Science Show

Over 1,500 flowering plants in Western Australia are undescribed, with 870 of these occurring in the south-western Australian biodiversity hotspot. State-wide, 298 new plants were named in 2007, making it the second most productive year in Western Australian taxonomic history. Of these, at least 130 are from the south-western Australian biodiversity hotspot. Ninety-five new botanical names were published in a special edition of the Western Australian Herbarium's journal Nuytsia, which provides descriptions and names to species vulnerable to mining or of conservation concern.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Robyn Williams:The biological hotspot in Western Australia has given botanists large amounts of work to do. And much was achieves in 2007. New species, new classifications, the whole state is a treasure trove. Ryonen Butcher is a research scientist at the WA Herbarium. And as we're talking about the naming of species, where did her name come from?

Ryonen Butcher: I'm named after a 13th century Zen Buddhist nun that was a story my parents read when my mother was pregnant. It means 'to realise clearly'.

Robyn Williams: And what language is it from?

Ryonen Butcher: It would be a Japanese name but it's very uncommon. I think it's a religious name, it's not a name in common use.

Robyn Williams: I thought it might have been Welsh.

Ryonen Butcher: No. If you Google 'Ryonen' there's about six of us that are not in the story and I think we're all approximately the same age and we're scattered around the world and we all had hippy parents.

Robyn Williams: The naming of persons and the naming of plants and the naming of creatures is highly significant. Why was 2007 a bumper year in WA?

Ryonen Butcher: Two large monographs were released, they're the results of a revision of the genus Jacksonia which is the pea flower genus and also of the eremophilias which are called the poverty bushes or emu bushes that are Australia-wide. Two large books came out and then there was a special edition of the WA Herbarium's journal of systematic botany which is called Nuytsia, and 95 new names were actually published in that.

Robyn Williams: Why the glut?

Ryonen Butcher: It's very difficult to do a full taxonomic revision of a group when you can spend months and months looking at plant specimens and not actually get any other work done, and then with the Nuytsia special edition we were actually charged with describing the number of new species that had been collected from the Banded Ironstone Ranges and the Ravensthorpe Range and Bandalup Hill because they have got potentially impacted upon by mining activities at the moment in Western Australia, and also to describe a sort of backlog of conservation listed taxa.

Robyn Williams: So to be clear, this is not simply a naming of plants where you're catching up with what's in the drawers, you've actually found new species?

Ryonen Butcher: In the case of the Banded Ironstone Range surveys, the Department of Environment and Conservation and various other environmental groups have long recognised that these are quite unique systems. Western Australia is characterised by being hugely flat, so when you look at the landscape, when you get a small rise or a hill, especially one as ancient as a Banded Ironstone Range, there are lots of species that are endemic to those or occur on a series of hills but don't occur anywhere else.

So there were a number of surveys by the government, by environmental groups, and also by consultants working for the mining industry because you have to do flora surveys in order to get an approval to proceed with the mine. And they picked up a whole heap of stuff that was new to science. So a lot of this research was actually involved in describing those new collections that had come in.

Robyn Williams: How many actually came from what's called a hotspot? We did a series of programs on The Science Show, Lynne Malcolm produced them with the BBC, and we featured Western Australia in the south, and it was quite amazing to see the biodiversity in one small patch of area.

Ryonen Butcher: The Banded Ironstone Ranges that we actually looked at for the special edition and the Ravensthorpe Range, which is the south coast near Ravensthorpe, the Banded Ironstone Ranges occur in a district called the Yilgarn, so it's on that hugely stable ancient Yilgarn block. There's about 8,000 species in the south Western Australian botanical province global biodiversity hotspot, and of those about 1,570 are undescribed formally. So we know that they are probably new species. Some of them are in the process of being written up at the moment, but a lot of them still need taxonomic investigation.

Of those 1,570, 872 of them are in the south Western Australian floristic region, and of those 322 have conservation listing. So we've got various processes, massive land clearing, salinity are problems, expansion of the population, all kinds of clearing goes on, and moving into areas perhaps where people shouldn't be clearing a lot of bush and building houses. There's just a lot of work to be done, but a lot of it takes a lot of time, so it's very difficult to get the research together and the impetus behind it.

Robyn Williams: Western Australia is the world's quarry and getting bigger all the time. How much is that impacting on what you've described?

Ryonen Butcher: I think because the mining company has a lot of consultants who go out and collect in new areas and because those areas haven't been explored before because they're very, very remote the chances of them actually picking up something new to science is very, very high. This is a double edged sword. We have the information then that there are new taxa out there, and then it slows down, of course, the mining process. So the mining companies are actually directly funding a lot of taxonomic research in Western Australia at the moment in order to get names described so that they can actually get their consultants to recognise them in the field so they know distributions and various things so they can clear land. So it gets a bit tricky.

Robyn Williams: So would you say that taxonomy is still important these days? Because if you think back to the heyday in the 19th century, all those gentlefolk in Victorian times, and then the 20th century with all the modern techniques. You hit the 21st century and is taxonomy still as important now as it was then?

Ryonen Butcher: Oh yes. Last year was a bumer year of describing plants in Western Australia; there were 298 new taxa, so species, subspecies and varieties described from Western Australia. The last time there was a number like that was when Robert Brown wrote his Prodromus of New Holland in 1810, and he described close to 500 new Western Australian species but that's because he was one of the first gentleman scientists. He was sailing with Flinders. He collected all of this material and saw it fresh for the first time.

The fact that in 2007 we can still be describing massive numbers of species...we use a lot of the same methods that were used by Robert Brown and people laugh at us, but we still have to provide part of our short description in Latin. Botanical names are based on Latin and Greek words, so there's an element of classical science involved. When I sit in front of a microscope with a dried plant specimen and I look down at the label and find that it was collected in 1895, it still looks exactly the same as a collection that somebody made last year.

So the information is still there, it's got lovely old scripts and hands and you can trace bits of history of some of the early explorers of WA who had little pockets that they collected from some of the ladies who perhaps their work wasn't recognised scientifically and they were relegated to botanical artists and naturalists, and they actually made some incredibly important collections from south Western Australia.

So we're just looking at things very, very closely, which is what you did 250 years ago. Our techniques are pretty much the same as Linnaeus but now we actually have additional tools that we can use, so DNA sequence analysis for looking at evolutionary relationships between things, population genetics work that allows us to make decisions about which populations might be of higher conservation value than others in order to maintain genetic diversity within species.

So we really sit between the two; we've got this old detective story approach where you can actually track and name back through the literature and get out your Latin dictionary and work out what somebody was saying in 1795, find that one character that doesn't match the specimen that you're looking at now, so you think, hmm, bingo, maybe this is something new. And so you can pull out a new species per day almost. It's one of the few sciences where you can leave the house in the morning and say 'another day, another discovery', which I don't think many people can do in the sciences. You can find a new species every day before morning tea if you put your head down, which is remarkable.

Robyn Williams: Wonderfully exciting.

Ryonen Butcher: At the Western Australian Herbarium there's over 680,000 herbarium specimens, and some of the new species we describe are because they've been delivered to us fresh and we go, whoa, I've never seen that before, or because we're out in the field and we'll stop for lunch and you'll go, hmm, that's a bit odd, or it's actually been sitting in the herbarium for the last 45, 100-and-something years amongst our collections but because there are so few taxonomists and so little time and it takes a long time to work your way through all of the specimens collected within a genus and to sort them, you pull numerous species out.

So there's almost a rule that if the genus was last dealt with by George Bentham who was an English botanist who wrote the Flora Australiensis series, if he was the last person to do a taxonomic revision of that genus you can almost double the number of species if you revise it now. So it's just all sort of sitting here.

Robyn Williams: Do you know, once in Oxford...you mentioned 17-something, I saw a plant collected in Australia in 1699 by Dampier, the desert pea, amongst I think it was 27 of the specimens brought back, despite I think the fact that his boat sank. Do you know of the collection of Dampier?

Ryonen Butcher: Yes.

Robyn Williams: It's amazing looking at that stuff thinking, oh gosh, it is still looking like a recognisable, clear and reasonably...can't say healthy but intact plant, despite the fact that it's all those years old.

Ryonen Butcher: Some of the collections of course are in much better condition than others. Many a species that hasn't been seen for a while is represented by a stick and a couple of leaves taped to a browning herbarium sheet. But it's amazing how much information you can still get off these small fragments that were collected.

Robyn Williams: Is that the same 'Brown' as in Banksia brownii?

Ryonen Butcher: Yes, it is.

Robyn Williams: Ryonen Butcher from the Western Australian Herbarium. More from her next week on why that work matters so much.

Guests

Ryonen Butcher
Research Scientist WA Herbarium Perth Western Australia
http://www.dec.wa.gov.au/science-and-research/wa-herbarium/index.html

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

David Fisher

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