This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 18, 2011 - Charles Darwin only spent 10 days in the Galapagos Islands.
On that score Patricia Parker's got him beat. Though she seems at home enough in her fourth-floor office at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the 60-year-old biology department chair has been to the equatorial Pacific island chain at least once a year for the past 14 years for periods ranging from one to three months.
The Galapagos Avian Health Initiative, a team she directs, has issued 52 papers over the past decade examining threats to bird life in the Ecuadorian province. The team has developed a special relationship with the people of the islands and formed a partnership between them, UMSL and her other employer, the St. Louis Zoo, where she serves as a senior scientist.
The most recent paper revealed the timing of a deadly combination of a malarial parasite and a pox virus that has led to mass bird extinctions in other areas of the Pacific. The paper was co-authored by Parker and seven others, including fellow UMSL biologist Robert Ricklefs.
The team studied nearly 4,000 specimens from the turn of the 20th century. They discovered avipoxvirus, similar to smallpox in humans, arrived on the islands in 1898. Their earlier papers had detailed the origin of the parasite. The findings were published in PLoS ONE, an online scientific journal, earlier this week.
"We can be that precise about it because we were using museum samples and you can see that it's not there, not there, not there, then suddenly -- boom -- it's there," she said.
The key, said Parker, was in realizing that two human-inhabited islands were the first places the illness showed up.
"There's a lot of boat traffic going back and forth between these colonies," she said. "We are suggesting that this pattern is consistent with humans having been part of the arrival and distribution of this virus."
It's that human connection that's significant.
"Everything here has intrinsic value and to the extent that we are responsible for their demise we should try to prevent that," she said. "When we realize that we have been part of a cycle that is damaging other life on Earth, my instinctive view is that we should stop doing that."
She also believes there's a lesson from a public policy perspective. Ecuador has maintained the Galapagos and its surrounding waters as a national park and marine preserve since the 1950s. Parker believes the nation's commitment to preservation and its strict procedures to limit the spread of environmental threats are responsible for keeping the parasite and avian virus from causing extinctions in the Galapagos as it has in other places, such as Hawaii.
"One of the differences is just the political will to solve problems," she said. The Ecuadorians "don't want to just understand it after it's happened. They want to be right on top of it and see if there is anything they can do about it."
Wild Kingdom
The Dallas native came to St. Louis in 2000, assuming her position as the Des Lee Endowed Professor of Zoological Studies. As an undergraduate in college, she found herself inspired by episodes of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," a brainchild of Marlin Perkins, the famous director of the zoo where she now works.
Then, the light bulb went on.
"I realized, those are actual people who are doing that for their jobs," she said. "It's academia that allows you the intellectual freedom to do research. It's the teaching and research combination of academia that permits people to do that."
A behavioral ecologist, she studied social interactions between animals. Eventually, Parker found an area of even tighter focus, working with the Galapagos hawk, which led to her present field of research.
But as unique as her area of study is, her team's approach is equally fresh. They make sure their research findings are shared with the people of Galapagos.
"Their perception is that most scientists come down there, take the data, go away, publish it in a language they don't understand and never tell them about it," she said. "I think we are considered fairly unique in their experience in that we not only publish a ton of papers but we also meet regularly with them and give them management recommendations."
The most recent paper was published on a Thursday. By Friday, a PDF of it was waiting in the email of the director of the Galapagos National Park. It's a way of doing business that has endeared the scientific crew to the locals -- keeping everyone in the loop. In 2008, Parker was awarded the Order of Scientific Merit by the people of the island, an award she says represents the efforts of the entire team. The medallion and certificate hang on her wall at UMSL.
It relates back to her belief that all life is precious.
"We are working with the people in Galapagos to understand what the disease threats are for wildlife," she said. "We have discovered a list of things that nobody knew was there."
Why she's driven to do that seems somewhat of a mystery, even to her. It's just like what she tells her doctoral students. Research is often drudge work.
"You should do this only if you can't NOT do it," she adds with a laugh. "It's either in you or it's not."
David Baugher is a freelance writer in St. Louis.