 I'm going to talk today about Peeler's Nails and their link to biodiversity. In the Philippines, we are blessed with a very high amount of biodiversity. We are at the Coral Triangle where that includes the Philippines, Indonesia and part of New Guinea. This is where most of the species are found particularly in the Verde Island passage of Luzon. We have many, many more species that are undiscovered and in fact the Sulawesi corridor was thought to be at the heart of the Coral Triangle but the recent studies suggested that it's actually in the Philippines. So when we were at the College of Medicine at the University of the Philippines in Manila, we got interested in snails that could kill people. It was Dr. Olivera, my colleague at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology who knew about these killer snails because as a boy he collected snails from the seashore. So we thought that by looking at these killer snails where we have a lot of in the Philippines we will have an advantage over our competitors in research because they don't have the count snails and we have it. Although they have all the equipment for doing work then they don't have these species that are so beautiful in our collectors' item. And if you go to the villages the count snails are actually eaten and in fact when we went there one time to get snails from Marinduke the fishermen said, oh you're too late we got a bucket full of konus magus but they are now boiling it for lunch. So we were quite late then but in the Philippines we have many, many more species. We have at least 300 of the over 600 species found worldwide. And the killer snails that we are so curious about is konus geographos, the most dangerous konus snail. It is a fish hunting species and the victims of geographical cones are paralyzed much faster when you done that of snakes. When you get stung by konus geographos it will take only about 10 minutes for the victim to feel the paralysis and then the victim may die in 30 minutes. And the fatality rate that was studied by Yoshiba of Japan who injected himself actually with sang venom as part of his experiments he estimated a fatality rate of 67% which is quite high. So this geographos is a fish eater but there are other species that eat worms and others eat snails, other snails and other mollusk. So among these different species of cone snails it's the konus geographos, it's the fish eaters that are most dangerous to man because they affect vertebrates and in worldwide these stinging cases of konus geographos and other cone snails are mostly in the Indo-Pacific region because this is where the cone snails are found mainly. And they can sting, they can inject a venom because they have a well-developed venom apparatus that consists of A, the venom bulb that is believed to push the venom through the venom duct. It's very muscular. Then B is the venom duct where the venom is synthesized. C is like a packet where there are different harpoons at varied stages of formations. So there is shown the harpoon where you see the sharp needle-like tip and what is shown here is just one half of the harpoon so you can imagine it's quite long and when the snail is ready to sting it positions one of the harpoons at the tip of the proboscis which is D. The proboscis can be elongated by the snail to more than its length so it can reach out to any victim in the sea. There are many, many different cone snails as I said that right now 680 have been verified to be species belonging to cone snails. So, and there are those that are very much related which formerly were thought to just belong to cone snails but there has been a new reclassification of species in these genus and some of them have been delegated to another genus. And each venom of the cone snail has at least 100, 250 different components to 200 components and so if you estimate the total number of cone snails and multiply that by the number of peptides that can be found in each venom then you can have anywhere from 70,000 to 140,000 or even 200,000 different peptides that can be studied. And so we started this we started the study of cone snails when we were at the college of medicine and so the first one that we picked was cone geographers the most dangerous cone snail and what we wanted to do we thought it would just be a one to two year project was to find out what in these cone snails can kill people. And then later on we found that there are so many peptides so in addition to just using the old techniques that we started off in 1970s there are now using modern technologies and I think the development of our studies on cone snails parallel the development of techniques that are more sensitive techniques that are faster and otherwise it would have taken us many, many more years than what we were able to do. And so since these cone snails all over the Philippines one of the things that worried us was that like in Cebu they gather snails in containers and big containers of snails and other marine products are shipped out and they are sold in Hawaii in Japan and so what we did was to try to talk to the fishermen and we did conservation and community development information dissemination we requested scientists from the Marine Science Institute like Peri Alino who helped us organize workshops for the fishermen so the assistants of Peri Alino went there with us to help the fishermen assess the coral reefs that are in Morong Bataan and these fishermen who don't have the regular scuba diving suits that our divers from MSI have what they did was to improvise and they also some of them though in addition some of them have been knew about the illegal fishing activities that are going on in fact some of them were involved in dynamite fishing but when the leader of the group Karesti told them that we should work together because our catch is becoming smaller and smaller we should protect the coral reefs they started confiscating the dynamites the homemade dynamites and one of these is shown at the bottom in the middle of the bottom illustration in addition to having to helping the fishermen cover biodiversity there is now a move from the marine people who realized that actually some of the sediments that are coming from the mountains are affecting the organisms in the ocean because if you have lots of erosion this will then cover the coral reef organisms and they will die so we went to trying to reach out to the people of the mountains and among these are the ITAS this shows the Kanawan ITA Reservation and if you look at the mountains if you look at the mountains there you see this ball mountains the nooded forest and part of this reservation is being used for farming but if you want to go see a forest you have to walk up further so the lower parts of what used to be lush forest have now be converted to farms and some have been subjected to logging and charcoal making and so we also did want to bring science to communities so that they will understand why it's so important to have conservation of what is around us so we talk to the communities explain to them about the indigenous peoples rights act about biodiversity and I used to bring my civic welfare training service course students so that they can teach the young ones about biodiversity and also the older ones the heads of household about biodiversity and we embark on a project that was supported by the Philippine Conservation Foundation Tropical Forest Conservation Foundation which supported us for three years in trying to give the ITAS some information about biodiversity conservation and then we also incorporated livelihood in that project we have two biologists at that time two field biologists namely Ulysses Ferreras and Leonard Cole and we had the social scientist Boromeo Matin the training and biodiversity and inventory and para taxonomy was part of the project from PTFCF so you see here the ITAS collecting samples and preparing the vouchers for delivery and among those that were found are two or kids which were for the first time was found in Luzon we also taught them about growing seedlings from forestry seedlings from the seeds that they have gathered from the forest so they were taught how to set up nurseries and so they maintained this about they were planting about more than 30 different species of forestry and in addition they also had a project on agroforestry so that some of these plants that they have planted there will become their source of livelihood later for example among these is cashew nuts there's bananas, coconuts guava trees and some fruit trees in addition to the forest trees and another aspect of the work is to finding out what the traditional medicine of the ITAS are and Grace Yu from the College of Medicine is our collaborator I studied the functional food of the ITAS and among the functional food of the ITAS is ratan ratan what we use for furniture the shoot of ratan in particular the species limuran or calamus or natus is eaten by the ITAS they said that if you eat this even if you have a having stomach trouble if you are having diarrhea that will surely cure your diarrhea and then they also said that it makes them feel good and so this was developed by Grace Yu she studied this and she found that indeed this ratan shoots when eaten or when given to animals can reduce the motility of the gastrointestinal tract so that's why it can help alleviate diarrhea and then she was able to isolate compounds from this and she in addition to the anti-motility activity she found that this can have anti-inflammatory activity and also anti-cancer activity and the anti-inflammatory activity of ratan in combination with another plant has been developed as a tea that can that is good for rheumatism if you have painful knees it helps and I've tried this Chancellor also tried this and a number of doctors in PGH tried this and now using this herbal tea and this will also be developed as capsules as pure compounds that can later on be sold as drugs so by making use of our natural resources like ratan it's that has been developed into a drug and against inflammation and a drug against diarrhea one can help the itas earn more from what they have and if people can use can get this hidden wealth from the forest then they don't have to cut down trees just to earn the misli amount from charcoal making and also develop drugs from the cone snails you see the cone snails can kill people but the venom have been used to develop drugs like the one that was developed from conus magus is now commercially known as pre-out or primary alternative pre-out to morphine it's a hundred times more active than morphine but since it's a peptide it has to be given in a specialized manner by injection into the intracerebral fluid, spinal fluid and so it is used only for those who have terminal cancer and no longer respond to morphine so these are just two examples of what we can get by studying our natural resources so we really have to preserve our biodiversity in addition right now most of the biodiversity we have most of the trees and the marine resources we have they are exported without any processing and so we get very little from this and if we can develop this into higher value products drugs, herbal teas and other items then that can really help alleviate poverty in rural areas and this is also a way of educating the people and not only educating the community but also educating the scientists to go there because one of these interaction so like mutual learning experiences resulted in this book which is a guide, pictorial guide to the plants of the Bataanational Park which was written by Ulysses Ferreiras and Leonard Koh who are botanist but this was co-authored with two ITAS so because they are the ones who knew about, who know about the plants, who could tell them about when these plants flower when they will bear trees and what plants are being eaten by the animals what plants are important for maintaining the biodiversity of the animals in the forest and so the ITAS really are against monocrapping that is planting the same trees in the forest for the national greening project you know just to facilitate the planting of trees in the forest that they want to restore what has been done is to say put all plants of mahogany all plants of one type of plant but they said if you do this then you want the animals will not have anything to eat because they don't eat some of these plants that the national greening program uses and so you know in the way that we have been as we studied from cone snails we learned about the communities because we have to interact with the communities in order to be able to get samples of these snails all over the Philippines and by doing that we learned to interact with the fishermen we learned about what they are doing how they can how we can help them in conserving the resources that we have and the same way by working with the ITAS we have also learned a lot from them but they have also learned from us about you know scientific names and the uses that we can derive from this by using chemistry biochemistry biology and other say pharmacology so the studies of our natural resources should be done together with the communities and in collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of scientists and we have to empower the communities to conserve their resources because they are the ones who live there and empowerment and approach for sustainable development is to integrate the study of their culture education health and livelihood for the ITAS the most important thing is preservation of their culture followed by education and then they said after education then you can have earn money, you can get employment health is the last in their indicators for development we have developed together with them a social cultural development index that was we defined together with the ITAS so they assigned 40% to culture 30% to education 20% to livelihood and 10% to health so what we did was to use some indicators sub indicators that will measure these main indicators of development and we measured this in 2005 then we measure them again in 2010 so we found an increase in most of these indicators except for cultural heritage because dumadami yung mga mestizo in mestiza and but now we are now doing a survey along these four indicators to estimate how much the parameters have changed and to see if the development that are going on now if the development interventions that we have introduced that other people have introduced have led really to the development of the ITAS to the decrease in their social cultural development index so I think what we have is starting from a chemist that I stayed many many years in the lab just concentrating in the lab but our access to the community our link to the community are in terms of the samples and now I think our interaction with the communities are much richer than maybe what we have contributed to science so and so with that I believe we should all be work together for the empowerment of communities if you want the country to be sustainable