Cameroonian forest shrew

Transcription

Okay, get one- you- get right on the side, there you go. Ready? - Yup. Got it? - Yup. So, this is what, uh, Kris Helgen from the Smithsonian was doing. Kris is a, um, he's a mammologist from the Smithsonian Museum? Correct. - Okay. So he's, uh, he's head of mammals at Smithsonian, he is, uh, somebody who has been to museums all over the world, and, um, goes through the drawers, looks at the specimens, and this is exactly what happened here. He came into the carnivore collection and he wanted to review the whole olingo group. An olingo is a member of the raccoon family. So what he was expecting, when he was looking at the olingos, was skins that were relatively dark and the hair was relatively short. And he pulled out this drawer and saw something that he knew was different because it wasn't like the olingos he was expecting to see. The red color and the very long- Feel how f- furry that is. How fluffy that is. It's so soft! It's SO soft! This was the first step, this was what Kris saw first and he then decided to go to other museums to see if he could find other specimens that would help support his hypothesis and he was able to assemble a list of specimens and get measurements and examine these specimens in these different museums. He was sure he had a new species but then he teamed up with other mammologists to go to the areas where these things were collected. To see if they were still there. And-- the first night. he went into the forest and - Really? and they saw one. Really? And where are they from? They- So, they're from montane areas in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia. But within the new species he, uh, Kris and, and his co-authors recognized three subspecies. That is three different components within this new group that are distinct from one another. So not only did he just find an entirely new species he discovered that this new species also contained, like, three-- So there-- there's-- Three disc-- discrete forms within that that can be differentiated based on morphological characters. So often I get the question "Well, if you have one squirrel," "if you have a dozen squirrels, why do you keep collecting squirrels?" "Why do you keep collecting raccoons?" People say: "Well, you just need one or two." No, because you need to figure out - are the males different than the females? Are the young different than the old? Are the 1902 different from the 2013? And... - Yeah. And it's only with series, large series like this, that you can tease apart, uh, if he, if he just, if we only had this red, this one specimen here, we didn't have these others, and Kris opened up the drawer and he saw this, he would be intrigued but it's not nearly as compelling as when he sees a series of these skins, all looking the same and he compares it there. He says: "This is very definitely, a distinct form from this." Because before you can start making broad determinations about something, you have to have an appropriate sample size. Exactly. - That's just the nature of trying to do any kind of statistical work. And, and my, the, the analogy I always use is if, um, if you go to Times Square and you watch the ball drop on New Years, and you look around you, you're gonna see hundreds of thousands of people and not one will look like you. If, uh, if a man from Mars comes down to the Earth and says "I'm gonna describe the human species," and he lands in Korea, he's going to get a very different picture than if he landed in Sweden. Or if he landed in Cameroon. So that same diversity that we see in our own species needs to be kept in mind when you're thinking about how do we how do we document the diversity within any other species. Squirrel, olingo... Bear. Whatever. And that's what these collections are, why these collections are so vital. I think a lot of people are really surprised when they hear that a new species is discovered but it has been in these museum drawers for as much as 100 years. People think we go out to - Yeah. unexplored areas and bring back something new, which we do. But, uh, many, many times the new species is, has been here all the time. And this is why these collections are so important and why there are untold stories in each of these cases. So did he look at just morphology? Did he determine that the, these are new species just because some were a little more red and had smaller ears? Or was there- I'm assuming there's genetic analysis involved. - There is. The, the first, the first step was- The first step literally was pulling a drawer out and going: "Woah." "That's not at all what I expected." But then, uh, was able to team up with people, uh, to work on the, uh, molecular aspects of it. So this paper describes not only the morphology but also how these are different from a DNA perspective, uh, the different types of habitats they live in, uh, and it's, it's, it's pretty beefy publication, but, - Yeah. but sums up, uh, a lot of the natural history information about the new species and about olingos in general. And this is really exciting because when was the last time a new species of carnivore was described? From the Americas, 35 years ago. Roughly. - Thirt- Really? It's been 35 years. Actually, yeah. And, in fact, ironically enough, that species of carnivore, that was named in 1978, was a weasel from the Field Museum collections and it was named by a Field Museum biologist. So the moral of this story is that I need to spend more time going through the drawers around here.