PSW 2494 Diving Deep into Biodiversity | Richard Pyle

Lecture Starts at 15:48
www.pswscience.org
PSW #2494
April 19, 2024
Diving Deep into Biodiversity: Leveraging the Latest Technology to Explore Deep Coral Reefs
Richard Pyle
Director of Natural Sciences and Senior Curator of Ichthyology at Bernice P. Bishop Museum
Global Biodiversity is the most valuable resource on Earth. It provides the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, likely contains cures to many human diseases, and it holds keys to solving important challenges that humanity will have to overcome to survive.
Biodiversity is the great library of life on Earth, accumulated and evolved over billions of years. It is vast and still largely beyond human knowledge. Indeed, even now we are like kindergartners peering through the aisles of a great Universal Library, hardly aware even of the enormity of the information around us, and largely oblivious to its value. Indeed, after more than 250 years of scientific effort, humanity has managed to identify less than 10-20% of earth’s biodiversity. The remaining 80-90% (undiscovered species) remain entirely unknown to us. And very little is known about even those that have been named and catalogued.
Coral Reefs are often described as the “rainforests of the sea,” harboring an incredible array of diverse organisms. Although SCUBA has allowed researchers to explore coral-reef habitat down to about 50 meters (150 feet) or so for decades, coral-reef ecosystems extend down to about 200 meters (660 feet) and more. For over 50 years, our team of researchers at Bishop Museum in Honolulu has pioneered the use of new technologies to explore coral reefs. These efforts included the use of early SCUBA and underwater photography in the mid-20th century, followed by the revolutionary application of mixed-gas diving and close-circuit rebreathers for coral-reef exploration starting in the 1980s (and continuing today), the use of advanced robots for deep sea exploration and the use of advanced DNA sequencing techniques to understand the geneology, evolutionary relationships and molecular makeup of creatures in these complex coral ecosystems. Now, Bishop Museum is about to launch the Center for the Exploration of Coral Reef Ecosystems (EXCORE), which aims to leverage decades of pioneering scientific exploration and discovery to fundamentally transform how coral-reef habitats and their inhabitants are documented and to glean a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of coral reefs.
This lecture will discuss the technologies we have developed for studying coral ecosystems at depths of several hundred meters, what we have learned about these richly complex ecosystems, and how we can ensure that they are not driven to extinction.
Richard L. Pyle is the Director of Natural Sciences and Senior Curator of Ichthyology at Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. He is also a Commissioner and Counselor for the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and he conceived, developed and maintains ZooBank (zoobank.org; the official online register for scientific publications and names under the ICZN) and other biodiversity data systems.
His primary research interest is to explore and document Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (coral-reef habitat at depths of 30-200 meters, also known as the coral-reef ‘Twilight Zone.’ He has led and supported over 80 research expeditions around the tropical Indo-Pacific, with particular emphasis on the discovery of new species of fishes and other organisms, and on documenting patterns of biogeography and depth distributions. Richard’s other focus is the development of computer database systems, primarily to manage systematic and biogeographic information. He is an active participant in international groups that develop standards for biodiversity information management and exchange.
Richard has published over 220 scientific, technical and popular articles and chapters on ichthyology, diving technology, and biodiversity data; given over 270 public presentations (including two TED talks); posted dozens of blogs (including one of the first-ever real-time scientific expedition blogs in 1997, and several others published by the New York Times). He has been featured in over 50 film projects (IMAX, National Geographic, BBC, Discovery Channel, and others); been profiled in over 50 published articles (including a cover-feature of Science); received dozens of awards (including a Genius Award and Best and Brightest award from Esquire Magazine, and the prestigious “NOGI” award for science from the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences); and he has served in dozens of roles for organizations focused on research, exploration, technology and international data standards.
He earned a BS and PhD in Zoology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.