Feature

An Oceanic Library

In a hundred thousand jars repose the creatures of the deep making up our national marine invertebrate colletion.

Dennis Gordon

Millions of examples of New Zealand marine life can be found on-shore in a series of cabinets that form a national treasure and an internationally recognised scientific resource.

New Zealand's marine ecology is extensive and, in many cases, unique. This may be related to the long geological history of the region, the variable seafloor relief, and the fact that New Zealand lies at the perimeter of the global marine-biodiversity hotspot -- the Philippine/Indonesian/New Guinean region, which "spills over" into northeastern Australia and the New Caledonian area.

The world's largest ecological collection of New Zealand marine invertebrates is housed at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute (NZOI) at Greta Point, Wellington. When NZOI began, knowledge of New Zealand's marine life at shelf and slope depths was minimal. Following the recommendation of the New Zealand Oceanographic Committee, and building on the tradition of earlier expeditions, NZOI biologists were encouraged to explore the organisms found resting on the shelf sediments beneath New Zealand waters.

The aim was to characterise this benthic (sea-floor) diversity and the distribution of faunal communities. The preliminary benthic surveys of the 1950s were followed by an intensive reconnaissance survey in 1961 and 1962, systematically sampling the continental shelf around New Zealand. With some variation in sampling methods, the programme of deliberate sampling of the shelf and deeper areas was more or less completed by the early 1980s. Collecting continues, though now largely opportunistically in the course of other work.

The biology collection now comprises over 100,000 jars and several million specimens from over 8,000 sea-floor and mid-water locations. The majority come from within the New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone, but there are a significant number of samples from Norfolk and Macquarie Islands, Tasman seamounts, Antarctica and many Pacific Islands. The density of sampling, along with ancillary information in the form of charts of seafloor relief, sediments, bottom temperatures, and water-column nutrients and productivity, have seen the collection garner international praise.

Taxonomic Monographs

How is the collection used? The major goal has been to document New Zealand's marine biodiversity for as many end users as possible. Two particular objectives were partly achieved during the 1950s and 60s. One was to identify as many species as possible in the growing collection, and the second was to gauge how these species make up the faunal communities of which they are a part.

By 1969, some 80 papers and 25 oceanographic memoirs had been produced, recording numerous species new to science and new distributions. In 1969, Don McKnight published a significant paper describing the major seafloor communities identifiable from the reconnaissance and other surveys, while more detailed recent work has refined our knowledge of the structure of benthic communities off the South Island's West Coast. There is much scope for further clarification of the distribution and structure of benthic communities, however, and the NZOI collection is the major resource in New Zealand for determining this information.

Taxonomic work continues and, to date, over 320 publications have been produced based on the collection, including numerous large monographs of faunal groups. One might think that, with this publication record, a majority of the collection must have been studied or that the larger part of the New Zealand marine fauna has been documented and described. For a number of faunal groups, however, this is not the case, and even for those groups of larger or common organisms (such as marine worms, hydroids, brittlestars, shrimps and other crustaceans), the taxonomic descriptions and distributional records are scattered through the scientific literature.

A major goal of collection use, then, is to continue to monograph as many faunal groups as possible in the Memoirs of the NZ Oceanographic Institute. These monographs combine all published records of a group, as well as those resulting from studying the NZOI and other collections, in one publication. Those published to date form a series which is highly regarded by New Zealand and overseas biologists, but not all users are specialists -- people involved with conservation, environmental inventory, resource management, and popularising New Zealand's natural history all appreciate the Memoirs.

Borrowing Overseas Experts

Unfortunately, in New Zealand as in other parts of the world, there is a shortage of taxonomic expertise. Therefore, an important part of the current Marine Taxonomy Programme is to encourage experts from overseas to study different faunal groups. The approach used is to write and explain the history and goals of the NZOI collection and its comprehensiveness and invite them to study their specialist group. A sample memoir is included, along with computer plots of all seafloor stations deeper than 30 metres and of the distribution of their group in the New Zealand region. If the specialist is interested in undertaking the task, selected charts and a printout of station data are supplied and specimens despatched to the person, who may also come to NZOI for a period of time. This overall approach has proven to work very well.

As a consequence of the reputation of the NZOI collection and increased efforts to promote its use, 61 overseas and 15 New Zealand (non-NIWA) specialists are studying specimens from it at present, with 10 working towards large monographs. The latter may take 2-5 years to complete a faunal group and draft a manuscript.

Completion by 2010

Sending material abroad and encouraging overseas specialists to work at NZOI saves or gains money for New Zealand, and the resulting memoirs remain definitive identification manuals for years or decades. The longer-term goal of the Marine Taxonomy Programme (contingent upon stable funding) is to monograph all macrofaunal groups by 2010. This would be a major achievement for New Zealand. A further goal is to use the memoir series as a vehicle for publishing taxonomic monographs on various groups of algae.

Some years ago, all collection and station data were entered into a computer database. Now, as specimens are identified and memoirs and other papers published, the taxonomic and distributional data are automatically added to the database. Specific programmes permit the plotting of species distributions at any range of depths or co-ordinates. Now that NZOI has Geographic Information Service capability, it is possible to match or overlay the cumulative data on species distributions with data on seafloor relief, sediments etc. Because we can plot the distribution of any or all taxonomic groups, we can use GIS to generate maps of biodiversity density in order to identify biodiversity hotspots around New Zealand.

Being mindful of the increasing loss of systematic expertise in New Zealand, with few new recruits, the continued building up of NZOI's reference collection of identified species for use by non-specialists (in conjunction with the memoirs) is an important goal. In this regard, one benefit in having visiting specialists on the premises is that they immediately generate identified specimens for the reference collection and give a seminar or workshop on taxonomic methodology for their faunal group.

In accord with overseas trends, one goal is to translate the taxonomic data obtained from the monographic studies into a form that permits taxonomic identification using a computer. This would involve translation, during or after preparation of hard copy, text and illustrations (including half-tone and colour) to CD-ROM. This would contribute directly to the World Biodiversity Database being compiled by the Expert-Centre for Taxonomic Identifications (ETI), a non-profit organisation associated with the University of Amsterdam, that would be of benefit to New Zealand users. Indeed, the capture of taxonomic information electronically must be seen as inevitable if New Zealand's high biodiversity -- not to mention the world's -- is to be fully understood and practically appreciated.

Listing Life-forms
Everywhere

Relevant to the goals of NIWA's Marine Taxonomy Programme is the most ambitious taxonomic undertaking ever -- Systematics Agenda 2000. Launched in the US in February, SA 2000 aims to inventory all living species on Earth, from microbes to vertebrates, but that is not all. The goals of the programme are summarised in three mission statements:

• to discover, describe, and inventory global species diversity
• to analyse and synthesise the information derived from this global discovery effort into a predictive classification system that reflects the history of life
• To organise the information derived from this global program in an efficient retrievable form that best meets the needs of science and society.

The first goal is potentially achievable in 25 years, but there would need to be immediate and substantial increases in the numbers of practising taxonomists worldwide and in funding. This is not likely but, as Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the world's foremost champion of biodiversity studies, pointed out as early as 1985 when he suggested the idea, this project matches the scope and grandeur of the human genome project and a manned expedition to Mars but is far cheaper and more practical.

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity was a landmark event of global significance. As one of the original signatories to this convention, New Zealand has subsequently ratified its commitment to it. Among other things, the Articles of the Convention require that the contracting parties shall "identify components of biodiversity", "establish and maintain programmes for scientific and technical education in measures for the identification, conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and its components" and "promote and encourage research which contributes to the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity".

Thanks to the far-sighted efforts of the 1950s and especially the 1960s and beyond, New Zealand has, at NZOI, a marine-faunal collection of outstanding resource value and national and international significance. NZOI's productive history of taxonomic research, exemplified particularly in the prestigious Memoir series of faunal monographs, anticipated by several decades current national needs in terms of the Biodiversity Convention. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research is the inheritor of the collection and the associated research effort.

Dennis Gordon is the coordinator of NZOI's marine taxonomy programme.

Dennis Gordon is the coordinator of NZOI's marine taxonomy programme.