Election Section

SF Exhibit Celebrates California’s 5,500 Species By JOE EATON Special to the Planet

Tuesday November 22, 2005

When conservationists talk about biodiversity hotspots, the association is usually with remote, exotic places: Madagascar, Yunnan, the tepuis of Venezuela, the Western Ghats of India. That’s not always the case, though; in fact, we live in one. The biodiversity of California is astounding. An island on the land, cordoned off from the rest of North America by mountains and deserts, our state is full of plants and animals that have gone their own evolutionary ways. Of a total of 5,500 California species, just over a quarter occur nowhere else in the world. 

“Hotspots: California on the Edge,” which opened last weekend at the California Academy of Science’s temporary quarters on Howard Street in San Francisco, is a fitting celebration of these unique species and natural communities. The exhibit spotlights six regions and/or habitats: Mediterranean shrublands, coast redwood forest, Central Valley vernal pools, the High Sierra, the volcanoes of the Cascades, the Klamath-Siskiyou wilderness. They could easily have doubled that without exhausting the possibilities. 

Designed and curated in-house, “Hotspots” combines specimens from the Academy’s collection, live plants and animals, and multi-media. The exhibit space is dominated by a huge fire-scarred manzanita, emblematic of the chaparral that evolved with and is renewed by fire. Each area has a “hotspot tower” showcasing an endangered organism and a “collection wall” with animals and artifacts from the museum’s vaults. 

“It’s an exhibit for all the senses,” says the museum’s Roberta Brett. You can smell the essence of native sage plants (both Salvia and Artemisia), handle the skull of a California grizzly or a chunk of volcanic rock from Lassen, take a virtual-reality tour of a redwood grove. Images of the changing seasons at Jepson Prairie are projected on a giant screen, and videos show the belching mudpots of Bumpass Hell. Monarch, the badly-stuffed California grizzly who was once the star of Woodward’s Gardens, has been brought out of storage for the occasion. An ammonite the size of a truck tire represents the region’s rich fossil history.  

There’s a focus not just on species, but on communities and interactions. A Clark’s nutcracker perches above a typical winter’s cache of 32,000 pine nuts; nutcrackers and whitebark pines have co-evolved a seed-dispersal system that benefits both bird and tree. The life of a small native bee revolves around a single vernal-pool wildflower. Two hundred species of butterfly depend on specific Mediterranean-shrubland plants.  

The living exhibits provide glimpses into natural worlds most of us will never encounter. 

There’s a garden of insectivorous cobra lilies from the bogs of the Klamath country, a couple of mountain yellow-legged frogs (which reputedly smell of garlic), a gaudy California tiger salamander. A vernal pool tadpole shrimp, looking for all the world like a tiny trilobite, bumbles along the bottom of an aquarium; in the wild, it waits out the dry season in a cyst buried in the mud. Nebria beetles, nocturnal foragers on alpine snowfields, are housed in a modified wine refrigerator. The redwood region is represented by our state mollusk, the banana slug. (California’s state rock, mineral, gem, and soil series are also on display). 

Then there are the Jerusalem crickets, alarming-looking insects that you may have seen in your garden. 

“It’s the most queried insect in our entomology department,” says Roberta Brett. “People find them and they’re either fascinated or repulsed by them.” 

Seven California species are currently recognized, but Academy research associate David Weissman believes there may be as many as 50, distinguished by the drumming patterns they use to attract mates. You can hear samples of five cricket drumrolls. The courtship of Jerusalem crickets often ends with the female devouring the male, mantis-style. 

The academy has a series of special “Hotspots” events and programs planned through next summer. Pomo-Miwok basketmakers Julia and Lucy Parker were on hand for the opening to demonstrate traditional uses of sedge, soaproot, and other native plant materials. Artist-naturalist Jack Laws will be an ongoing part of the exhibit, working on his forthcoming field guide to everything in the Sierra and giving classes in scientific illustration. Brett says wine and food tastings (featuring produce from the Berkeley Bowl) are planned. The bookstore has a fine selection of California natural history books available, including titles from Berkeley’s Heyday Books.  

Academy Executive Director Patick Kociolek sees the exhibit as “a way to open up Californians’ eyes” to the extraordinary biodiversity all around them, and to provoke action to save what’s left of it. It also highlights the work of Academy scientists—like ornithologist Jack Dumbacher, who’s studying competition between the endangered spotted owl and the barred owl, a newcomer to the West Coast—in documenting the diversity of California habitats. Jack Laws describes what he’s after with his field guide: “I want to help people love what they see and become better stewards.” 

“Hotspots” serves that goal admirably. 

 

 

 

Photograph by Joe Eaton: 

An exhibit in “Hotspots” at the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, celebrating California’s unique species and natural communities..