Taxacom: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list)

Tue Jul 4 10:15:04 CDT 2023

What a monumental waste of time and effort that would be - at least for the
purposes of gender agreement! No one has presented a good scientific
argument in defence of gender agreement, so I hold by what I said earlier -
it is a useless waste of time! Lepidopterists have never used it, and they
are probably a lot happier for it. Just use the basionyms - that would
result in a much less confusing and more stable system.

Best wishes,

George
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*Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
*Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*

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On Tue, 4 Jul 2023 at 15:54, Jose Fernandez-Triana via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> [Sorry for the long email that follows]
>
>
>
> What a long exchange of ideas over the past couple of weeks or so! Even
> though at times it may look repetitive or tiring, I think this exchange has
> been mostly valuable, as it is indeed important to hear other criteria and
> see other perspectives (we have seen comments coming from different sectors
> and degrees of specialization). I think these exchanges are one of the main
> useful things of Taxacom.
>
>
>
> One of the main components of this discussion has been the proposal of
> having “master lists” of taxa. I copy below my signature the latest email
> from Doug about that -but, to be fair, he has been proposing that approach
> for a long time (at least 2019 as far as I can remember, probably longer
> than that). And he has mentioned that several times in this Taxacom list. I
> have to say that I fully agree with Doug’s proposal, and have at times
> wondered why there is not more support for that idea here. Instead, the
> discussion usually steers away towards other topics and his proposal gets
> once and again “forgotten” among the plethora of emails and discussions
> going into many tangents…
>
>
>
> I truly believe that such list (or lists) are indeed possible and would
> probably be the best way to deal with the many problems that we have been
> discussing here lately. What I think has been overlooked, or at least not
> discussed with more detail is how to generate such lists. Usually what I
> see here is the work from informatics or databasing experts, trying to
> obtain and curate such information from many sources, and I also see the
> efforts (wonderful! Do not get me wrong) of isolated persons spending a
> considerable amount of their time (mostly for free and out of love for what
> they do) gathering such data and preparing such lists on their own.
>
>
>
> But there has never been a concerted effort (at least that I am aware of,
> but perhaps I am wrong!) to discuss how such list(s) could be generated
> from bottom to top, so to speak, i.e., generated by the community instead
> of done by the few brave “IT knights” that are trying to do it now. Why do
> not we try to engage the wider taxonomic community to work together on
> that? And “reward” them by way of publications where such lists are
> initially presented, so that everyone that participates “gains” something
> (instead of just appearing to be just contributing her/his info “for free”
> to some IT wizard that would generate the list, as it is usually the case)?
>
>
>
> There are no real limitations to such an approach, if there would be a will
> to do it. For example, scientific societies devoted to specific taxa could
> decide to support more and advance such efforts. [I am going to use
> Hymenoptera here to use myself as a Guinea pig in the following exercise (I
> am the current president of the Hym. Society)]. So, let’s say that the
> International Society of Hymenopterists (ISH) decides to publish lists of
> genera (and species, because a concerted effort needs not to be limited
> only to genera gender agreement, it can also be broadened to include many
> other things such as synonyms, species lists, etc.). Like all of the hyper
> diverse insect orders, we do not really know how many species are already
> described (let alone how many undescribed… but that is another topic, so I
> digress there). And we do not have lists of synonyms, gender of genera, and
> so on and so forth for many Hymenoptera groups. But what if ISH members
> decide to work together towards that goal? The work can be spread by
> families, or any other, smaller grouping, such that work can be manageable
> and papers can be produced as groups are completed. Such publications can
> later be used by all of the databasers and IT wizards, but the initial list
> gets credited to the taxonomists that worked preparing, checking and
> analyzing those lists. One only needs to identify potential “project leads”
> for specific taxa (be it family X or even a large genus Y) and have as many
> people interested with that taxa getting involved in the work needed to
> prepare such lists (authorship of the papers would be determined by the
> individual contribution of each author). Taxa that are “orphan” (i.e., have
> no current  experts to work on that, or the current experts are not
> interested, would remain undone, until the time comes when someone would be
> willing to work on that. But at least a good amount of taxa could be done
> in the meantime. [One different problem is groups where there are different
> experts with competing views and, unfortunately, sometimes contradictory or
> strongly in disagreement… But, from what I have seen, that tends to be more
> common in vertebrates than in larger groups such as invertebrates (although
> no group is exempt from human disagreements and miseries, of course! In any
> case, I will not touch in this email about how to solve those potentially
> “difficult groups” to deal with when there are competing or opposed experts
> (this could be discussed in a different email, if there is any interest in
> doing that)].
>
>
>
> A few years ago I worked on a project like that, with a single subfamily of
> Braconidae (around 3,000 described species). The work involved a) one
> undergrad student, b) one technician, c) one Ichneumonidae researcher, d)
> two Braconidae researchers, with the main expertise on that taxon. At the
> end everyone got “rewarded” (perhaps the better phrase would be “her/his
> work towards that list was properly recognized”) and the paper, published
> in 2020 and over 1,000 pages long, has become the standard for names and
> other things related to that subfamily (including the first time the gender
> for all genera of that group where clearly and explicitly stated, and over
> 300 new combinations were provided, etc.; see the link here:
> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzookeys.pensoft.net%2Farticle%2F39128%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C5c192fa8442f4b71059308db7ca18289%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638240805360672459%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=bZHZ%2BPw2kxHl1QvkbmhqJAzm3VMILbXblDgF9FmK4Cg%3D&reserved=0). [For what is worth, Doug
> helped me A LOT to correct many of the gender problems we encountered
> during that work, that is why I know he has been pushing for these efforts
> for a long time].
>
>
>
> There is no limitation to continue doing that for other Hymenoptera taxa
> that are still pending or any other group. And, needless to say, many other
> lists have been generated, both before and after my example, and many of
> them are better than mine! Thus, I do not pretend to have invented the
> wheel here, I only point to an example of collaborative work done bottom to
> top and being able to deliver a list that was then usable for the wider
> community - as it has been discussed here for the past few weeks.
>
>
>
> Perhaps we could think about this approach, because then things would be
> more manageable and both the taxonomic and wider scientific community would
> accomplish more. We could indeed have our cake and eat it, as long as we
> could agree on some minimum standards and organization of the work to be
> done…
>
>
>
> And I will stop here, thanks to anyone that was patient enough to read up
> to this point!
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jose
>
>
> --
> José L. Fernández-Triana, Ph.D.
> Research Scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
> Canadian National Collection of Insects (CNC)
> 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0C6, CANADA
> Phone: 613-759-1034. Email: jose.fernandez at agr.gc.ca
> Alternative email: cnc.braconidae at gmail.com
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