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The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Here at the Academy The African ConnectionWhen entomologist Edward Ross first went to Africa in 1957, he forged new territory for the Academy and for systematics research. With modest support from a private benefactor and the National Geographic Society, Ross finagled free tickets for himself, his assistants, and his customized truck on a freighter to Liberia. When they landed at Matadi on the Congo River, they revved up the GMC, which served as their home and mobile research station for the next 327 days and 33,000 miles, and began their drive across the continent and then south to Cape Town. Ross was primarily there to study Embiidina, a small order of insects whose "Garden of Eden is in Africa," he says. But he brought home about a million insect specimens of all kinds, 16-mm footage later used by National Geographic and Time-Life films, and thousands of photographs. Five more African expeditions bring Ross’s total time in the field there to about five years. "Because of the political and cultural degeneration of much of Africa," Ross says, his efforts there are "never to be equaled." Though Ross has been an Emeritus Curator since 1980, he continues his travel and research. Ross was the first of many Academy scientists to work in Africa. Robert C. Drewes, Curator and Chairman of the Academy’s Department of Herpetology, traces his own interest in Africa to his great uncle, Norman Livermore, who was both Academy President and Chairman of the Board in the 1920s. Livermore was a passionate explorer. He walked from Nairobi into N’gorongoro Crater in Tanzania and then on to Tabora “shooting stuff all along the way,” says Drewes. Now 57 years old, Drewes remembers toddling, awestruck, through Livermore’s study and deciding he would one day go to Africa. In 1969, he made good on that childhood resolution. Only he didn’t bring home elephant tusks and rhino heads like his great uncle had. He was there to study the evolutionary relationships, natural history, and biogeography of African amphibians. He is also interested in the comparative physiology of arid-adapted frogs and he has become one of the world’s authorities on the creatures. Drewes has been back 26 times since then and is planning another trip for later this year. Anyone who knows him knows that frogs are his passion, but asked if he had to choose between amphibians or Africa, he doesn’t hesitate long: “If I couldn’t study African amphibians, I’d study African something else.” “Africa might as well have been another planet for all the science we knew about it in the 1930s,” Drewes says. Today, though the megafauna has been well documented (as has the tragedy of its precipitous decline), the lower-order animals still remain remarkably unknown. Other Academy scientists are also working to fill in the knowledge gaps about Africa’s biota. Charles Griswold, an Associate Curator in the Academy’s Department of Entomology, has been studying African spiders since 1983, when he first went to South Africa to chair the Natal Museum’s Department of Arachnology. Griswold, who has described 100 new species of spiders from Africa, has received National Science Foundation funding to track the spiders of Africa’s mountain forests. “These mountains are like islands,” says Griswold. “They harbor plants and animals very different from those that flourish in the hot surrounding lowlands.” By combining and analyzing his data from Africa’s forest “islands,” Griswold has concluded that they and their arachnid occupants are older and more resilient than previously thought, many dating all the way back to the Age of Dinosaurs. Wojciech Pulawski, Curator in the Department of Entomology, first went to Egypt as a graduate student in 1957. He is an authority on the solitary wasp family Sphecidae. He published a worldwide revision of the wasp genus Gastrosericus (Latin for “silky belly”), and 40 of the 61 known species of the genus are found in African deserts. About half of the species described in his 1995 book The Wasp Genus Gastrosericus Spinola had been previously undescribed. Pulawski now travels to Africa at least once a year to study the taxonomy and behavior of the little-known genus Tachysphex. Terrence Gosliner, Senior Curator and Director of Research, specializes in opisthobranch mollusks and has been on numerous research expeditions to Africa chronicling the southern African nudibranch fauna, in an effort to determine which species are unique to the area and which were derived from more distant waters. Gosliner was also a curator at the South African Museum in Cape Town from 1979 to 1982. Gary Williams, an Associate Curator in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town. He specializes in the systematics and biogeography of octocorals (soft corals, sea fans, and sea pens) in Namibia, South Africa, and the Indo-Pacific. Williams expresses an ambivalence voiced in one way or another by all of the Academy scientists who work on the continent: “It is hard to view southern Africa as a paradise, with the political and social turmoil that has embroiled it for so long,” says Williams. “But if the human factor were somehow separated out, what would be left could only be described as a naturalist’s paradise,” he says. “The region’s flora and fauna are certainly among the most diverse and interesting in the world. Approximately two-thirds of the plants and animals living there are found nowhere else in the world.” Despite the fundamental science the Academy continues to do in Africa, in the public mind the Academy personality most associated with the continent was not a scientist at all. Leslie Simson was a mining engineer who grew up in Oakland and spent many years overseeing operations in South Africa in the 1920s. He was a passionate hunter and philanthropist who provided both the funds for the Academy’s Simson Hall and the fauna to fill it. Simson African Hall, with its 24 habitat groups, opened to the public in 1934. The dioramas in the exhibit were constructed and painted by Frank Tose who, as the Director of Exhibitions, had accompanied Simson on the collecting safari. The dioramas include carefully researched, detailed representations of the actual places where the animals were found; they were the state-of-the-art exhibits of their day. At 65 years old, African Hall has seen many trends in exhibitry come and go, but it remains a favorite of many Academy guests, drawing its strength directly from the remarkable places it represents. Gordy Slack is an Associate Editor of California Wild and is the Editor of this web site. |
Fall 1999
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