Joan Ball & Peter Oboyski

Spectrum

Joan Ball is a UC Berkeley Grad student in the College of Natural Resouces. Peter Oboyski is Collections Manager & Sr. Museum Scientist at the UC Berkeley Essig Museum of Entomology. www.notesfromnature.org

Transcript

Speaker 1: Spectrum's next

Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible].

Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we get to hear about an exciting citizen science project from Joanie Ball and Peter Oh Boyski. [00:01:00] Joni is a UC Berkeley graduate student in the College of natural resources where she focuses her research on dragonflies. Peter is a collections manager and senior museum scientist at the UC Berkeley Asig Museum of entomology. They spoke to Brad Swift about the new cal project. The ASIG is collaborating with Zooniverse to run the cal bog website, which allows anyone with an internet connection to help digitize the vast collection of bugs specimens in nine California natural history museums [00:01:30] just over 3000 citizens, scientists have joined the project today. We'll learn more about cal vogue and bugs in general in today's interview,

Speaker 4: Joanie Ball and Peter O. Boyski, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you. Let's talk about the cal bug project that you're both part of and how did that get started? What was the genesis of the project?

Speaker 1: So Quebec started in 2010 as a collaboration of the major entomology collections in California. And [00:02:00] as a group, the collections were awarded an NSF grant to database their entymology collections through this program called advancing digitization of biological collections. And the goal is to digitize over 1 million specimens. The purpose is to capture the collection information from the labels, like the species name, when the specimen was collected, who collected it and when it was collected.

Speaker 4: So the ECIG museum is an insect collection at UC Berkeley and our collections go back about a hundred years. [00:02:30] And these represents the research of our faculty and students over that period of time. And it's a representation of what's lived in California all this time. So each one of those specimens in the museum is a data point. It tells you what lived where at what time. And so the problem is it's all locked up in these specimens. It's on these tiny little labels sitting in a museum somewhere. And nobody has access to this information. So the point of this project is to make that data available to, to the research community, into the public cause this all [00:03:00] goes online free to everybody to look at. So that's the big point of this is to make this a hundred years of of data available to people, researchers and to do this, you know, is it's a pretty overwhelming task.

Speaker 4: Now, other museums have done this before with their vertebrate collections. For instance, the Museum of vertebrate zoology here on campus, they've already database their entire collection and they're able to do wonderful things with it. They're looking at distributions of different species and what time of year they occur. But entomology museums have lagged behind just [00:03:30] because of the sheer volume of specimens that we have. We have orders of magnitude more specimens than some of these other museums and we just thought that was too big of a job and nobody wanted to tackle that job. But now with this funding from the National Science Foundation, we feel like, okay, we can take a shot at this now let's take a stab at it. How big is the collection? Well, we don't actually know, but uh, when you multiply how many specimens per drawer and all the jurors that we have that comes out somewhere around five to 6 million specimens that we have in our collection, and that's [00:04:00] just a USAC, that's just the ecig museum and then combine that with the eight other institutions that we're working with. We're talking tens of millions of specimens among all of us. So to do the 1 million is just a, you know, the tip of the iceberg, but it's a place to start.

Speaker 1: In the beginning of the project, we were hiring students to enter the data manually directly from the specimens themselves, but we found that that was taking a really long time. So we started taking photographs of the specimens, which is [00:04:30] beneficial in that we then have a record of both the specimen itself and the labels so we can go back and check specimens later. People can also enter this data from the images from wherever they are online. That's how we've started this notes from nature project where we have an interactive database now for people to enter. The specimen data online. As of this morning we had to over 2,790 people entering data. We're approaching 170,000 [00:05:00] total transcription people entering data online through this project, which started just a few weeks ago.

Speaker 4: Wow, that's impressive. It is. Have you tried to calculate how many people you think need to volunteer to help? So when we initially started this project, and we are even in the planning stages, we thought, well how long would it take us to actually database? Just our collection alone. You look at the amount of staff that we have in the budget that we [00:05:30] have, and we figured at least a century to do this in house. So we hired some students to help us out, take some of these images, and they started doing the database for us, but we realized, okay, that cut it down to maybe half a century. It's still, that was going to be too long. We needed more help in having these images that you can be sitting online anywhere in the world and jump online and help us transcribe these images. So that was a huge step forward. It's incredibly simple step to take, but it was a very important one. And how did that idea bubble up? Well, we heard about

Speaker 1: Zooniverse, which does a citizen [00:06:00] science organization that creates these web interfaces. In particular, we saw this project called old weather. What this project did was enter weather records from ship logs from World War One. The purpose is to improve climate models for the oceans in that time period. So we knew we wanted to do something similar with with our images. I submitted an application to them. What won them over I think was the actual photos of our specimens with the [00:06:30] pen sticking through them. They're really impressed with that and that's also something that the citizen scientists really like as well. They really enjoy seeing the actual pictures of the insects.

Speaker 5: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum. I'm KLX Berkeley, I guess today are Joanie Ball and Peter Boise from the Calvin project. In the next segment they discuss how they choose which specimens to begin at.

Speaker 6: [00:07:00] Talk a little bit about the people at the ECIG that keep it all going.

Speaker 4: Yeah, we do have a pretty limited staff in the museum, but I have to say the real work gets done by the undergraduates. These are either volunteers or work study students and they put in endless hours and they're the ones who are taking these images that were putting up online without them work just doesn't get done on campus. They really are the, the workforce of this campus.

Speaker 6: Going back to the involvement of the citizen scientists, the transcription [00:07:30] work that they do, how would you characterize who's good at it? What sort of person would enjoy this? Do you have a sense of who that is or do you think people should just try it and see?

Speaker 1: Does anyone who's curious and has little time to help out? But it tends to be people who are really enjoy contributing to something.

Speaker 4: Yeah, it is an opportunity to be part of a larger community. People enjoy that and I think some people are surprised when they, they like it. So some people just log on, Eh, it's okay. [00:08:00] And some people, it just doesn't do it for them. But they took a look and now they know. But other people, they kind of surprise themselves like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. And in a way you're following an expedition. You can see where these things are coming from, what year they were collected. We had some really funny comments about one of our professors who is still actively collecting. Somebody suggested perhaps he's a vampire because he's been collecting for 50 years and the specimens are still coming in. So a little observations like that and people just, they become part of our community without even knowing it.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and some people [00:08:30] who never really had an interest in insects before find themselves now more interested in what's around them. One woman mentioned that as she was driving and insect splattered on her car and she was trying to identify it or you know, suddenly she had this new appreciation for insects, which was pretty neat.

Speaker 6: How are you choosing the million specimens start?

Speaker 1: Uh, well actually one of the groups that we've decided to focus on [00:09:00] start with are the dragon flies. The reason for that is that we have good collections for them over the hundred years where we have our collections. They've been well collected over time. They're pretty charismatic group. They're also used as biological indicators for stream ecosystem health. So that's one of the groups that we're focusing on. We're also focusing on certain insects that are used in applied research like pollinators or biological control agents. What are the, some of the other groups,

Speaker 4: the approach we use to slicking [00:09:30] the groups where groups that we have well-represented in the museum, groups that have some significance regarding global change, whether it be land use change that be climate change, changing the way water is distributed. So which groups are more sensitive to that. That might give us some indication of of what's happened in the past. The other criteria and we use was places where we have longterm collections because museums have some biases in them and we have [00:10:00] to recognize that when we do this kind of research people when to a particular place at a particular time because there's something interesting there for them. So some places we have fewer collections over the years, other places we have nice longterm data sets. So we also focused on locations where we knew we had nice longterm data. That makes sense. Yeah, so collecting is ongoing.

Speaker 4: It is consumer. We continually collect the museum specimens. The insect collection comes from a number of sources. The most common [00:10:30] is research that's done right here on campus. Professors, students who are doing research projects, they deposit what we refer to as voucher specimens in the museum. So you write a publication that says you found this species at this place. Somebody else reads it and says, well that sounds odd. I don't think that thing occurs there. Well, you have to be able to go back to that specimen and look at it. Oh yeah, sure enough, there it is. I wouldn't believe that. So we have to voucher these specimens in a museum. So that's a large part of where our collection comes from. In 1939 professor ESIG, [00:11:00] the namesake of our museum, had this idea to start the California insect survey. UC Berkeley is a land grant school, which means we owe a certain responsibility back to the community, to agriculture, to forestry, to the urban ecosystem.

Speaker 4: And we need to be able to answer questions. But if we don't have representatives of the insects that are out there, then it's much harder to answer the sort of questions. So that was his logic in launching the California Insec survey, sending professors and students all over the state. And that was in 1939 [00:11:30] so our collections go back earlier than that, but that's where the real boost began in our collections. So from that point on, we've had regular collecting trips. People in the museum, professors, other folks will go out and collect all over the state and then deposit their material. Another source of our specimens, our donations, there's a lot of hobbyists, enthusiasts that aren't necessarily professional entomologists, but they enjoy butterflies or beetles or whatever group. At some point when have their family and their kids and they've got these big boxes taken [00:12:00] up a lot of space in their house. They said, well, Geez, you know, I really like having these here, but yeah, maybe I should give them to a museum somewhere. So I get a lot of that kind of stuff as well. Just in the past couple of years we've had, I don't know about 10,000 donated specimens, which has been really nice. We don't do much in the way of trading there. There are museums out there that'll buy and sell specimens, but because the main interest of our museum is answering questions about California, we can go out and get most of that stuff ourselves.

Speaker 5: [00:12:30] Our guest today on spectrum are Joanie, Baal [inaudible]. In the next segment they talk about how cal bug is already affecting research. This is k LX Berkeley.

Speaker 4: So how is the end product affecting research do you think from pre digitization and now post digitization? [00:13:00] How are people able to leverage what they have in a database now that they couldn't do previously?

Speaker 1: I am doing research using the Jag and fly collections from a few different angles. One of my projects is to resurvey sites that were originally sampled in 1914 for Jag and flies. So this collector clearance, Hamilton Kennedy went around California and Nevada collecting dragonflies that in 1914 and create a list of species [00:13:30] for all of the sites that he visited, which turns out to be around 40 sites throughout the region. The problem was he didn't include the dates that he visited these sites. That information is on his specimen. So I use the collection to reconstruct the dates that he went to these specific sites. And then I revisited those sites on the same day. And now what I'm doing is I'm comparing my surveys to the original surveys that were done in 1914 to see how things like species richness and that proportion of habitat [00:14:00] generalist versus specialist and some other community metrics have changed over that time period.

Speaker 1: Another project that I'm working on will be using all of the museums specimens for dragon flies and I'll be comparing communities for different counties for the different time periods throughout that hundred years that we have collections. So I'm looking to see which time periods have enough specimens for a comparison. For example, there was a lot of collecting activity in the 70s there's a lot of current [00:14:30] collecting activity through another group, actually dragon fly enthusiast group who report their sightings, so I'm using their sightings for current species distribution throughout California. One of the last projects that I'm working on is creating species distribution models, which is something that a lot of ecologists are doing right now with historical data. The museum collections are points for that. You can create a latitude and longitude for where you find individual specimens throughout time. I'm using these to [00:15:00] look at changes in species distribution over recent decades in relation to factors like climate and land use. So I started analyzing some of the changes in the dragon fly communities based on the resurvey and some of the things that I'm finding so far is are that communities are becoming more similar throughout this survey. Previously you might find much more different species of at different sites, whereas now you're finding a lot of the same things over and over again. So we're seeing kind of a homogenization [00:15:30] of Jag and fly communities.

Speaker 4: A lot of researchers have come to the museum to do similar sorts of studies to Joanie's where they're looking at one species. It's distribution over time. And that meant coming into our museum, looking at our specimens, typing that up, they would bring that home and put that into their database, write up a report on that. But that didn't always end up back in our database. And there's only one species at a time. So the advantage to what we're doing now is we can look at whole communities at a time Joanie's case, the whole dragon [00:16:00] fly dams will fly community rather than looking at one species at a time. So you couldn't do that before without one of these larger databases. We keep thinking in terms of the research, which is one of the main reasons why we're doing this, but there's a lot of practical outcomes for the general public as well.

Speaker 4: For instance, maybe you're a fly fisherman and you're going up to this particular drainage basin or this river and you want to know what, what's flying up there? I want to know what kind of flies I should be tying. So at some point in the future you'll be able to pull up in our database and see, well what's flying at that time of year in that area? Or you find a spider in your [00:16:30] house and you want to know what kinds of spiders are found in my area, you should be able to go to our database and find that. Or yeah, you're a farmer and you're thinking about rotating to some new crop that you haven't planted before and you want to know what kind of pests should I be worried about? What things feed on this plant in this area? So those are the kinds of questions that other folks outside of the museum community should be able to use. And like I say, this is all freely available online once it's all been database. So this is, you know, it's not just for us, it's for everybody.

Speaker 4: What ends up [00:17:00] being the most diverse species of insects. If you were mentioning dragonflies aren't really all that diverse. Beatles. There's a famous geneticists Haldane. When asked, what has he learned in his studies about the creator? Said the creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles. Certainly beetles are the most species rich out there, and within the Beatles, the weevils, a lot of these are very hosts specialized, and so for every species of plant out there, you may have several species of weevil that specialize on them. So [00:17:30] it said that if you were to take one of every species, take a black tail deer, a blue whale, a sequoia tree, every species of insects out there and lined them all up, four out of 10 would be a beetle. So 40% of the diversity of the macro diversity. Now, when I say this to people who study bacteria and viruses, they say, ah, yeah, well, I see. Okay, you right, you're right. There are, there's a lot out there with that, but of multicellular animals and plants, the insects, certainly out number, most other things.

Speaker 3: [00:18:00] I'm Renee Rao and you're listening to spectrum. Today's guest are Jody ball and Peter Boyce. In the next segment, they discuss the importance of entomology. This is Kayla Berkeley.

Speaker 4: What is the most studied insect? The more charismatic things, as you might guess, get a lot more attention. Butterflies get a lot of attention there. Show either out during the day, they're conspicuous, they don't hide [00:18:30] themselves. It makes them easy to study and for hobbyists to notice them. The more obscure things, the tiny, the brown, the cryptic things that are much more diverse but are much harder to study and there's far fewer people that actually study them. It's just human nature. Yeah. We were attracted to some things that we find aesthetically pleasing and other things that we don't. It takes a special kind of person to look at them. We call them entomologists.

Speaker 4: Within the current environment. Are [00:19:00] Insects ascending or is, are they struggling or is it case by case? Very much case by case and again, the more charismatic things we know a lot more about, I know of about 20 species that are listed as endangered in California. 14 of those are butterflies. Then there is a large [inaudible] three pretty charismatic beetles, lion of grasshopper, so these are all pretty conspicuous sort of things. A lot of them are endangered because of habitat loss. They specialize in a particular plant that only occurs in a particular habitat and especially meadows. [00:19:30] So many meadows had been turned into grazed plots or housing developments or golf courses. There's been all kinds of lawsuits around what to do with this meadow and that sort of thing, but there's probably a lot more out there that have become very rare that we just don't know about it because nobody has looked at them in any great depth.

Speaker 4: That said, some of the things we do also promote some insects. Certainly our agriculture is this great field of food for not just us, but for insects as well, so some pest species where we consider them past, you know, they're just trying to live, they flourished. There's other things [00:20:00] prescribed burning where you open up a habitat and let the new vegetation grow back in. There are some insects that specialize on that. Unfortunately, the things that specialize in more stable habitat, say old growth forest, they're having less of a good time about it because those habitats, once you disturb them, it takes a long time for them to get back into balance. So yeah, it's a case by case basis. Somethings are doing well, others are not.

Speaker 1: The other thing that we're seeing is like in many other groups, habitat generalists are really expanding because they can [00:20:30] live in a variety of different environments and they're more tolerant to changes in the habitat so they can even live in urban areas. So a lot of the habitat generalists are really expanding while the habitat specialists are more likely to be declining.

Speaker 4: So I think to some extent we've talked about it, but is there anything specific about the importance of studying insects that you want to mention? Well, we like to think that humans rule the world and [00:21:00] uh, but you know, if our species was to disappear tomorrow, the world would probably go on. Okay. Maybe even better. But if insects were to disappear tomorrow, most ecosystems would collapse pretty quickly. And so I think that's a pretty compelling reason right there to look at them. The act as pollinators, they're recycling nutrients, they're keeping plants and checks are the plants don't over run the world. They're keeping other insects and checks so they don't overrun the world. It kind of keeps things in balance. The act as food for a lot of other organisms. So they're, they're, uh, one of [00:21:30] the most important components of the ecosystem. And to me that's enough reason to study them.

Speaker 4: But beyond that, their biology, their behavior sometimes just fascinating to just sit by a pond and watch a dragon fly. It's, it's just amazing to see how they move and how they can move. I mean, they've inspired so many things. I think the, uh, the helicopter was inspired by dragonflies. It's the same kind of design, you know, beyond that, their physiology, there's just so many things about them that are fascinating. And that's where I came from in all of this as an undergraduate, I was an electrical [00:22:00] engineering major for three years and finally realized that biology was really my passion. By coincidence. My first entomology professor got his phd here at Berkeley in entomology and this is at the University of Connecticut. He's the one who got me excited about it. For me, every day of that classroom was just fascinating. Everything I learned was telling me about this world that has been all around me my whole life, but I've never noticed it.

Speaker 4: And then all of a sudden somebody opened my eyes [00:22:30] and I just started noticing more and more and it just fascinates me. I mean it's, it's 20 something years later. I still am just as fascinated today as I was before. But I think some of the more obvious things are things like pollination. Our crops depend on having pollinators in with colony collapse disorder going on with the honey bees. What does that mean? So there's a lot of very compelling reasons too, is to study insects. But I think for most of us it's because we love it. They're just fascinating. Great. Joanie ball and Peter o Boyski. Thanks [00:23:00] very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. Thank you. If you think you might want to get involved with cal bag. Here's Peter with some more information about how to do that. There's a number of websites where you can find information about us. The ECIG museum. If you go to our website, ecig.berkeley.edu I'm the collections manager, Peter Boyski and you can contact me directly. Gordon Deshita is one of the coordinators of our project. He's on that website as well. There is a cal bug website, get's cal bug.berkeley.edu [00:23:30] and that also has information about the project. Okay.

Speaker 2: [inaudible]

Speaker 5: the science and technology events happening globally over the next two weeks. Brad switch will join me in presenting the calendar

Speaker 3: next Monday. The California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture [00:24:00] by Dr. Anthony [inaudible] Guerra and associate professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Guerra will speak about the evolution of models that scientists use to understand and study the universe. For over two decades, scientists have been refining the standard model they currently use with new data. In light of this, the concept of inflation has been revised in many cases, inflation completely upends. Our picture of the large scale structure of the universe and suggests that the universe may not actually have a beginning. [00:24:30] An object of such enormous size and complexity can only be described as a multi-verse. Dr. Guerra will walk through the development of these ideas and describe other aspects of the multi-verse that scientists wish to test. The lecture will be held on Monday, August 5th at 7:30 PM in the California Academy of Sciences. Planetarium tickets will be available [e-mail]

Speaker 6: the August East Bay Science Cafe Presents Huta Greys Hammer Phd, [00:25:00] a science officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state stem cell agency that manages bond funds dedicated to support basic translational and clinical stem cell and regenerative medicine research in California. Her research background is in the study of embryonic development, elucidating how the cells of mouse and chick embryos assemble into functional organs. Udo will explore the power of the promise and the problems [00:25:30] of stem cells. That's Wednesday night, August 7th, 2013 in the Cafe Valparaiso, 41 30 Solano Avenue in Berkeley from seven to 9:00 PM

Speaker 5: on spectrum. We also like to cover science stories, so we found particularly interesting. Brad swift flew join me in presenting papers.

Speaker 6: A multidisciplinary team at the University of Texas Southwest Medical [00:26:00] Center has found that measuring the oxygenation of tumors can be a valuable tool in guiding radiation therapy, opening the door for personalized therapies that keep tumors in check with oxygen enhancement in research, examining tissue oxygenation levels and predicting radiation response. University of Texas southwest scientists led by Dr. Ralph Mason reported in the June 27th online issue of magnetic resonance in medicine [00:26:30] that countering hypoxic and aggressive tumors with an oxygen challenge, which amounts to inhaling oxygen while monitoring tumor response coincides with a greater delay in tumor growth in irradiated animal model. The next step is clinical trials to assess tumor response to radiation therapy says Dr. Mason. If the results are confirmed in humans, the implication for personalized therapies for cancers could mean fewer radiation treatments [00:27:00] or perhaps one single high dose treatment. In some cases, the simple addition of oxygen to stereotactic body radiation greatly improves response. The key is to identify those patients who will benefit

Speaker 3: an android app released Monday. Allow smart phone owners to donate their phones, computing power to scientific research around the world. The app was developed by the Berkeley Open infrastructure for network computing or Boy Inc a project [00:27:30] that is best known for developing similar software for personal computers. The app install software that allows the charging phone's processing power to be used to analyze data or run simulations that would normally require expensive supercomputers. The app supports a variety of projects ranging from a program that searches radio telescope data for spinning stars called pulse eyes to one that searches for a more effective aids treatment through a community grid points creator. David Anderson [00:28:00] noted that the computing power of the nearly 1 billion android devices currently being used around the globe exceeds that of the world's largest conventional super computer. The app is currently available at the android app store, but I found you should keep an eye out as Anderson's next project maybe to design a version compatible with apple systems.

Speaker 2: Okay. [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] music in the show is written produced by Alex Simon, edited by Renee Brown.

Speaker 5: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum, Doug K l [e-mail] join us in two weeks at this same time.

Speaker 2: [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

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