Transcriber: Deborah Oliveira Reviewer: Denise RQ
Host: Our next speaker is a Brazilian native and microbiologist
with deep interests in biodiversity and ecosystem functionality
of the Amazon rainforest.
In order to shed light on these and other microbial ecosystems in question,
he uses high-throughput genomic technologies
to study microorganism environments
as diverse as tropical forests and termite hindguts.
Today, he serves as an Assistant Professor within the Department of Biology at UTA.
Please welcome Jorge Rodrigues.
(Applause)
Jorge Rodriguez: For the next ten minutes,
I'm going to try to convince you that Dr. Seuss has been lying to you.
(Laughter)
I hope that if I convince you of that, you will go back home,
buy more Dr. Seuss books, and read to your kids,
with your siblings, friends, grandkids, and so on.
Why do I say that?
Because it is my own experience when I started working in the Amazon.
I was really interested in learning more about the Amazon.
If I am going there, I want to find out what is already there.
And if I am going to be there,
I want to find out if something is going to eat me,
who is going to eat me there, right?
So what I did was to collect a whole bunch of information about the Amazon.
I collected books, readings, videos.
And I started reading all of this.
But the book that really caught my attention was this book.
Why is that?
Well, because it is all about the rainforest.
So I said, "This is the must-read book for me."
If I am going there, I should read more and more about this book.
So I start reading this book and what happened was
that the book starts talking about the rainforest
and the patterns, the dry seasons and the rainy seasons of the forest.
I thought, "Oh, that is very interesting! Let me continue reading this."
The next topic was about the locations.
It told me where rainforests are located.
But I am a scientist, and as a scientist I don't just trust data.
I really want to find out what is going on with the data.
So what I did was to connect with people
who could tell me more about the Amazon, or about the rainforest.
I found one expert,
and the expert was seven years old.
I asked him, "Where are the locations of the rainforest?"
He told me, "Rainforests are located in Central and South America,
they are also located in Africa
in countries like Congo, Zaire, Gabon, Madagascar,
and back again we have rainforest
in countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, New Guinea."
I compared the information the expert gave me
with the information that I got from the book,
and they both matched.
So I am going to read more and more about this book.
The next topic in the book was about the biodiversity.
It talks about the biodiversity of plants and of animals.
I said, "I am going to get there to the Amazon,
and it is going to be like a zoo to me,
because I am going to see all kinds of animals, all kinds of plants."
It turns out that when I got there that is what I saw.
A pretty dark place, and this is the middle of the day.
I thought, "Wait a minute,
all those books promised me that I would see something else!"
Actually, the books told me
that 25% of all terrestrial species are present in the Amazon.
25%.
The books told me that in a 100 by 100 square meters,
I would find more plants than in the entire European continent.
Imagine the entire Europe.
In a 100 by 100, you can see more plants there.
In a single tree, I can see 80 different species of ants.
And if you multiple this number of insects by the number of plants,
you would find a staggering number
of 42,000 different insects in a hectare of the Amazon.
If this is not enough for you,
the majority of them have not been described.
We don't know what they are doing there.
And something that is a bit more related to us:
in a single sampling expedition, we can find 72 different species of bats.
If you are in the US, we have 42 species of bats.
In a single expedition,
we could almost double the number of bat species in the Amazon.
I did not see any animals there.
I was still wondering,
"What is happening? Why don't I see all those animals?"
And I would be OK with that, not seeing any animals there,
but the problem is that the landscape is changing.
The Amazon is changing quite fast.
This is a satellite picture of part of the Amazon forest.
Every little orange dot you see is a fire.
A fire that started to change the land.
How do we do that?
You remove all the hardwood and sell it.
Then you slash everything to the ground.
Next, you let it dry.
When the dry season comes, you set everything on fire.
And that fire will burn for days and days, sometimes for weeks and weeks.
Once everything is turned to ashes, you sow with grass and move cattle in.
There are lots and lots of cattle there.
So this idea of changing the land from forest to pasture
is really changing the biodiversity in the Amazon forest.
Why is that?
Because this is the most important factor
affecting biodiversity losses in the Amazon.
It is more important than the CO2 increase,
more important than climate change.
It is the most important man-made alteration
going on in tropical systems these days.
Just to give you an example,
this is the area where we do our sampling in the Amazon.
In 1975, it was a sea of green.
If we looked from the airplane, we'd only see trees all over the place.
In 14 years, that is what we saw.
Lots and lots of changes.
This is called a fishbone structure of development.
You have a road, and in both sides of it, you have clearing of the land
transforming the forest into pasture.
The road continues, and you see more;
more and more changes.
If the landscape is changing, then all inhabitants are changing as well.
You know that plants and animals will change.
You have a forest with hundreds of plants,
and then you have one single plant now: a grass species.
You have all kinds of animals, all animals I didn't see before,
and now you have one single species of animal: a cow.
But there are lots of microbes there I don't see, and I know they're there.
Those are tiny little microbes.
I have one gram of soil here on my hand.,
a little gram of soil.
In this gram of soil, I have 100 million microbes.
There are 10,000 species of microbes in this little gram of soil.
They are all changing,
so I am here today to tell you they are changing as well;
not only plants and animals change but microbes change as well.
The research that we do in the Amazon tells us that the microbial communities
in the Amazon soil are increasing in similarity.
What does that mean?
It means that the microbes are becoming more and more the same.
They are becoming more and more equal to each other.
Genetically, they are becoming more and more similar to each other.
Why is that important?
I have two reasons for you.
The first reason is related to the environment.
Environments, ecosystems provide us some services,
and microbes as well.
We don't know that on a daily basis,
but you have more microbial cells than human cells.
In the Amazon,
those microbes are responsible for recycling all nutrients.
All dead carcasses of animals are recycled by microbes.
All leaves that fall from the trees are recycled by microbes.
So microbes are responsible for all the biogeochemical cycles.
If you are changing those microbes,
then those biogeochemical cycles will be altered as well.
Now imagine the Amazon,
that place that is the largest forest terrestrial ecosystem in the world.
If this ecosystem is changing, then the Earth is changing.
That is the first reason.
The second reason is because microbes are reservoirs of new antibiotics.
They are reservoirs of new biotechnological products.
They are reservoirs of cancer-fighting drugs.
In fact,
there are at least 120 prescribed drugs these days
that came from the forest.
If we are losing all those microbes, we are losing the opportunity
of finding new drugs, new antibiotics, new biotechnological products.
This is a picture that I took during my last trip in the Amazon.
When we are removing wood from the forest,
we are not removing only wood, we are removing something with it.
I just told you that, the microbes are disappearing.
If the microbes are disappearing, we are removing something else:
their genes, those antibiotics that we are supposed to find.
You and me, we are all driving that truck together.
You like it or not, you are responsible for driving that truck.
As a responsible driver, or as a driver, the question for you to ask is:
"Should I step on the gas pedal and go for it as fast as I can,
or should I slow down a little bit
and find the safest route for me to keep going?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause)