The Independent -12 April 2007

Native languages hold the key to saving species

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Published: 19 February 2007

Many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved ifscientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge oflocal species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost.

Potentially vital information about many endangered species is locked in thevocabulary and expressions of local people, yet biologists are failing to tapinto this huge source of knowledge before it is lost for good, scientists said.

"It seems logical that the biologists should go and talk to theindigenous people who know more about the local environment than anyoneelse," said David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics atSwarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

"Most of what humans know about ecosystems and species is not found indatabases or libraries or written down anywhere. It's in people's heads. It'sin purely oral traditions," Dr Harrison told the American Association forthe Advancement of Science in San Francisco. "About 80 per cent of theanimals and plants visible to the naked eye have not yet been classified byscience. It doesn't mean they are unknown; it just means we have a knowledgegap.".

An estimated 7,000 languages are spoken in the world but more than half ofthem are dying out so fast that they will be lost completely by the end of thecentury as children learn more common languages, such as English or Spanish.

He cited the example of a South American skipper butterfly, Astraptesfulgerator, which scientists thought was just one species until a DNA studythree years ago revealed that it was in fact 10 different species whosecamouflaged colouration made the adult forms appear identical to one another.

Yet if the scientists had spoken to the Tzeltal-speaking people of Mexico -descendants of the Maya - they might have learnt this information much soonerbecause Tzeltal has several descriptions of the butterflies based on the differentkinds of caterpillar.

"These people live on the territory of that butterfly habitat and infact care very little about the adult butterfly but they have a very-finegrained classification for the larvae because the caterpillars affect theircrops and their agriculture," Dr Harrison said.

"It's crucial for them to know which larva is eating which crop and atwhat time of year. Their survival literally depends on knowing that, whereasthe adult butterfly has no impact on their crops," he said.

"There was a knowledge gap on both sides and if they had been talkingto each other they might have figured out sooner that they were dealing with aspecies complex," he said.

"Indigenous people often have classification systems that are oftenmore fine-grained and more precise than what Western science knows aboutspecies and their territories."

Another example of local knowledge was shown by the Musqueam people ofBritish Columbia in Canada, who have fished the local rivers for generationsand describe the trout and the salmon as belonging to the same group.

In 2003 they were vindicated when a genetic study revealed that the"trout" did in fact belong to the same group as Pacific salmon, DrHarrison said. "It seems obvious that knowing more about species andecosystems would put us in a better position to sustain those species andecosystems," he said.

'That's my argument, that the knowledge gap is vastly to the detriment ofWestern science. We know much less than we think we do.