Papagaios, Life & Times on a Speculative Archipelago - A New Dawn - Prof Catarina Novais on the pioneer species in Papagaios

Transcript* of an on-stage interview between João Almeida (JA) and Professor Catarina da Costa Novais (CN) at the 2019 Festival Pacificadora de Ciência (Pacificadora Science Festival), held at Pacificadora University, 3-5 July 2019.

(*Transcript is a translation from Portuguese.)

JA: Thank you all for coming to the last event of day two. We have had some truly fantastic events today and a reminder that later this evening is a Moonlight Mingle, so don’t miss out on that.

But now to the reason you’re all here. I’m joined by, I think it’s fair to say, the most famous Papagaian in the world. She is an academic, author, broadcaster, science communicator and in addition to her extensive fieldwork, is professor of palaeontology at the University of Chicago. I’m going to be honest, I feel unaccomplished.

Everyone, put your hands together for Professor Catarina da Costa Novais.

CN: Thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. It’s good to be back in Pacificadora.

JA: Are you enjoying being back in the islands? When were you last here?

CN: It’s been too long. I was last here… I suppose it would have been late 2017, I was at a dig on São Thomás, looking at some of our oldest fossil beds.

JA: A lot of your work has dealt with the natural history of our islands. It doesn’t seem as glamourous as the work your colleagues in Chicago are doing unearthing T. rexes and Triceratops the like, but you’ve devoted much of your career to it. What is it that draws you here, besides a chance to come home!

CN: (A long pause) For me, it’s about loss. Papagaios specifically, but also the world as a whole, have been home to beautiful, unique, majestic lifeforms. And thanks in large part to the actions of people over the past few centuries, we are losing them. By looking under and inside every rock on these islands, I hope to rediscover some of that lost beauty, and also, hopefully, make people stop and think about what we’re on the verge of losing today. It’s not yet too late. (Pause) That was perhaps a heavier answer than you wanted.

JA: Not at all, professor, a very poignant response. Given that we’re all gathered today in the university’s botanical garden, surrounded by many of the unique plants and insects of our homeland, would you take a moment to talk us through the early days of Papagaios and what the first animals and plants were like.

CN: Of course. The islands are, as we are often reminded, volcanic in origin. The oldest islands are Vulcão and the central group of Milagres, Santuário and São Thomás, all around 43…44 million years old. Like all volcanic islands they were barren rock for thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, especially given their isolation compared to the rest of Macaronesia.

Eventually the weather, and mosses whose spores arrived on the wind and waves, created the first soils. This meant small shrubs and grasses could grow, at least once their seeds made it here, and, in time, trees could flourish.

The type of forest we get here, the misty, humid forests that still exist in the mountains is called laurisilva. It typically includes many laurel species, hence the name, but also holly, olive, asparagus, juniper, viburnum and Vaccinium plants – which are bushes that produce edible berries like the Papagaian cranberry. These have now developed into endemic species- that is to say, ones found only here. All of these plants so far would have arrived from Europe and Africa. But we have American species too, albeit rarer ones as continental America is significantly further away.

The most notable species of American origin are bromeliads. The most well-known bromeliads are pineapples, but they’re a very diverse group. Originating from a plateau region in Guyana, seeds of an ancient bromeliad must have blown into the ocean and drifted on the currents to reach the young islands by 30 million years ago. It’s worth saying that most modern bromeliads only speciated around…ooh I think it was 19 million years ago, so our endemic bromeliads – including St Galvínus’ Hands and the clinker shrubs – are very distant cousins to those plants.

Now, it took millions of years for these forests to develop, but once there was nutrient- rich soil, individual trees could take root and these habitats were at that point inevitable.

Pictured: 40mya, an ancestral auk, and a lizard of the Lacertidae family sit on the rocks of the recently formed Papagaios islands. They will go on to evolve into many of the islands' unique species.

JA: That was a fascinating whistle stop tour of the world of plants, but what of animals. There are some animals on our islands that I’m told by friends overseas are pretty damn weird. But what were the first critters here?

CN: Like with plants, all the animals here had to arrive by air or water. The reefs around the islands likely formed early on in the nutrient rich water and so the corals, jellies, octopuses, urchins, crustaceans, fish and so on will have been here a long time. The other seaborne arrival would have been a small number of lizards that probably rafted over on fallen trees or other vegetation. Phylogenetic studies suggest these pioneer lizards originated in southern Spain.

JA: How many lizards are we talking about? I remember reading about how once the number of individuals in a species is low enough, you get problems from inbreeding, yet I can’t imagine the necessary thousands of lizards washing up.

CN: We don’t know the exact number of lizards and you’re correct about numbers, but it is worth pointing out that most of our endemic lizard species are capable of parthenogenesis – they can have young without mating in low-choice environments. Therefore, it could be that a hundred animals very quickly had thousands of descendants and a stable breeding population could develop.

JA: And finally, arrivals by air.

CN: Yes. Insects and birds. Insects are small enough that a tropical storm could have blown thousands off course of which a small number survived and made it to land. The other possibility is that they arrived on driftwood rafts, like the lizards, or clinging to migrant birds.

JA: Is it fair to say Papagaios’ birds are its most unique species?

CN: Well, that’s getting into conversations of what species we deem interesting, or important. I’m fond of clinker crabs myself. We had a colony by our cottage when I was a girl. But, are Papagaian birds internationally well-known? Yes, definitely.

JA: And how and when did they arrive?

CN: Our birds have two main lines of descent. The kingrays, a group of passerines, or song birds, which arrived later, and the seabirds which I’m confident were the first animals here. Even today there are many species of seabird that nest here in the mating season, or stop off on their way to their own breeding grounds. It would have been the same 40 million years ago, when the islands were new. And back then there would have been no predators so birds could nest without fear. Most moved on, but some of the alcid – or auk – family stayed year-round. They are the ultimate ancestor of many of our most wellknown species both on land and at sea.

JA: Now we’ve laid the groundwork for life on our islands, let me take a detour and ask about some of the other places you’ve led expeditions. Your PhD was spent digging up bizarre mammals in the Mossfell islands…

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