars. Let's stop questioning the value of our work. The third level is that of genetics. This is to be developed too, to answer specific questions, like the viability of populations or the provenance of aliens.

iii. What are the consequences and costs of not knowing?
This is like asking what the consequence of ignorance are. Not knowing is simply ignorance. How can we say if we do not know? We have many examples of apparently "useless" species that all of a sudden become important. Sometimes we are asked: where do they come from? were they always here in small numbers, so that we did not realise their presence? Most of the time we do not know. I received money to study the outbreaks of Pelagia noctiluca in the Eighties. But when Pelagia disappeared again, the money disappeared.

We study things when they happen, and we usually start to study them when the conditions that determined them do not occur anymore. So we cannot explain. What is the cost of not being able to explain? The cost is that management is based on ignorance. I must go back to chaos, and to the butterfly effect. One thing is that the beating of the wings of a butterfly at Bombay can cause a thunderstorm at New York, but another meaning of this metaphor is the shape of a model. You can have a graphic model with a recurrent path, going in an elliptic way. The pattern goes on over and over again then, all of a sudden, it changes and goes into another path, with another ellyptic pattern, connected to the previous one by a single point. The two ellypses look like the wings of a butterfly. We focus on regularities, but the important thing is that point in which the system changed shape. That might be the ballast waters containing the inocule of Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea. Or the opening of the Suez canal. So, my answer to the cost of not knowing is that we cannot afford ignorance, both as a managerial issue and as a cultural issue. Not knowing is against human nature, our mission is to fight ignorance. Of course identifying priorities.

But as long as our governments give money to search for extraterrestrial life, then I dare say that biodiversity research, at all levels, has a greater priority than that.

A contribution by:

Ferdinando Boero
Via Prov. Le Lecce-Monteroni
73100 Lecce
Italy