A friend of mine works as a beetle curator. Telling species apart is actually surprisingly difficult. He shot down a lot of my technical solution suggestions wi

A friend of mine works as a beetle curator. Telling species apart is actually surprisingly difficult. He shot down a lot of my technical solution suggestions with ease. Genetic sequencing might work some day but it's not there yet (and they have a lot of specimens, like 10-20 million). E.g. there is a species where each specimen looks very different (e.g. size between mm and cm) depending on how much food they consume. The best way to differentiate is often to extract the genitalia. One thing the article doesn't explicitly mention but alludes to is that a lot of species we think we know may actually be different species, or just the same species with a different look. A lot of the descriptions are 50 years old and read "black body with six legs and a head". So all those need to be re-done at some point.