Teaching zoology in the age of machines

Abstract

Zoology is disappearing from university curricula in first-world countries (whatever this means). New generations of biologists are illiterate in biodiversity, due to a mismatch between their initial expectations and what is proposed to them as “modern biology”. Almost invariably, young specimens of our species are attracted by living beings, especially animals. This tendency is reinforced by a myriad of TV programs about nature. Biology is synonymous with natural history, implying the exploration of secluded places, while looking for still unknown creatures. This is what pushed me towards biology; I made my thesis in a tuna trap, with a crew of rough fishermen, then spent long periods in places ranging from Papua New Guinea to California, and found many previously unknown species (and genera, and families), diving in shark-infested waters, exploring marine caves and following the seasons of the sea along vertical rocky cliffs from the surface to 30 m depth. Now, regular biology students spend their lives in the laboratory and see the world through the graphs of sophisticated machines. If they encounter animals, they do not know what they are by just looking at them, and the only chance they have to give them a name is to grind them, extract some sequences and match them with online databases. E. coli and C. elegans are more or less the same thing, together with Arabidopsis and D. melanogaster, a distant relative of the zebrafish! In some Italian universities, however, zoology is still taught, even if the hours dedicated to it are decreasing year after year. Francesca Strano, one of our students at the University of Salento, made her master thesis on a new species of pterobranch that we found some time ago in a marine cave. I had never seen a pterobranch before, and that was the first time a member of this class had been found in Italian waters, the second finding in the Mediterranean Sea. Francesca followed the life cycle of this beast, and studied the architecture of its nervous system, but the most important result was that she had stumbled into a species unknown to science, right in our backyard! Valerio Micaroni works at his master thesis in our new marine laboratory, the Mare Outpost at Tricase Porto. I gave him a very difficult task: produce an all-species inventory of the local fauna. He is in the water every day, and brings stuff to the lab, where he tries to give names to specimens, and to elucidate their life cycles, just as Francesca did with her pterobranch. Not easy at all, since most of the knowledge is frozen in outdated monographs, and knowledgeable living beings are rapidly disappearing. Francesca and Valerio are having great fun and spend all their time in studying their beasts; there is nothing else they want to do. The fishermen and the children of the village admire their passion and help them in their studies. The ocean literacy of the people of Tricase Porto is increasing and they come to the Outpost with their observations, asking questions. Culture evolved from our ability to observe animals, as witnessed by cave paintings, and we have an instinctive curiosity towards them. The education system is trying hard to eradicate this tendency from us, and the result is the lack of respect for nature that characterizes our relationship with the rest of the world. Zoology is the primeval form of culture, it’s the root of our history, and we are severing it from the rest of our cultural heritage. Francesca and Valerio are like Adam and Eve, in the forgotten Eden that we have in front of us (in which animals are still unnamed) but that we cannot see anymore. No wonder that children are their best assistants, as they are still uncorrupted by an education system that implacably separates our species from the rest of Nature, as if we could survive without her. If zoology is expelled from the capacity building system, as it is, and nobody teaches how to give names to animals anymore, we will rapidly lose our sense of responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain us. The modern trends in biology are leading to Italian Journal of Zoology, 2016, 283–284 Vol. 83, No. 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11250003.2016.1223610