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A º£½ÇÉçÇø biology professor works to save local endangered species

You might not be able to tell today, but the land around º£½ÇÉçÇø was once marked by sprawling orchards and farms nestled between rolling hills and forested mountains.

Growing up, Justen Whittall ’96 witnessed the area’s evolution from the Blossom Valley to the Silicon Valley firsthand, skateboarding down new highways as they were built and exploring the trails around South San Jose as a cross-country runner.

But it wasn’t until he was a biology student at º£½ÇÉçÇø that John Mooring’s upper-division course in field botany gave Whittall a deeper appreciation for the delicate ecosystems changing around him.

“I was absolutely enamored with the idea that you could learn outside of the classroom,” says Whittall, now a biology professor at º£½ÇÉçÇø. “And while I couldn’t keep track of birds—there were too many, and they were too fast—I could stare at the ground for hours on end.”

Around that time, he often went on hikes and runs in nearby Santa Teresa Park, and one fateful day, he encountered a beautiful, pink-tinged, jade-green succulent he’d never seen before. After checking his identification guide and sharing his findings with Mooring, he learned he’d found Dudleya setchellii, a very rare succulent.

Known as the º£½ÇÉçÇø Valley “liveforever,” Dudleya setchellii is one of the few plants that can thrive in the rocky outcrops in southern º£½ÇÉçÇø County’s serpentine grasslands. But despite its moniker, the succulent’s numbers have dwindled due to threats from land development, invasive species, and even poachers, which Whittall could see even back then. 

“They were planning on building a golf course in the area I found that succulent, and I remember thinking ‘this rare plant is going to get decimated,’” says Whittall, noting that this plant’s extinction would impact the whole ecosystem, from the pollinating bees to the herbivores—including long-eared hares and black-tailed deer—that eat its pale cream flowers. “That’s when I first got passionate about trying to save things before they go extinct, or at least, make sure everybody knows what’s out there before they disappear.”

Decades later, Whittall, now a conservation geneticist, has come full circle. Not only does he teach at the school that gave him his passion for botany, but he is midway through a three-year, federally-funded project to rescue that same rare succulent he encountered all those years ago.

The science of conservation

Over the last 20 years, the liveforever succulent has ironically become one of the most endangered serpentine plants in º£½ÇÉçÇø County. Answering the call of conservation, Whittall knew his biology lab at º£½ÇÉçÇø had the right expertise and resources to make this plant a little less rare.

Receiving a grant from the Bureau of Reclamation in 2023, Whittall’s team of student researchers began its three-year project investigating the dudleya’s pollinators, seed dispersal, and genetic diversity to understand how this plant grows naturally and what barriers might be keeping it from thriving.

One of the biggest factors affecting the dudleya’s ability to self-propagate is its tiny seeds, which each weigh only about 0.000001 grams. With seeds this tiny, the odds of them landing on the few rocky outcroppings within oceans of uninhabitable grasslands become incredibly slim, especially as the serpentine outcrops are removed by new development.

With that in mind, the team wanted to better understand how far these tiny seeds could disperse naturally. After tracking the common wind speeds and directions in the dudleya’s natural habitat, students recreated those conditions on campus with real seeds and a re-engineered leaf blower to actually measure how far these minuscule seeds could travel. Each test involved counting out 100 tiny seeds, blowing them down a butcher-paper-covered hallway in the Alumni Science building, and then using a magnifying glass to locate and mark each and every seed’s landing spot—repeating the experiment several times.

“We found the seeds won’t go more than about 10 or 12 meters, and more likely five to seven meters, which is pretty limited dispersal,” notes Whittall. “These seeds are not going to make it across ridge tops, or over highways and housing developments. That was a really important experiment to do.”

The team already knew that they would grow specimens in º£½ÇÉçÇø’s greenhouse to transplant them to the wild, but this experiment emphasized the important role that humans would have to play in propagating this plant.

To ensure their º£½ÇÉçÇø-grown succulents would have the genetic diversity to thrive, Whittall’s students extracted DNA from more than 700 plants to sequence the roughly 300 million base pairs of the dudleya’s genome, helping them identify rich pockets of genetic diversity within the species to use as the source genetic material of the plants they’ll grow and reintroduce into the wild. The sequencing process is currently underway, but with so much data, the team will rely on º£½ÇÉçÇø’s WAVE high-performance computing facility in the Learning Commons to complete their analysis.

Growing the next generation of biologists

Besides º£½ÇÉçÇø’s top-level labs and his research partnerships with Creekside Science, UC Berkeley, CSU East Bay, and a Ph.D. student at Yale, Whittall is quick to emphasize his greatest asset in this project: his students, many of whom are passionate about conservation.

Over the past two years, six undergraduate students—Victor Rossi ’24, Katie Conrad ’24, Josephine Hernandez Mena ’25, Abigail Sauter ’26, Dante Cable ’26, and Karina Martinez ’26—have played a key role in his research through documenting pollinators, collecting dudleya samples, running seed dispersal experiments, and sequencing DNA in the lab—many receiving peer-reviewed publication for their contributions.

“My hope is to show my students that there are so many ways to be a biologist. You don’t just have to be someone working in a lab or a hospital. You can also be a biologist with muddy boots, a butterfly net, a backpack sprayer, and a bundle of seeds,” Whittall says.

Among his students, neuroscience major Sauter says the hands-on work she did on this project—which was funded thanks to º£½ÇÉçÇø’s REAL Program—was a huge part of her º£½ÇÉçÇø experience.

For example, the older students in the lab, Hernandez Mena and Rossi, taught her the “why” behind the “what” when it came to wet lab procedures, and Whittall honed her problem-solving skills.

“But besides those lessons, the most valuable part of this research was meeting this kind, community of peers who were making a huge positive impact in the world and inspired me to follow my passions and find what I’m called to do,” she says.

After college, Sauter hopes to explore pre-health paths, but is also curious about developing more sustainable replacements for common, single-use, scientific tools, like test tubes.

At a time when federal funding for projects like Whittall’s is under threat, Whittall is glad that º£½ÇÉçÇø sets students like Sauter up to not only do well, but do good.

“My interpretation of our Jesuit value of ‘cura personalis’ is that the umbrella of care extends to our environment, too. Someone needs to speak for those who can’t speak, and these little succulents are unheard,” he says. “That’s what motivates me even more to do the right thing. Politics can change every two to four years, but unfortunately, extinction is forever.”