In the meantime, the Science exposé that had portrayed Sheffey as antipathetic to ecological questions generated more press. The Nobel prizewinner Joshua
Lederberg devoted his weekly Washington Post science column to the prolifera-tion of “mega- experiments” with global yet unknown environmental effects, as epitomized by nuclear testing and the chemical pesticide DDT, and to the con-comitant political need for ecological research. Predicting the sea- level canal’s consequences for oceanic life required a range of approaches, old and new: “As a molecular biologist interested in evolution,” he wrote, “I would at least insist that large samples of present marine life at various stations be carefully frozen for later examination.” Lederberg urged the CSC not to allow diplomatic, en-gineering, military, political, and financial issues to bury the scientific ones.40
That was precisely the point of the contract with the National Academy es-tablishing CERIC, the Committee on Ecological Research for the Interoceanic Canal. In the spring of 1969, Mayr, who had agreed to chair the committee, met with several advisors, including Wallen and Galler of the Smithsonian, John Wolfe of the AEC, and marine and hydrological scientists associated with the National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey, and Woods Hole Ocean-ographic Institution, to discuss the committee’s scope and membership.41 They identified dozens of research questions pertaining to marine biota, the biology of species dispersal, and the physical parameters governing water movement through the canal as well as the conditions on either side of the isthmus.42 Above all, stressed Mayr, “at this stage it is most important to counteract the wide-spread impression that the potentiality of ‘fall- out’ is the only, or at least major, problem of the Sea- level Canal.”43
Following a months- long process to pin down the membership, CERIC’s first formal meeting took place in July 1969 at the academy’s stately headquarters in Washington, D.C. The ten members seem to have been chosen, primarily by organizational affiliation, by NAS executives, with input from Mayr. While he did not succeed in having Rubinoff appointed as the Smithsonian representa-tive (a position filled by David Challinor, who succeeded Galler as the assistant secretary for science in 1971), Mayr did gain representation for two Caribbean university marine biology programs.44
However, left off the list was an institution with a strong stake in the matter, the University of Miami’s Institute of Marine Science. The school employed Gilbert Voss, Frederick Bayer, and C. Richard Robins, one of the teams sub-contracted by Battelle, the private organization that had won out over the Smithsonian in the 1965 competition for AEC funds. The Miami researchers had initiated transisthmian oceanographic trawls long before receiving any of the canal study funds, and they were still working on their report for Battelle when CERIC came into being.45 As Challinor later testified before Congress,
CERIC’s dismissive attitude of the Miami group seemed to relate to their sampling techniques and their assessment that most species exchange through a sea- level canal would likely be minimal and noncatastrophic.46 Routine aca-demic elitism and rivalry probably also played a part.
Mayr wanted an eminent ecologist to serve on the committee and convinced his younger colleague Edward O. Wilson to do so. As codeveloper of the innova-tive theory of island biogeography, the insect systematist aimed to revolutionize ecology by linking it with genetics and biogeography.47 Wilson had also partici-pated in a foundational 1964 symposium at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California on the genetics of colonizing species, presenting on the invasive—
or as it was then called, imported—South American fire ant.48
At CERIC’s first workshop, held in August 1969 in Woods Hole, Massachu-setts, Mayr explained the committee would proceed on the assumption that the sea- level canal would actually be built. The CSC allowed him to share its major recommendations, which would not be publicized for another eight months:
conventional, not nuclear, explosives would be used; the new waterway would be built in Panama along Route 10, ten miles west of the existing canal; and construction would begin around 1982, allowing researchers just over a decade to complete the baseline studies to be outlined by CERIC.49
The group spent its first meeting discussing both the optimal scope of the research program and specific hypotheses about dispersal and colonization. Wil-son’s presentation, for instance, noted the repeated failure of intentional species introductions, and the need for field and laboratory experiments to determine the qualities of successful colonizers. As for the range of research to be recom-mended, some participants expressed fear that not enough qualified experts ex-isted to carry out a large- scale research program; others sought to “think and act big” to impress Congress in order to attain the funds, which would then help train the requisite taxonomists, biogeographers, and ecologists.50
The CERIC membership met three additional times, in October 1969, in January 1970 for a week in Panama, and in April 1970, but the bulk of its work was handled by Staff Officer Gerald Bakus, a coral reef specialist who relocated from California to Washington to take on the immense job.51 To assess the cur-rent state of knowledge on selected Central American marine biota and how human effects might change them, Bakus contacted nearly two hundred spe-cialists with exhaustive requests for information.52 One informant complained he would need six months and “at least $10,000 plus perquisites” to do the job.53 Even getting the CERIC members to draft and comment on their assigned re-port sections was difficult.54 On the other hand, the Miami researcher Voss later
complained his team was never contacted, despite the years they spent surveying isthmian waters on the R/V Pillsbury and searching the literature in obscure libraries.55 Bakus might have assumed the Battelle- funded team members were not willing to share their data, signifying the mutual mistrust of the two scien-tific groups contracted to assist the CSC.56
Despite their different ecological predictions, both groups agreed the sea- level canal should contain a precautionary barrier incorporating physical, thermal, or freshwater obstacles to marine migrants. Mayr had made a point of asking the CSC to investigate the feasibility of such structures, and he drew on a recent event that seemed sure to capture their attention, the July 1969 moon landing: “It is a situation somewhat analogous to the potential risk of astronauts bringing a highly dangerous pathogen from the moon to the earth. Even if such a danger had only a very small probability, it should be avoided at all possible cost.”57
Another seemingly ideal opportunity to convince the CSC to recommend a precautionary approach occurred in December 1969. John Briggs, the most conservation- oriented of the sea- level canal authors, organized a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston that featured presentations by Sheffey, Voss, Topp, and other sea- level canal authors. Yet to Bakus’s surprise, the symposium speakers “almost unanimously agreed that there would be only slight biologi-cal effects from interoceanic dispersal.”58 Rubinoff attributed the optimism to ignorance of basic concepts such as competitive exclusion, the principle that two species vying for the same resource cannot coexist.59 Bakus concluded that many speakers overlooked evolutionary mechanisms of species dispersal, and attributed some of the disagreements about the likely patterns of migration, colonization, and competition to diverse disciplinary outlooks.60 Almost a de-cade later, the malacologist Geerat Vermeij made the related point that “the direction and the magnitude of any biotic migration through a Central Ameri-can sea- level Ameri-canal are likely to differ among taxonomic groups as well as among organisms from different communities,” hence the need for “greater insight into the properties of natural history of individual organisms and species” as opposed to “studies on abstract group measures such as diversity or community stability.”61 Vermeij spoke to a fundamental conundrum of postwar ecology—
despite the growing interest in developing predictive models, the low prestige of old- fashioned naturalist- based disciplines hampered efforts to acquire basic yet crucial information.62
The AAAS scientific speakers did acknowledge one specific danger, the crown- of- thorns starfish. The topic was on the minds of marine biologists because the
Indo- Pacific Acanthaster planci was preying on the coral of Australia’s Great Bar-rier Reef, and the first major paper on the topic had just been published by one of the sea- level canal authors, Richard Chesher.63 In his presentation, Voss stated that a little- known eastern Pacific species, Acanthaster ellisi, appeared almost identical to A. planci; a Central American sea- level canal might thus enable A.
ellisi to prey on Caribbean corals.64 A few months later, STRI’s coral reef ecol-ogist, Peter Glynn, confirmed the first Acanthaster outbreak west of the Gulf of Panama, leading Briggs to predict, “If the crown of thorns got into the Atlantic, there would be a very great risk of damage all the way from the Florida Keys to Rio de Janeiro.”65
The other dramatic species that captured public attention was the eastern Pacific yellow- bellied sea snake. To quantify the invasion potential of a specific organism, Rubinoff had shifted his attention from gobies to the physiology and ecology of Pelamis platurus, a venomous organism that periodically appeared in large numbers along Panama’s Pacific shores. By offering the snake to potential Atlantic predators, Rubinoff and his collaborators sought to predict how fast it might colonize the Caribbean Sea and adjacent Atlantic Ocean. Their experi-ments indicated that Atlantic predators were much more likely to attack the ser-pents and die than Pacific carnivores, and thus following the construction of an unobstructed channel, natural selection would favor predatory fishes disinclined to attack sea snakes.66 Due to its ability to drift and feed at the surface, Pelamis might not only invade the Caribbean and Atlantic but also ride the Gulf Stream all the way to the English Channel.67
For Sheffey, it made no sense to focus on an organism that did not seem to pose problems in its native habitat and that had not already transited the exist-ing canal: “I have been swimmexist-ing many times on the Pacific side of Panama, in Hawaii and in the South China Sea off Vietnam. Until I met Rubinoff I had never heard of the sea snake, and to this day I have been unable to find anyone who has ever heard of anyone being bitten by one.”68 But for Rubinoff, the Pacific sea snake constituted a “conspicuous example” of just one of the many species capable of being transmitted in large, reproducible numbers through a sea- level canal, and one that could help people conceive of the problem of invasive species.
As he acknowledged to a colleague, “there are many less conspicuous organisms which may cause greater economic problems to commercial enterprises.”69 These points would generate much attention later in the 1970s, when the sea- level canal proposal reemerged in a very different political context.