Boy's love of bugs matured into career

Gonzalo Giribet has made a career of studying creatures that give everyone else the creeps.

Over the past five years he has visited every continent and many of the world's largest islands hunting for daddy longlegs spiders.

"They can help us trace the history of the earth," says Giribet, a Harvard invertebrate expert. "Daddy longlegs are 400 million years old -- some of the earliest colonizers of land," and they are relatively immobile, with populations staying in the same place for millions of years.

He began collecting bugs as a child, chasing them with a toy butterfly net outside his parents' home in the northern Spanish city of Burgos. He kept his multilegged playmates in a cardboard box and nursed a sense of beauty, even wonder, for the misunderstood arthropod (the phylum that includes insects, spiders, and lobsters).

"They're segmented," he explains. `'Think of them as a train made up of locomotives. You can remove some of the locomotives and replace them with other types of cars and the train still runs." In that way, some segments can be used to evolve legs, others for sensory appendages, and so on. The result is the most successful group of animals on earth.

Now 36, Giribet looks more like an "Animal Planet" adventurer than an Ivy League scientist. There's more than a façade of the suntanned athlete about him -- he grew up in Barcelona, where in 1997 he was the number-one ranked wind-surfer in Catalonia (and number two in all of Spain). Nine years ago he moved to the United States for postdoctoral work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before settling at Harvard in 2000.

"He's probably the premier scientist" working on evolutionary relationships among animals, says Ward Wheeler, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and Giribet's former colleague.

A scientist can't collect specimens sitting in his laboratory. Field work -- trekking into an Indonesian forest to stare a spider in the optical sensors -- is central to Giribet's idea of what a biologist ought to be.

"Many biologists become detached from the organisms and where they live," he says. "Every student knows the structure of DNA, but they don't know about the organisms themselves."

Wheeler is more critical. "Unlike most people who do molecular work, Giribet is an extremely good field hand, dealing with localities and collecting material."

This year Giribet received a National Science Foundation grant to assemble "the Protostome Tree of Life." This is a project with a goal of nothing short of uncovering the evolutionary relationships between all protostomes -- invertebrates that include arthropods, mollusks, and flatworms -- dating back 540 million years.

"Understanding diversity makes you appreciate evolutionary time," says Giribet. "When we wipe out species, we wipe out half a billion years of evolution."

His work has more potential than simply filling in the gaps of evolutionary history. Giribet conducts "biogeographic" studies, examining the geographic distribution of animals across the earth in order to shed light on seemingly unrelated questions.

For example, it's commonly believed that millions of years ago, the island of New Caledonia split from Australia. Giribet, however, discovered that the daddy longlegs species in New Caledonia have a much stronger genetic correlation to the fauna in Africa than to the bugs down under -- which raises questions about the accuracy of our models of plate tectonics. That's not to say that current geological wisdom is wrong, but it does raise questions. "We're studying this further to find the source of the disagreement," says Giribet.

FACT SHEET

Hometowns: Cambridge and Barcelona.

Hobbies: Wind-surfing, diving, climbing, photography.

Ambition: To compile a complete tree of metazoan evolution -- linking all animals. "It would be rather large."

On arthropods: "They're segmented. Think of them as a train made up of locomotives. You can remove some of the locomotives and replace them with other types of cars, and the train still runs." In that way, some segments can be used for legs, others for sensory appendages, and so on.

On intelligent design, the idea that life is too complex to have happened without the help of a higher being: "It's shocking, especially being from Europe, where these debates don't exist. You can't even call them old-fashioned. They're just reactionary."

Favorite local Spanish restaurant: Taberna de Haro in Brookline. "The cook is from Spain. It's really authentic."