Caira heads global tapeworm biodiversity inventory

Janine Caira, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has won a rare $3 million National Science Foundation Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI) grant to oversee a worldwide network of specialists to study the biodiversity of tapeworms.

The grant will be shared with the University of Kansas, where Caira’s former PhD student, Kirsten Jensen, is now an assistant professor of biology. Co-principal investigators with Caira are Dr. Timothy Littlewood, zoologist with The Natural History Museum, London, UK, and Dr. Jean Mariaux, zoologist with the Museum of Natural History of Geneva, Switzerland.

In all, 34 researchers from 20 countries around the world, from Vietnam to Ethiopia to Argentina – will be involved in the massive five-year project to learn as much as possible about the world’s diversity of tapeworms.

Tapeworms inhabit the bowels of all classes of vertebrates, but not much is known about them, Caira says. A few are of medical or veterinary interest as parasites, and the researchers will learn more about them.

She expects the search to find as many as 1,700 new species, a nearly 40 percent increase over the roughly 5,000 species now known, and under the grant will describe 1,000 of them.

“If we can accomplish what we propose to do, the tapeworms are going to be one of the most well known groups,” she says.

The project will revise the way that tapeworms are classified, using molecular methods, as well as more traditional methods using morphology and anatomy, to identify species.

The study could not have been done even ten years ago, she says, because of the difficulty of coordinating specimen collection and sharing information among experts worldwide. 

In this project, UConn will be the home of a tapeworm database, designed by Jensen and housed on a server at UITS. All of the researchers worldwide will have access and will work from the same database, using the same criteria.

UConn was awarded $2.6 million for the project, with the remaining $400,000 going to the University of Kansas. Subcontractors include the University of North Dakota, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and the Czech Academy of Sciences.

“This is a very impressive tribute to one of our most active and long-term, well-supported and internationally known research programs,” says Gregory J. Anderson, vice provost for research and graduate education.

It is also among the largest research grants to the University, he says, and a good example of a grant program in which matching contributions, from the Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Education, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, have made possible an otherwise huge and complex research undertaking.

The matching funds will cover expenses such as a multi-cultural graduate student assistantship and support for a minority undergraduate research participant.

The NSF introduced PBI grants in 2003 as a new strategy to accelerate the discovery and study of the world’s biodiversity. Investigators are asked to conduct a worldwide inventory and study of a major group of organisms that are not well known, such as tapeworms, with at least 40 percent of the world’s species unknown. The inventories are on an unprecedented scale, according to NSF, transcending the historic practice of classifying species by place and organizing them instead according to their evolutionary relationships.

This is the third round of the grants since 2003, and until now, only nine grants have been awarded.  Budgets for the grants are limited to $3 million.