Posts tagged taxonomy
A Taxonomist's Notebook
The Brain Scoop:
What is a Species?When I was in high school, I learned that the definition of a species is two animals that can interbreed and give birth to fertile offspring. Like, dogs are all one species because they technically can interbreed (although, functionally, watching a Great Dane and a Chihuahua work it out might be… difficult), but donkeys and horses are different because – although they can mate and give birth – their offspring (mules) are sterile.
At the time, I thought – well, that’s pretty straight forward. Thanks, scientists, for solving yet another mystery of life.
Fast forward to a few months ago when I asked one of my taxonomist colleagues to define a ‘species’ for me. The result of that (many hour-long) conversation inspired this video. Turns out, the answer isn’t, at all, straight-forward.
This is so good, and does more than just explain different species concepts. When @ehmeegee said “a species concept is an hypothesis” my cold, jaded, taxonomist’s heart grew 3 sizes
You know when you’re shown one of those illustrations where a face suddenly pops out of lines & shadows and you can never not see it again? That, but for gender inequality in taxonomy & biodiversity science.
Ever since I looked into the gender inequality of biodiversity journal editorial boards & committees, I can’t stop seeing how terribly women are represented & portrayed in biodiversity sciences.
Take for example, the talk Dr. Quentin Wheeler, president of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science & Forestry, just gave as a Plenary address at the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. His title?
“Time to Grow a Pair: Institutional Leadership, Taxonomy and Natural History”
Yeah, taxonomy is totally welcoming to women, as long as they have the ability to grow testicles. Dr. Wheeler went on to start his talk by trying to explain he meant “the pair” were Taxonomy & Natural History, but trying to cover up an idiotic & sexist title for a high-profile talk from a high-profile scientist with a joke only makes it worse.
From there, Dr. Wheeler went on to give a talk that was described by some as “eloquent” and “powerful”, but I can’t agree. Besides the fact that most of the arguments he was making were far from new, and which most people familiar with taxonomy & biodiversity science have heard a thousand times before, or read in any one of the dozens of op-ed pieces on the subject, Dr. Wheeler’s talk further highlighted the male-dominance of taxonomy, a situation that in and of itself should not be a part of taxonomy’s future.
You see, every time Dr. Wheeler highlighted someone’s work (usually while including a photo of the researcher), or made a point using a poignant quote, it was the work of a man, while the only 2 instances where I recall seeing a woman on screen, they were objectified, either as a thing of beauty, as was the point he made with Da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci, or as an analogy for overhyped research that gets more money than it deserves, which he called “Karda$hian Science” (it may have been “Kardashian $cience”, I don’t remember exactly. Regardless, as other’s have argued, making a joke at the expense of the Kardashians is a dick move on it’s own), and which he illustrated with an evocative photo of the Kardashian sisters.
Early in his talk, he did discuss Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction (and I missed what he said about it as my labmate came back to talk to me just as Dr. Wheeler’s talk was starting), but as far as I can tell, this was the only time he highlighted the contributions of someone who hadn’t literally grown a pair at some point in their development.
I doubt Dr. Wheeler *meant* to highlight only male researchers while using women as objects or inappropriate jokes, but nevertheless, that’s what happened, and on a large stage as a guest of honour. Chances are, he didn’t even think twice about who’s work he was highlighting, which is exactly the point. If our default state is to continue to herald the work of men, while not taking the time to consider whether our points could be equally well-made with examples or quotes from women researchers, then we have failed.
Dr. Wheeler pointed out in his talk that taxonomy is facing a number of academic & funding challenges moving into the future, challenges that we must overcome as a community. But if we continue to ignore, and thus perpetuate, gender disparity in our community, including the ways in which we communicate with each other, and not acknowledge that it is just as important a challenge to overcome as anything else we face, then we as taxonomists have no future, and no amount of testicular growth will help us.
Awesome new genus etymology
When a new species or genus is described, authors (nowadays) usually provide an etymology for the name, essentially explaining why they named it the way they did.
The genus Parkerola was just described yesterday by Shûhei Nomura and Richard A. B. Leschen in The Coleopterist’s Bulletin to provide a new generic home for a previously described species, Parkerola gigantea (Broun), pictured above. Check out the etymology section for the new genus:
Etymology. This new genus is dedicated to the authors’ friends, Heidi and Joseph Parker, on theoccasion of their marriage and honoring Joe’s workon pselaphine inquilines. In early 2015, Joe and Heidi became parents of Jonah Wallace Parker (7 lbs. 10 oz.).
Heidi & Joe are great people and friends of mine (Heidi is a brilliant evolutionary biologist and one of my co-hosts on Breaking Bio, while Joe is an evo-devo biologist/beetle taxonomist), and that they were recognized with such a touching patronym warms my heart.
Taxonomists are sometimes portrayed as pedantic curmudgeons who don’t interact well with other researchers or the public, but in reality they are some of the most passionate, loving, and supporting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. On this #TaxonomyDay, I think this is a perfect example of how close-knit the taxonomic community truly is.
So thank you Shûhei & Richard for helping society better understand pselaphine rove beetles, and for infusing your work with a touching piece of personality.
Blondelia sp. piercer, vector version. No stippling.
This specimen was collected 15 minutes from my house, and is now being dissected, drawn, and studied for Kai’s PhD research at a university in a different country.
Awesome.
The discussions that have from time to time taken place as to the number of species of insects have had the result of making it pretty clear that if all the extant collections of insects were put together it would be probably found that they did not contain one-tenth part of the existing species. Moreover, this great general collection – if we can imagine it brought together– would be found dreadfully deficient in other respects; for instance, a large part of the species would be represented by only one, two, or three specimens; many of the individuals would be found to be in a very inferior state of preservation, and not a series would be found to illustrate either variation, geographical distribution, or metamorphosis, although these are essential points for a good collection. We should also discover that there were dreadful discrepancies as to the primary requisite, nomenclature. We should find in some cases several species standing under one name, and in others we should see individuals of the same species standing under different names. In other words, the world has made very little progress with the formation of a collection of insects. The enormous amount of enthusiasm, labour, devotion, and study bestowed on Entomology have as yet effected but little towards what is required.
There can be no doubt that the insect-fauna of the world is becoming greatly depauperated; one hears it from all sources. In our own country, in North America, in New Zealand, in Australia; insects that were formerly found in places are not there now. And I often ask myself whether the insects will not succeed in becoming extinct before mankind has become acquainted with them.
David Sharp, 1893 in The Cost and Value of Insect Collections (available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nabokov frequently voiced annoyance with scientists and science-writers not attributing discovery — not acknowledging the person who discovered and named a butterfly species. Therein lies a broader, and rather timely, lament about our culture’s failure to honor discovery as a creative act and a subset of scholarship — such a scientist, after all, doesn’t invent a species, for it already exists in nature, but discovers it, names it, and contextualizes it in the canon of natural history. It is no coincidence that Nabokov’s own role at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology was that of curator, for this is the task of the curator — to describe, arrange, and contextualize what already exists in such a way as to shed new light on its meaning, to discover and un-cover its significance and place in the canon of ideas.
Embedded in this act is also a lineage of discovery, similar to the “links in a chain” metaphor Pete Seeger used for creativity: I learned of Nabokov’s pet peeve about discovery thanks to Stephen Jay Gould — perhaps the greatest curator of scientific ideas the world has ever known, the greatest contextualizer of such ideas in the popular imagination — and you learned of it via me, and the person you tell about this will learn of it via you. All of us are links in the evolutionary chain of ideas, much like each butterfly species discovered is a link in the evolutionary chain of natural history. This is why Richard Dawkins, in coining the word meme, used a metaphor from evolutionary biology to describe how ideas spread: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”
Some thoughts on discovery by way of Nabokov’s butterflies via explore-blog. I recommend heading over to Brain Pickings and reading Maria’s full post, it’s great.
It’s amazing what a literary giant can teach us about the realities of the scientific process, isn’t it? Discovery is truly an act of creation.
Our obsession with discovery has some darker sides, though. When we place so much value on those moments of “Eureka!” they can become disguised as destinations instead of waypoints on the road of discovery. Our journey is never complete.
And when we heap importance on lone individuals, we can forget that we were guided there by many, and it was just that one light that shone brighter, sometimes unfairly.
Worse, we often declare those individuals kings of that new domain, placing them on thrones, painting them as geniuses, and forgetting their often fallible humanity. I thoroughly recommend this story from science writer Ed Yong about what happened when he met his hero, Sir David Attenborough:
BONUS: Read Nabokov’s poem dedicated to the discovery of a butterfly, it’s beautiful stuff/
(via jtotheizzoe)
But seriously, please acknowledge the people who discovered and named species.
(Source: explore-blog, via itsokaytobesmart)
My main impetus for starting a blog was to improve my writing. While I think I’ve accomplished that in the 5 years since I started, I’d like to increase the speed at which I write, and establish a regular writing routine (something I’m definitely lacking/procrastinating about currently). To hopefully fix this, I’m considering assigning myself an outreach writing challenge project to write 250 articles highlighting newly described species in 2015. That’s pretty much an article every weekday for the entire year (with a few days buffer built in for holidays, travel, etc). I’d keep each article to no more than 300 words, and I’d distribute them taxonomically to reflect global biodiversity (i.e. 1 extant mammal all year, but a beetle pretty well every week; take that vertebrate bias).
Not only will this hopefully establish better writing habits, and allow me to learn about organisms that I’m currently pretty clueless about, but it should also draw some attention to a lot of new species which may otherwise go unrecognized. YAY Taxonomy!
I’m not going to call it a New Year’s Resolution, because resolutions are meant to be broken, but rather a goal, something to strive towards. Am I crazy to try it? Maybe, but I think it’s worth a shot.
Social Media & Obscure Natural History
Random thing I just stumbled across: a paper describing a new genus & species of soil mite (Osperalycus tenerphagus) is the most viewed paper in the Journal of Natural History. In fact, it has more views than the rest of the top 10 most viewed papers for the journal combined (which includes a touching memorial to Charles Darwin, and an important paper by Alfred Russell Wallace).
But, why? Why would a taxonomic paper on an obscure soil mite from Ohio be the most viewed article in a journal with 176 years of history*? From what I can tell, it’s largely because Quentin Wheeler wrote about it in his blog at The Guardian. While probably less than a dozen people will ever see or collect this mite themselves, at least 10,000 people now know it exists thanks to social media and blogging.
I don’t want to read too much into this, I just think it’s an interesting example of social media’s potential to breathe new life and interest into disciplines like Natural History & Taxonomy.
*Obviously this is only counting views since the papers have been put online & is skewed, but still.