[Taxacom] Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis?

[Chris Thompson]

Neal has a VALID point for which an add point is needed.

Personally, I know of a couple of hundred new species of flower flies. Why 
have those not been described and added to the total?

Yes, Neal, lists various reasons, such as greater admin time, grant writing, 
focus on high impact aspect (DNA analyses, phylogenetic analyses), etc.  But 
the real issue is higher standards ...

Once about 150 years, the BM(NH) paid a bonus to encourage its scientist to 
publish more new species. Francis Walker responded and published some 
14,000. Today most of those are recognized as valid species and the BM(NH) 
recognized as perhaps the MAJOR depository of biodiversity vouchers, etc. 
But what was the standard for documentation of those new species. Walker 
published in an in-house publication (no peer-review, etc.) and simply wrote 
out a few lines of descriptive phrases for each.

Today, unless one self-publishes, as some do, simple new species 
descriptions strung together are no longer acceptable. Minimal standards 
require placing new species formally into the context of all known related 
species, minimal a key to those species. And then the maximal description of 
all characters, with illustrations. AND many high impact journals just will 
not accept any new species descriptions, etc., unless it is a new bird or 
monkey!

SO, the bottom line remains, if we, as a Society, really wanted to describe 
our Biodiversity, to document it, etc., then the solution is simply. Provide 
more support to existing taxonomists and ensure there is a well supported 
future generation of descriptive taxonomists.

Yes, we all know that Paul Hebert has already solved this problem. Simply 
generate DNA barcodes! And Andy Brower has shown that one can simply then 
add names to those barcodes. But I remain firm in my belief that people 
would like to know more about the concept those names represent than a 
sequence of DNA nucleotides, whether those refer to something that they can 
recognize without Dan Janzen's magic DNA barcode reader. It is nice to know 
that Cepa alex, for example, is a brilliant bluish-purple two-winged fly 
whose maggots live in the sap-fluxes of various trees in southeastern 
Brazil. That requires a description and that requires time, support, etc.

Oh, well ...

Sincerely,

Chris

from home

-----Original Message----- 
From: Neal Evenhuis
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 4:05 PM
To: Roderic Page ; taxacom
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis?

I think their analysis missed a very important point.

They say that given the decline in numbers of species described per 
taxonomist since 1950 there must be a declining pool of species. This does 
not take into account that some taxonomists are simply not publishing new 
taxa anymore -- for various reasons (greater admin time, teaching duties, 
grant writing for them and students, studies focusing more on evolutionary 
relationships, etc.).

I would contend that we have plenty of taxonomists but the current financial 
climate and funding priorities overall do not support describing new taxa 
anymore. Maybe someone should do an analysis on whether there is a positive, 
negative, or any correlation to the apparent increasing amount of molecular 
research by "taxonomists" (since that 1950 benchmark used by Joppa et al.) 
and the decreasing numbers of new species per taxonomist they claim exists.

Just a thought ....

-Neal

On 10/5/11 6:37 AM, "Roderic Page" 
<r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk<mailto:r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>> scribbled the following 
tidbit:

Hot on the tail of the recent paper son the number of species comes Joppa et 
al.'s paper in TREE http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010 , which 
concludes:

"Conventional wisdom is highly prejudiced. It suggests that taxonomists were 
a formerly more numerous people, are in 'crisis', are becoming endangered 
and are generally asocial. We consider these hypotheses and reject them to 
varying degrees."

It's an interesting paper. I've written a short blog post on the irony that 
it will be hard to test their conclusions because the taxonomic data they 
use isn't freely available, see 
http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/10/taxonomy-crisis-what-crisis.html

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk<mailto:r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com<mailto:rodpage1962 at aim.com>
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html


_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these 
methods:

(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

(2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom 
your search terms here


________________________________
This message is only intended for the addressee named above. Its contents 
may be privileged or otherwise protected. Any unauthorized use, disclosure 
or copying of this message or its contents is prohibited. If you have 
received this message by mistake, please notify us immediately by reply mail 
or by collect telephone call. Any personal opinions expressed in this 
message do not necessarily represent the views of the Bishop Museum.

_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these 
methods:

(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

(2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom 
your search terms here