JP Anderson, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Park Ranger, at the start of National Geographic and the National Park Service's 2009 BioBlitz at The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. (Photo by Enrique Pulido)
The National Park Service has a slightly embarrassing problem. It manages some of the nation’s most
environmentally valuable land – but it doesn’t have a full account of plant and animal species that live in
the parks. One remedy is the BioBlitz. A BioBlitz is a kind of whirlwind count of all the species in a
specific place. The Park Service has been co-sponsoring BioBlitzes with National Geographic. We sent
Shawn Allee to their latest:
Transcript
The National Park Service has a slightly embarrassing problem. It manages some of the nation’s most
environmentally valuable land – but it doesn’t have a full account of plant and animal species that live in
the parks. One remedy is the BioBlitz. A BioBlitz is a kind of whirlwind count of all the species in a
specific place. The Park Service has been co-sponsoring BioBlitzes with National Geographic. We sent
Shawn Allee to their latest:
The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is spread along Lake Michigan’s southern shoreline.
During this BioBlitz, scientists and volunteers fan out in teams to search the sand dunes, woods, and
grassland around here.
At first, the mood’s high, but then it rains kinda hard.
We’re supposed to be counting species for 24 hours, but at first, we can’t even get out of our cars.
(ring of a phone)
“Hello? Yeah. We’re stuck in traffic, here. We came out here and I thought we were going
out in the wrong direction.”
I hitch a ride with Dr. Patrick Leacock. He’s a mycologist, a kind of mushroom expert.
I’m actually lucky to be on his BioBlitz team, because organizers from National Geographic and the National Park Service want people to count all the species
in the park.
And they mean everything – not just plants and animals that are a cinch to find.
Allee: “Are fungi something you feel that the average person doesn’t think about when it comes
to biodiversity?”
Leacock: “Yeah, there’s people, you tell them you study mushrooms, and they talk about their
athlete’s foot, or they think there’s only six different kinds or something like
that.”
Leacock says, in fact, the Indiana Dunes Lakeshore has at least 600 fungi species. He hopes the
BioBlitz team will add to that list.
Leacock: “Here we are.”
Allee: “I’m hunting mushrooms with three trained mycologists and there are six other volunteers on my team here. One of them is Zachary Benes – he’s just 9 years old. But, I gotta say, Dr. Leacock is pretty lucky
to have Zachary on the team – since he’s found the most mushrooms of anyone on the team.”
Benes: “Is it poisonous?”
Leacock: “Nope. A real mushroom.”
Tang: “Yeah.”
Allee: “Looks like you found another one, too. Where’d you find it?”
Benes: “Over there by the wood.”
Leacock: “This is collybia sub-sulphurea. Do you know what sulfur means?”
Benes: “No.”
Leacock: “It’s a kind of a yellow-orange color. So, this might be a new record for the dunes. So that’s a good one. Was it
just the one?”
Benes: “Yeah. Just the one.”
Leacock: “It’s in good shape.”
Along the trail, I chat with Yaya Tang. She’s one of the other mycologists on the team.
Tang says she’s glad to see BioBlitz volunteers search for elusive species of bats, bugs, and fungi.
“I feel like that’s an issue with biodiversity in general. Where people care about things that are cute or
that they see immediately. Like, there’s insects, too, that don’t get a lot of attention.”
Allee: “Dr. Leacock, we’re pretty much finished here. You got this container of many varieties
of fungi we’ve collected within an hour, would you have been able to get this many
yourself? If you had come out here on your own?”
Leacock: “No. The more people you have searching, that helps a lot. Different people will see
different things, too, I think. So we’ve 14 or 15 things right in my box. We have two that might be new
records for the dunes.”
The BioBlitz at The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore lasts another 20 hours.
A few days later, Dr. Leacock writes me.
He tells me volunteers turned up at least one fungi specimen no one had ever seen in the Dunes park.
It’s a small success – enough that National Geographic, the Park Service, and other groups are
planning more BioBlitzes across the country.
For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.
