Gonzalo Giribet, the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, talks about the museum’s many collections, including a considerable quantity from Latin America. He also discusses his fieldwork and how Harvard undergraduates in his class will have the opportunity to explore biodiversity in Bocas del Toro, Panama, for the first time since the pandemic.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Welcome to Faculty Voices. Our guest today is Gonzalo Giribet. Gonzalo Giribet is the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Zoology at Harvard University. Welcome to Faculty Voices, Gonzalo.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
June Carolyn Erlick:
First, the museum. I have walked past the museum on my way to work so many times, and I've always thought it's one of those rare Harvard museums I never managed to get to. So until I started researching for this podcast, I didn't realize it's not a museum in the traditional sense, but it's a private research center focused on comparative relationships in the animal life. I was also startled to find in that rather small building, it holds 21 million animal specimens. Can you tell us a bit more about this fascinating museum?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Yes, I can. First of all, I'm very proud to be the director. I've been director for about a year now. And as you said, it's a bit confusing because most people know the public galleries of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and that's only some of our specimens are displayed there for the public. But really the Museum of Comparatives Zoology is the institution that it's not open to the public where we have the research and the specimens from our collections that have been in the MCZ for over 150 years.
Gonzalo Giribet:
So this is mostly a research institution if you want. And then we use the public galleries of the HMNH and the Harvard Museum of Science and Culture to showcase some of our important specimens of the research that people do in the MCZ. But really the MCZ is just behind the scenes.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Many of the collections, at least some of the collections in the museum are from South America and the Caribbean. I was reading about some relatively new additions like 110 rodents and bats from Nicaragua, and 105 bats comprising 18 species from Costa Rica. What other interesting things do you have from Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Yeah, we have a lot of specimens from all over Latin America. From some of the earliest expeditions of the MCZ, the famous Fair Expedition that has for example, the first fishes that were ever described from the Amazon in Brazil, they're in the MCZ, for example. So traditionally, a lot of our curators through the history of the MCZ, have focused on many places of the Caribbean, including Cuba. Cuba had a big research station from Harvard. It was a botanic garden, but there was a lot of zoology that was there as well. In the Dominican Republic, in Puerto Rico. But basically, we have specimens from every country in Latin America.
Gonzalo Giribet:
These are specimens that were collected for scientific purposes, specimens that are available for the entire scientific community to study today, and that we're very proud to have here, although we recognize that the practices have changed in how people now acquire specimens in other countries. So one of the things that we're trying to do in the MCZ is to make these specimens available to everyone, especially to the scientists from the countries of origin of these specimens.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Can you talk a little more about how practices have changed?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Yeah. There is a lot of discussion about colonialism in science. When people from the US, from the UK, they will go anywhere in the world and sometimes without permission, they will take the specimens and bring them to their museums. That was a common practice a long time ago. For a long time, we've always collected with permits. When we go to a country, now you need to have the permits to collect the specimens that you want, the permits to export.
Gonzalo Giribet:
But even so, practices have changed. A hundred years ago, you could go to Brazil and collect whatever you wanted. Today you have to have a very specific permit for a very specific research project to collect those specimens. And many of those specimens may need to go back to their country of origin. That was not the practice before. And this is why a lot of important collections from many countries in Latin America are in some of the Northern Hemisphere countries.
Gonzalo Giribet:
In some sense, those specimens have been preserved for a long time. On the other hand, those practices have hindered research in some of the countries of origin because they don't have access to some of that material. We're trying to find a balance now between preserving those things in perpetuity, but also making them available for the broader scientific community to study.
June Carolyn Erlick:
When you say making them available, is there digitalization that's going on?
Gonzalo Giribet:
That is one of the big ways to do that. Other ways is we send specimens along to researchers that require it. Another way that we're trying to do it is by having internal fellowships that we pay for the researchers to come here and study. For them that might be actually more productive, because then they can compare that material to a lot of all the material that we have in the MCZ. We offer them the resources for digitizing, imaging, studying the specimens.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Researchers really like that. We get a lot of visitors every year from all over Latin America who come here for a week, or two weeks, or a month, to work in our collections. And one of the things that we have done in the past is fund a lot of these trips. I hope that in the future we can even fund more of these trips so the researchers can come here, study their specimens from their countries of origin, extract all the information that they want, and if we can afford it, we'll pay for that.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Are you still able to work with Cuba?
Gonzalo Giribet:
We have relationships with Cuba scientifically. I have for example, a researcher from Cuba who's going to come to my lab later this year for six months. There are scientific exchanges with Cuba. We're able to get some specimens for research, but obviously it's not as we would like to have. It will be much more relationship with Cuba if we had a better way to move freely between the two countries.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You've been talking about the resources of the specimens, and I was reading about the Ernst Mayr Library and the fact that you have this huge their collection from the first trip of the Agassiz to Cuba. Are there any other really interesting Latin American collections in the library?
Gonzalo Giribet:
There are many. There were many expeditions that were organized, large expeditions from the MCZ that were organized to different countries in Latin America. A very famous one was, I believe it's the Challenger, but that was one of the big steamers that was commissioned, I think for the Navy. It was built in Boston and it had to be delivered in the West Coast. So the whole trip of the ship was traveling. At the time there was no Panama Canal so they had to go all over the Americas. That was actually also another of the big expeditions of the MCZ.
Gonzalo Giribet:
So basically the steamer departing from Boston until arriving I believe to San Francisco, it was a scientific expedition. It was collecting specimens all over Latin America until returning to America and the other coast. And like that, there have been a lot of other expeditions, larger, smaller, big parties, smaller parties to different places of Latin America.
June Carolyn Erlick:
As director of the museum, what plans do you have for change, for expansion? What's your vision for the museum?
Gonzalo Giribet:
One of the initiatives that I started recently, traditionally, zoology museums had collections of specimens that are often on shelves, dry bones or specimens in spirits, especially ethanol. But now we are in, at the time of our genetic revolution where we started collecting freshest specimens for DNA to do genomics and things like that. With the new techniques for sequencing, we could get complete genomes from all their specimens with degraded DNA. But one of the things that we're trying to do is stop that DNA degradation by preserving a little bit of each one of the most important specimens in the MCZ, which are the type specimens, the specimens that were used to describe species.
Gonzalo Giribet:
We're sampling those types and preserving part of those specimens in the cryogenic collection in vapor liquid nitrogen to stop DNA degradation. So what we're trying to do there is to have a snip of the DNA from those specimens preserve in perpetuity, or at least for much longer term by avoiding degradation. And we're investing much more nowadays in the genetic resources of the specimens in the MCZ. Everything we collect new, we try to have samples that are cryopreserved, and that will ensure us to have the genetic information of those organisms available for future studies.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Do you have any plans specifically to do with Latin America or with the Caribbean?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I do a lot of work in Latin America and the Caribbean and a lot of people in the MCZ do, but that hasn't been a unique focus of the MCZ. We have curators who work in the Dominican Republic. I take my students to Panama every year until the pandemic. And I've done work in many countries in Latin America, in Chile, Brazil, in Argentina, in Colombia, and then all over Central America. So we do have constantly, trips and work in the Caribbean. I currently have a grant to study a radiation of Vedda worms in the Caribbean region. It's not my only research focus, but I do a lot of research in the Caribbean, and the MCZ does in general. A lot of people in the MCZ work in the Caribbean.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So where do you go to study these worms?
Gonzalo Giribet:
These ones I get to study them in most islands in the lesser and greater Antilles, and then in the mainland all over Latin America. But we need to collect them in obscure places like St. Vincent, Granada. We've already collected in places like Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic. We have now permits submitted to go to Jamaica also to collect some of these animals. So they're in many of the islands in Antilles.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You're a specialist in invertebrates. The museum has nine divisions, most of which have spines. Has this been a big learning curve for you?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Well, I'm a zoologist. I know my fair share about vertebrates. We do have invertebrate zoology which is a large collection, entomology which is the largest collection, malacology which is mollusks, and invertebrate paleontology. So from those nine collections, four are invertebrates, and those have most of the specimens in the MCZ. The reality is that I am the first invertebrate zoologist director of the MCZ in more than a hundred years. Everyone else has been working on vertebrates, for example. Yeah, it's a bit more difficult for an invertebrate zoologist to be director of such an institution because normally vertebrate people tend to attract more attention, but that's what it is now.
June Carolyn Erlick:
You mentioned when you were talking about mollusks, and your interest in mollusks seems to have started at a very young age. Could you tell us about that?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Yeah, that was my passion since I was a kid. Could be four, five years old. I was already out there collecting snails and going to beachcombing. I had my own shell collection, probably started at six or seven years old, and it's a collection that I continued building until a few years ago that I donated it to the MCZ. Once you become a professional and a curator in a museum, I don't think we should have private collections. Because if I'm in an expedition and I find something really rare, does it go for the Gonzalo Giribet collection or for the museum's collection? So to avoid those conflicts, normally professional curators don't have private collections anymore. So I donated mine to Harvard when I got tenure and I've continued doing a lot of collecting. All those specimens go to the MCZ. It's much nicer because their database, they're available for all the people to see. I can access them whenever I want sealed, so that makes more sense.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Great. Moving away from the museum now, what can you tell us about your lab?
Gonzalo Giribet:
My lab does all sorts of things related to invertebrate biodiversity. From going out there and finding and describing new species, to studying the genomes of those organisms back in the lab. We use all this information whether it's describing new biodiversity or whether it's sequencing genomes, to understand evolution of invertebrate animals, to understand their biogeography, which is how to explain how animals are distributed today. So we use all these tools, especially a lot of genetic tools to understand these questions related to evolution and biogeography.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So it's sort of constructing a history on the basis of genomes?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Exactly. We build these family trees of the animals by doing it with genomic data. We can also date a lot of the splits in these family trees and we can see when things diverge back in time, and then explain that for example, these two groups diverge at the time when the Atlantic Ocean was opening and South America separated from Africa. So these are the types of questions that we focus on. We work a lot on Gondwana, the breakup of Gondwana, the giant continent that gave origin to South America, Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, and Antarctica.
Gonzalo Giribet:
We focus a lot on this fauna that today lives in all these continental land masses. Not so much in Antarctica because it's frozen, but these are groups of animals that once had these Antarctic distribution. And as the continents started breaking apart, they left traces of the history of the evolution of these groups. Some of them remain in some of the continents, some of them disappear from other ones. These are the sorts of things that we're trying to study by comparing the genomes or the genes of these organisms that live in all these land masses. And this is why I go a lot to South America to compare some of these animals with the things that we collect in Africa, and in Australia, and New Zealand, et cetera.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Are you finding in this process anything about extinction? About what causes animals to go extinct?
Gonzalo Giribet:
Not so much because I don't study the fossil record that much. I've studied some fossils. I've described some fossil species. But when you look at the genomes, you have a better idea of what survived and what went extinct. You can infer some level of extinction. You can look at how the evolution of this group has gone, and there're some measures that you can look at the typical diversity of speciation, and then suddenly maybe there's a drop in the speciation. You can infer that maybe there was some extinction there. And obviously, there will be groups that you are expecting for some places and they're not there. You cannot find them there. That might indicate something about something that might have happened, but it's difficult to pinpoint what is the cause of extension in those groups when we're looking at these very long timeframes of sometimes hundreds of millions of years.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Most of our listeners including me are not scientists, so what does this Tree of Life concept actually help us understand?
Gonzalo Giribet:
This Tree of Life is a unifying principle of biology. If we want to understand how things have been distributed in the planet, why we find certain animals in one place and not another one, we do that by comparing the relationships of the organisms, comparing the places where they lived. We can then say, for example, there's no penguins in Greenland. Why aren't there penguins in Greenland? The climate is perfect for penguins, right? So why is that the case? Well, the case is not an ecological reason. The case is an evolutionary reason. Penguins evolve in the Southern Hemisphere, they evolve around Antarctica, diversifying that part of the world, but they couldn't cross the equator and through warmer seas until they could make it again to a colder climate in the north. So by understanding the relationships of these organisms, we understand why some of them live in some places.
Gonzalo Giribet:
And then another thing that you can use them for is also to predict properties that might be sometimes interesting to humans. Distribution of trades in nature is not random. You don't have a very venomous snake that is closer related to one that is non-venomous at all. Normally a lot of these venoms became very, very potent in specific plates. So like that, many medicinal traits might have evolved in an organism. If you want to find similar medicine, similar drugs, you are better off looking at closely related organisms to the one where you discovered that something very distantly related. So evolution is not random. The traits are conserved. They might accentuate in some lineages, and this is why understanding the relationships of organisms can be very informative in many situations.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So how do you manage to be director of museum, do field work, run a lab, go windsurfing, take photography? How do you do it all?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I think that all of these things are part of my passion. I think you can take on a lot of responsibilities when you really like what you're doing. We don't like a hundred percent of the things that we do in our jobs, but most of it I love. I love all my research. I love my passions of photography, nature, windsurfing. These are things that I've always done. Being director is a great responsibility, but I also see it as a great honor for my scientific career.
Gonzalo Giribet:
I've always been very invested in the MCZ in our institution. I've worked here now for almost 23 years and being asked to direct an institution that you love, it's a great responsibility but it's a great honor. So I do it very happily and try to do as best as I can. Do I have as much time as I did before perhaps to do all my research? Maybe not. But today I had a pretty empty day in terms of meetings, so I was able to finish a manuscript that I wanted to finish this summer. So I'm just trying to do things whenever I can, obviously, but still I love all these things.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's a manuscript for a forthcoming book?
Gonzalo Giribet:
No, that's a manuscript for a scientific paper that we're going to submit. I finished a book a few months ago, a textbook on invertebrates, the second textbook on invertebrates that I've done. That should come out next month or so. It's out actually now in one of these online formats that the actual physical book, and we're expecting copies at the end of July or beginning of August or something.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Congratulations.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Thank you.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Now that Covid is hopefully abating, what plans do you have for travel?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I just did my first field trip post-Covid last week. I came back from the Pyrenees in Spain. The next field trip I have planned is for September. I'm going with one of the postdocs in my lab. We're going to Guam for two weeks. We're going diving, collecting a lot of marine creatures, mostly crabs. That's my next field trip.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Any field trips to Latin America coming up?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I'm beginning to plan my field trip with the undergrads to Panama for the next spring break. This is a field trip that I've been doing for almost 15 years for my invertebrate zoology class, and that will happen in the spring, during the spring break. I'm also beginning to plan a couple of trips to perhaps Colombia and Brazil for next summer. I have a Congress in Colombia and we're trying to get permits to collect in Colombia. Then I'm going to Brazil to teach short course, and the idea is to do some field work there. And we have permits submitted for Jamaica and St. Vincent waiting to be approved. As soon as we have those permits approved, we'll go there also.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Well, backtracking to your undergraduate course, where in Panama? What are you looking for? And what is it like to work with undergraduates collecting stuff?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I've been teaching a class for the college in vertebrate zoology. It's a pretty intense class. We meet about three hours a week for lectures, another three hours for a weekly lab, and then we go to Panama for a week during spring break. In that week, what we do is put a lot of things into practice. In lectures, we see how animals work or how do they look like, in the lab, we might have some preserved specimens or even some live ones. But you look at a couple of animals of every different group and try to understand the anatomy. But what I want is the students to see them in nature because they don't have that concept. Once you're under water, suddenly you see, oh, in the sponge class we saw a few sponges. In the mollusks class, we saw a few mollusks. In the echinoderm class we saw a few echinoderms.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Now I see this is all sponges and corals and a few echinoderms here. And the mollusk which is the most diverse animal group in the ocean is hiding everywhere. They're really hard to find. And some of the other groups, you never see. You need to use these special techniques to find the worms or find these other small things that live in the sediment. For the first time, they're realizing of the interactions of those organisms. How you have these filter feeders always living on top of the sponges because the sponges are creating the current that brings food to the animals, for example. And they collect their first animals and we bring them into the lab, and we observe them or we dissect them. But it is the first time they do that outside of a classroom, really. I've taken some students who've never been in the ocean before and that's a real experience for them.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Every year I get letters after this class finishes, how this has been the most mind-opening class they've taken at Harvard, for example. Because we take them out of their comfort zone, they have to observe things in nature, do things in a very different way. A lot of our biology students, they've been taught a lot of things that will be applicable to medical school, but they've been taught very little about the organisms, the interactions with the environment, about ecology. And that's a passion that we all have had since we were kids. Many times it's hiding deep down in our brains, but it always comes back. Sometimes decades later, I get an email or a photo from my student, "Oh, I was here and I saw this newly brag. I remembered the trip to Panama." Blah, blah, blah. So it's really interesting and students really learn a lot. It's a hard class. They have to study a lot but they really enjoy it.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's fascinating. Is the Colombia trip also in terms of students?
Gonzalo Giribet:
There is a congress that I will attend in Colombia, and I'm going to try to set up a field trip with some of my grad students. I have a former postdoc who's from Colombia and we're still collaborating a lot. And the idea there is more collecting specimens for our own research.
June Carolyn Erlick:
In what part of Colombia?
Gonzalo Giribet:
We'll try to explore different areas, but we will start in the Cafetales region, so in the Andes. I've collected in other places in Colombia, including Leticia, which is in the Amazon. I really would like to go to Santa Marta. That area has some really interesting specimens that I'd like to get some fresh material for our genetic studies. But we will go for sure to the Andes region and then perhaps to the Caribbean side.
June Carolyn Erlick:
And in Brazil, what part of Brazil?
Gonzalo Giribet:
I'm going to Curitiba. Well, I'll teach there and then the idea is to collect some nearby areas. Again, I've collected in many places in Brazil, so it's to complement some of the regions. I've never collected in Curitiba so I'd like to add some specimens to our collections from that part of Brazil.
June Carolyn Erlick:
It must have been really hard for you during the pandemic.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Well, this is why I took on photography. A lot of that was local birds and local fauna. Almost every day I went out for like an hour or two after sitting in front of the computer screen the whole day on meetings. I would go at sunset or sometimes in sunrise before sitting in front of the computer. Almost every day I went out to look for animals. Summer, winter, every day. So that was a little bit of field, very close but I used that time to get to know much better actually the local fauna, which I didn't know very well.
June Carolyn Erlick:
I understand that one of your photos made it as a finalist in the Feria Internacional de Turismo Ornitologico.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Yeah. I was very proud to make it to that final selection. It's a very competitive photography contest that is hosted in Spain, an international thing. So it was really nice. It was one of the 10 selected photos for one of the categories. I didn't win anything, but it was really nice. This year I tried again, I didn't even get selected. It's very competitive.
June Carolyn Erlick:
So do you have any plans to keep on birding in Latin America?
Gonzalo Giribet:
That's the thing, is that it's not very compatible with my field work, but I like to do a little bit of it. When I go there, now there's a lot of birds that I like to see, but most of the time I need to be looking down in the ground for my animals and not looking up in the trees for the birds. But I'll try to do a little bit, yes.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Gonzalo Giribet:
This photo that you mentioned is actually from the MONOVA cemetery, so it's like two miles from where we are sitting. It was a really nice setting. It was one day early in the fall that's snowed, and that's something very unusual to have green leaves with snow on top of them. And then there was a female cardinal on that bush with the leaves. One of the nice things that I've learned is by going out almost every day, you find unusual situations and you have some of these photos that if you don't go every day, you never get.
June Carolyn Erlick:
That's great. We've been talking to Gonzalo Giribet. He's the director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Zoology at Harvard University. Thank you for being on Faculty Voices, Gonzalo.
Gonzalo Giribet:
Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.