A terrestrial Annelida biodiversity survey of the Philippines, Part II
As a biodiversity survey, the project seeks to discover, describe and document the earthworms and other annelid worms of the Philippines, a biodiversity hotspot nation in urgent need of data to support conservation efforts. Earthworms are important ecosystem engineers everywhere they occur. This project will conduct field trips to the remaining areas of old-growth lowland and montane rainforest in the central region (known locally as the Visayas) and southern parts of the country, including Mindanao and small neighboring islands. On these trips the research team will collect annelid specimens in a systematic effort to obtain every species of these organisms present, while capturing basic information on their ecology and distributions over various habitats and microhabitats. Laboratory activity will consist of specimen curation, morphological examination, the preparation of publications describing new species, and database building. This activity is expected to discover up to 200 new species of earthworms and several more each of the other annelid groups. Since many Philippine rare small mammals depend on earthworms for food, information on these organisms will be valuable to better understanding of the conditions needed for conservation of these mammals.
The electronic products of the research will include a web-searchable database on Philippine Annelida, a large archive of images, identification and study aids, and an interactive key to the earthworms of the archipelago, including common exotic species. This database will be part of a global earthworm information system to which other researchers are welcome to contribute.
This project will provide information valuable to conservation of The Philippines' rapidly vanishing unique biota, contribute towards revising the classification of Southeast Asian earthworms, and provide new knowledge of terrestrial leeches, and enchytraeid oligochaetes of the Philippines. It will discover and render accessible to the world community the diversity and ecology of an ecologically important group of soil fauna. This survey will provide new data valuable to analyzing the history biotic interchanges in the South Pacific and East Asian regions. There should also be significant impact on understanding of the geological and organism dispersal events involved in the development of the biota of the Philippines. Our collection of tissues suitable for DNA extraction will enable future projects to clarify relationships within one of the most species-rich groups of earthworms. This project includes the training of the first Philippine Ph.D. recipient in earthworm syste matics and career development for a second student. Other outcomes are opportunities for applied annelid biodiversity science: 1) a list of candidate species for evaluation as native organic waste composting worms, which could promote sustainable development and solution of environmental and social problems without recourse to invasive foreign species; 2) Our distribution data become a catalog of sources for drug discovery, in which the leadership of the Philippine Dept. of Science and Technology is strongly interested.
