Bowling Green, Ky. - A Western Kentucky University geoscience graduate student is making national news as part of the discovery of 27 new species in California caves.

Joel Despain, a cave specialist for the National Park Service at Sequoia National Park, participated in a three-year study of subterranean life and helped explore 30 of the 238 known caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks where the previously unknown species of spiders, centipedes, scorpion-like creatures and other animals were discovered.

“Not only are these animals new to science, but they’re adapted to very specific environments -- some of them, to a single room in one cave,” Despain said in an Associated Press report on the discovery. Dr. Jean Krejca, a Texas biologist who directed the research, has worked with Despain on several cave projects from California to the jungles of Malaysia.

Dr. Chris Groves, Despain’s graduate adviser and director of the Hoffman Environmental Research Institute within WKU’s Applied Research and Technology Program, isn’t surprised that Despain is earning national recognition again.

“The high regard that Joel has earned nationally among cave scientists and federal land managers highlights the level of student that WKU’s karst science programs are able to attract,” Dr. Groves said.

Despain, who lives in Three Rivers, Calif., is completing WKU graduate coursework as part of a specially designed master’s degree program for full-time scientists and land managers in the National Park Service. He will defend his thesis research and complete his degree in early March, Groves said.

Despain said he was attracted to WKU because of the program in karst hydrology and karst geology. “It is really a unique program nationwide with a good reputation and years of producing top people in world of caves and karst,” he said. “The degree has been a big help at my job as a Cave Management Specialist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon. It has changed my career by giving me the tools and skills for conducting necessary karst research and studies here at the two parks.”

In 2004, Despain published “Hidden Beneath the Mountains: Caves of Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks,” a 128-page book on the history, science and management of caves within the mountainous national park in the California Sierras.

He traveled to southwest China in 2001 as part of the Hoffman Institute’s China science program and led cave science expeditions to both Indonesia and Malaysia during the time he has been a WKU student.

In 2001, Despain was awarded the Cave Research Foundation’s $3,500 Karst Research Fellowship for his graduate thesis research, which examined interactions between karst geochemistry and atmospheric carbon dioxide in a high mountain karst area of Sequoia National Park.

For more about caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, visit http://www.nps.gov/seki/snrm/geology/cave_karst.htm.

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