16 ms·

As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods)

by xipho 6y ago

As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research. In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."

hammock 6y ago
>there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  This already exists: https://www.inaturalist.org https://www.inaturalist.org
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect species -- there can be details that are difficult to photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's photograph. And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.
    - xipho 6y ago
      I have been at talks by their devs. They candidly admit it will never meet the needs (accuracy) to address questions at this level of specificity. Some things will be extremely successful, many (most) will not. Think of biodiversity as a curve, with a long tail. Will AI on poorly taken images specimens work for the bell? Probably. Will it actually get at the numbers at the tail? Almost certainly not. This is largely because 1) getting at the tail requires intimate knowledge of where to find that biodiversity (the vast majority of iNaturlaist pics are shockingly close to civilization, where diversity may not be) and 2) intimate knowledge, often of internal features or other non-imagable data, so that one can actually record data that fits in the tail.
    - bliteben 6y ago
      inaturalist really needs the funding to support videos honestly.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    iNat is good, but crowdsourced, and anything but a panacea; for example, I'm very confident in my identifications of the Auplopus mellipes and Auplopus architectus metallicus individuals I encountered and photographed last year, but those (plus one braconid, of which I'm admittedly uncertain myself) are the only observations I have on iNat that haven't had any species confirmations from other users. (That's fair; I needed considerable literature review to develop that level of confidence, and I doubt most iNat users share the extent of my interest in wasps.) Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features. In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!) All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      Do you know of any place where one could simply contribute? Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't identified in years and can't quite find any place to simply share the photo[0]. [0] unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        Isn't this the primary purpose of iNaturalist?
- xipho 6y ago
  Not sure if a troll given I address this in the OP. You can't just upload images. Internal dissections, DNA sequences, imaging at SEM scale, all of these are not rare requirements, they are the norm. Specimens have to be meticulously collected, preserved, and vouchered in Natural History collections as part of this process (Science should be replicable to some degree). It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience by making, literally, millions of observations, then "power-up" with their free access to SEMs, sequencers, high-powered microscopes and lighting, digital imaging systems (etc.) then "farm for $" to get access to travel and gear then gain "clan-clout" to navigate collecting policies and permitting, etc. etc. Something to strive for, but sadly not a reality anytime soon.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Do they actually have lots of species which look the same but are impossible to tell apart except for DNA?
    - hospadar 6y ago
      Look into mushroom identification - many little brown mushrooms (LBMs) are differentiated only by careful microscopic analysis of their spores or DNA sequencing. Mushrooms are especially difficult because many of the potentially useful identifying features are only present at certain (short - hours or a day or two) phases of the lifecycle of the fruiting body.
      - tp3 6y ago
        Finally, for those who think genomic/genetic studies are being used inappropriately, consider that while they may seem to me to be, in practice, just another sort of 'data processing' (which they are not - they are often just generalised (or even generalized), and their application to new contexts is not that different to simply applying similar analysis to previous contexts) it is possible, for example, that, for example, the study of the DNA sequences of fungi actually (if you want to make a broader and very broad claim about fungus genomics) might in the future yield, in this particular case, a much more detailed, more reliable (and possibly more objective) classification (if not entirely a direct one) of some of the fungi and their eukaryotes in our immediate neighbourhood. I've also got to say that for the same reason, I don't have a lot of confidence in the 'fungal genomic analysis' thing in particular, because, on the whole, it seems to me to be so easily manipulated.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I've seen plant identification groups, and the thing is that a blurry picture of half the thing is not conducive to accurate identification. When these are correctly identified, it's often because the person has a particular investment in that exact plant. So if the expert on irises or two-stripe bumblebees is offline at the moment you might get crickets, or wild-ass guesses. There is something about video that makes it easier to identify things. The object feels more three dimensional, I suspect, which makes it closer to field identification. That said, we use camera 'traps' for very shy mammal species. I wonder if we could tune those systems for bees. (A fox or cloud leopard might run if the camera gears make noise, but do bees give a damn?)
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  There's a bot on reddit that does this for mushrooms: https://www.reddit.com/user/Mycology_Bot https://www.reddit.com/user/Mycology_Bot This xkcd from just a few years ago has already aged poorly: https://m.xkcd.com/1425/ https://m.xkcd.com/1425/
  - riffraff 6y ago
    well, that comic is seven years old, if anything it'd been accurate :)
esarbe 6y ago
It's the unfortunate truth that in the hyper capitalistic system we live in, everything that does not in the most direct way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut. And we've also seen what happened to climate scientists warning against the dangers of climate change for the past fifty years; they were - from a large part of the media, politicians and the public - at best ignored and more often belittled. So, I don't think it is the taxonomists or entomologists are are fault for not screaming loud enough "WE ARE KILLING OUR OWN LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM" from the top of their lungs. It is us that is to blame. We capitalistic producers and consumers that have put the profit motive over any cautionary principle when it comes to health, safety and liberty. Just see how long it took the general public to accept that a substance like lead in gas is detrimental to health. It's ridiculous. Then again; who could have thought that two centuries of ever-increasing predatory ecosystem exploitation could have any negative consequences?
- mulmen 6y ago
  We don’t live in a hyper capitalist system. This hyperbole is harmful to any conversation about making positive change. This is the intellectual equivalent of burning coal. Your emissions have a cost that others have to pay.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    I don't know where you live, but I would call US hyper capitalist. Overly privatized into the hands of the 1%. No health care. Everyday people mostly powerless and government pandering to companies for political support. My country is not much better.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dpoochieni 6y ago
      That's not hyper-capitalistic, that's just fascist/pseudo-feudalist. Throughtout history everyday people have been pretty much powerless in any meaningful way, always, no exception except maybe for early USA history.
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
I have a controversial theory that society would be better off if we made sure no one technically had to work to survive. Working would provide income to improve your conditions (serving as motivation), but food and shelter would be made available to everyone no matter what. Under these conditions, anyone could study what they wanted and volunteer to do things like this, and institutions could provide support to them at little cost. I imagine we accomplish this by making the necessities of life as cheap as possible, not by heavy state subsidy. Our need to squeeze profitable labor out of every person seems actually counter productive. Anyway total aside...
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  People would stay at home, watch TV and become depressed. Instead we should pay people to study things they are interested in, and then pay them to go apply those studies to the real world! Give peoples lives meaning and purpose with valuable work!
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    People have said this but I really don’t think that’s true. That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met. People love to do things. I think most people would “work” even if it was volunteer work. But if they got injured or had a life change, they wouldn’t be screwed. People will find meaning. It’s part of the human condition. It’s only when you take someone who has been working day in and day out for years and you give them a week off, and they’ll collapse on the couch and watch TV and feel bad. Because they are exhausted and haven’t developed any healthy hobbies. But if it was their whole life, they wouldn’t stay on the couch forever. Also when you give a worker a bit of time off, their friends are still working. If everyone can take time off, people would meet with each other. And that’s the oldest human pastime. The company of others. And it’s free!
    - kiliantics 6y ago
      > That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met. Exactly! Do people not realise that the whole reason we have any science in the first place is because of these people? Before there was any kind of middle class, these were the only guys with the freedom to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, thanks to living comfortably in other respects, and they did it.
readams 6y ago
This is a great example of how our biases can lead us to make mistakes like this. If they had looked at this and the numbers pointed the other way, they would certainly have looked at the denominator in hopes that the number of people identifying the specimens had gone up by more than the amount of observations. Just a great lesson to everyone when trying to do science.
titzer 6y ago
Care to provide a reference to this declining number of taxonomists? Because you've made a long reasonable-sounding argument, but there are a lot of reasonable-sounding arguments that don't have any empirical evidence.
- xipho 6y ago
  Sure [0], [1], [2], [3] can give you a hint at the keywords to search for. "Taxonomic impediment" is often used, it will let you dig deeper (though I don't like the term for various reasons). The topic has been raised for decades. I was part of the NSF program PEET [4], my peers and I got the best training in the world. Some of us are fortunate enough to good or great jobs in taxonomy. I can think of none that are strictly alpha-taxonomists (their primary research output being species descriptions). For example, if you did a PhD that was an epic 500 page monograph of the description of 100+ new species and covered 400 species total referencing science and specimens dating back up to 250 years, you wouldn't be a prof now. If you did a diverse, but necessarily less comprehensive PhD on a bunch of topics, maybe a couple new species, maybe a little molecular phylogeny, perhaps a database, a little of this, a little of that, and some of it was very buzzy- you'd have a fighting chance. This isn't really surprising, and I'm not making a real value-judgement on either approach. BTW- the problem is not that we've run out of species to descr [0](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/12/942/390232 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/12/942/390232) [1](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/latest-endangered-species-scientists-count-endangered-species https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/latest-endangered-speci...) [2](https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1017/S1367943002002299 https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...) [3](https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article-pdf/35/6/729/10346383/jcb0729.pdf https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article-pdf/35/6/729/10346383/j...) [4](https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5451 https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5451)
  - titzer 6y ago
    Thanks for the links.
anigbrowl 6y ago
in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important Without disputing your claim, why is this taxonomists' job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become the world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon'). If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics' goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.
- z77dj3kl 6y ago
  Because that's unfortunately how the world works: you have to sell to people the importance of what you do.
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs. We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded. Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).
hertzrat 6y ago
> in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) What tools did they fail to learn? If we went from a state of identifying species to not identifying them, and the major change is removing the taxonomists, isn't it arguable that they were doing fine if not better than without them?
- xipho 6y ago
  Not sure I understand. A - we identified species B - we removed our ability to identify species A & B therefor C - we're better off ... doesn't seem to follow. Something is missing.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
> This is not to say that species richness is not declining, I continue to be baffled by how many take serious this rather arbitrary concept as though it actually mean something. Apparently Clostridium botulinum as a species is purely defined by the ability to produce botulinum; many members of this species have acquired this trait by way of horizontal gene transfer and are otherwise vertically not specially related and vertically related strains that lost it recently are considered different species. The species of the neanderthal man has recently gone extinct, or not, depending on a sheer matter of semantics of whether it and the cro-magnon man are of the same species, or not. Similar arguments can of course be made for languages. A dialect with an army-and-a-navy being lost is a tragœdy; a dialect that lacks such being lost is inconsequential, — for the former is a separate language, and the latter merely a variant of another.
- xipho 6y ago
  Do you feel confident that you can apply an individual measure of meaning as to whether each of the 2 million + estimated species on Earth is "valuable"? If not, perhaps blanked statements might be of use. For example all species that produce food, perhaps useful. All species that are part of an ecosystem that decomposes dead things so that we are covered in filth - also useful. Species that cause viral death- extremely useful to know about. Species that produce oxygen for us to breath, I'm for them. Species that fix nitrogen so we can eat, count me. You get my drift, suggesting nothing matters/has meaning is a dead-end/non-starter argument.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    You assume that these traits necessarily lie on the arbitrary lines men have drawn between so-called “species”. My point is that they do not, and that the line between different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can very often differ from one specialist to the other. Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which is especially a place where some members of the same species produce said oxygen, and some do not.
    - xipho 6y ago
svara 6y ago
> the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), [...] has most certainly declined. That sentence is close to falsifying itself. If species can be identified by molecular methods, then anyone trained in basic molecular bio techniques can do it. Now, I don't know how many insect sequences that would enable identification are actually available in databases (might be a few, might be a lot...), but "molecular methods" make this easier, not harder.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > anyone trained in basic molecular bio techniques can do it. In the same way as anyone with a laptop can program. The quality of the results... may vary.

by xipho 6y ago

hammock 6y ago

>there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified.

AlexandrB 6y ago
This already exists: https://www.inaturalist.org https://www.inaturalist.org
- Symbiote 6y ago
  The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect species -- there can be details that are difficult to photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's photograph. And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.
  - xipho 6y ago
    I have been at talks by their devs. They candidly admit it will never meet the needs (accuracy) to address questions at this level of specificity. Some things will be extremely successful, many (most) will not. Think of biodiversity as a curve, with a long tail. Will AI on poorly taken images specimens work for the bell? Probably. Will it actually get at the numbers at the tail? Almost certainly not. This is largely because 1) getting at the tail requires intimate knowledge of where to find that biodiversity (the vast majority of iNaturlaist pics are shockingly close to civilization, where diversity may not be) and 2) intimate knowledge, often of internal features or other non-imagable data, so that one can actually record data that fits in the tail.
  - bliteben 6y ago
    inaturalist really needs the funding to support videos honestly.
- throwanem 6y ago
  iNat is good, but crowdsourced, and anything but a panacea; for example, I'm very confident in my identifications of the Auplopus mellipes and Auplopus architectus metallicus individuals I encountered and photographed last year, but those (plus one braconid, of which I'm admittedly uncertain myself) are the only observations I have on iNat that haven't had any species confirmations from other users. (That's fair; I needed considerable literature review to develop that level of confidence, and I doubt most iNat users share the extent of my interest in wasps.) Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features. In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!) All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    Do you know of any place where one could simply contribute? Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't identified in years and can't quite find any place to simply share the photo[0]. [0] unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      Isn't this the primary purpose of iNaturalist?
xipho 6y ago
Not sure if a troll given I address this in the OP. You can't just upload images. Internal dissections, DNA sequences, imaging at SEM scale, all of these are not rare requirements, they are the norm. Specimens have to be meticulously collected, preserved, and vouchered in Natural History collections as part of this process (Science should be replicable to some degree). It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience by making, literally, millions of observations, then "power-up" with their free access to SEMs, sequencers, high-powered microscopes and lighting, digital imaging systems (etc.) then "farm for $" to get access to travel and gear then gain "clan-clout" to navigate collecting policies and permitting, etc. etc. Something to strive for, but sadly not a reality anytime soon.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Do they actually have lots of species which look the same but are impossible to tell apart except for DNA?
  - hospadar 6y ago
    Look into mushroom identification - many little brown mushrooms (LBMs) are differentiated only by careful microscopic analysis of their spores or DNA sequencing. Mushrooms are especially difficult because many of the potentially useful identifying features are only present at certain (short - hours or a day or two) phases of the lifecycle of the fruiting body.
    - tp3 6y ago
      Finally, for those who think genomic/genetic studies are being used inappropriately, consider that while they may seem to me to be, in practice, just another sort of 'data processing' (which they are not - they are often just generalised (or even generalized), and their application to new contexts is not that different to simply applying similar analysis to previous contexts) it is possible, for example, that, for example, the study of the DNA sequences of fungi actually (if you want to make a broader and very broad claim about fungus genomics) might in the future yield, in this particular case, a much more detailed, more reliable (and possibly more objective) classification (if not entirely a direct one) of some of the fungi and their eukaryotes in our immediate neighbourhood. I've also got to say that for the same reason, I don't have a lot of confidence in the 'fungal genomic analysis' thing in particular, because, on the whole, it seems to me to be so easily manipulated.
hinkley 6y ago
I've seen plant identification groups, and the thing is that a blurry picture of half the thing is not conducive to accurate identification. When these are correctly identified, it's often because the person has a particular investment in that exact plant. So if the expert on irises or two-stripe bumblebees is offline at the moment you might get crickets, or wild-ass guesses. There is something about video that makes it easier to identify things. The object feels more three dimensional, I suspect, which makes it closer to field identification. That said, we use camera 'traps' for very shy mammal species. I wonder if we could tune those systems for bees. (A fox or cloud leopard might run if the camera gears make noise, but do bees give a damn?)
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
There's a bot on reddit that does this for mushrooms: https://www.reddit.com/user/Mycology_Bot https://www.reddit.com/user/Mycology_Bot This xkcd from just a few years ago has already aged poorly: https://m.xkcd.com/1425/ https://m.xkcd.com/1425/
- riffraff 6y ago
  well, that comic is seven years old, if anything it'd been accurate :)

esarbe 6y ago

It's the unfortunate truth that in the hyper capitalistic system we live in, everything that does not in the most direct way result in value added is demeaned, discounted and cut. And we've also seen what happened to climate scientists warning against the dangers of climate change for the past fifty years; they were - from a large part of the media, politicians and the public - at best ignored and more often belittled. So, I don't think it is the taxonomists or entomologists are are fault for not screaming loud enough "WE ARE KILLING OUR OWN LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEM" from the top of their lungs. It is us that is to blame. We capitalistic producers and consumers that have put the profit motive over any cautionary principle when it comes to health, safety and liberty. Just see how long it took the general public to accept that a substance like lead in gas is detrimental to health. It's ridiculous. Then again; who could have thought that two centuries of ever-increasing predatory ecosystem exploitation could have any negative consequences?

mulmen 6y ago
We don’t live in a hyper capitalist system. This hyperbole is harmful to any conversation about making positive change. This is the intellectual equivalent of burning coal. Your emissions have a cost that others have to pay.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  I don't know where you live, but I would call US hyper capitalist. Overly privatized into the hands of the 1%. No health care. Everyday people mostly powerless and government pandering to companies for political support. My country is not much better.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dpoochieni 6y ago
    That's not hyper-capitalistic, that's just fascist/pseudo-feudalist. Throughtout history everyday people have been pretty much powerless in any meaningful way, always, no exception except maybe for early USA history.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

I have a controversial theory that society would be better off if we made sure no one technically had to work to survive. Working would provide income to improve your conditions (serving as motivation), but food and shelter would be made available to everyone no matter what. Under these conditions, anyone could study what they wanted and volunteer to do things like this, and institutions could provide support to them at little cost. I imagine we accomplish this by making the necessities of life as cheap as possible, not by heavy state subsidy. Our need to squeeze profitable labor out of every person seems actually counter productive. Anyway total aside...

jay_kyburz 6y ago
People would stay at home, watch TV and become depressed. Instead we should pay people to study things they are interested in, and then pay them to go apply those studies to the real world! Give peoples lives meaning and purpose with valuable work!
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  People have said this but I really don’t think that’s true. That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met. People love to do things. I think most people would “work” even if it was volunteer work. But if they got injured or had a life change, they wouldn’t be screwed. People will find meaning. It’s part of the human condition. It’s only when you take someone who has been working day in and day out for years and you give them a week off, and they’ll collapse on the couch and watch TV and feel bad. Because they are exhausted and haven’t developed any healthy hobbies. But if it was their whole life, they wouldn’t stay on the couch forever. Also when you give a worker a bit of time off, their friends are still working. If everyone can take time off, people would meet with each other. And that’s the oldest human pastime. The company of others. And it’s free!
  - kiliantics 6y ago
    > That doesn’t seem to be what happens to wealthy people who have all of their material needs met. Exactly! Do people not realise that the whole reason we have any science in the first place is because of these people? Before there was any kind of middle class, these were the only guys with the freedom to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge, thanks to living comfortably in other respects, and they did it.

readams 6y ago

This is a great example of how our biases can lead us to make mistakes like this. If they had looked at this and the numbers pointed the other way, they would certainly have looked at the denominator in hopes that the number of people identifying the specimens had gone up by more than the amount of observations. Just a great lesson to everyone when trying to do science.

titzer 6y ago

Care to provide a reference to this declining number of taxonomists? Because you've made a long reasonable-sounding argument, but there are a lot of reasonable-sounding arguments that don't have any empirical evidence.

xipho 6y ago
Sure [0], [1], [2], [3] can give you a hint at the keywords to search for. "Taxonomic impediment" is often used, it will let you dig deeper (though I don't like the term for various reasons). The topic has been raised for decades. I was part of the NSF program PEET [4], my peers and I got the best training in the world. Some of us are fortunate enough to good or great jobs in taxonomy. I can think of none that are strictly alpha-taxonomists (their primary research output being species descriptions). For example, if you did a PhD that was an epic 500 page monograph of the description of 100+ new species and covered 400 species total referencing science and specimens dating back up to 250 years, you wouldn't be a prof now. If you did a diverse, but necessarily less comprehensive PhD on a bunch of topics, maybe a couple new species, maybe a little molecular phylogeny, perhaps a database, a little of this, a little of that, and some of it was very buzzy- you'd have a fighting chance. This isn't really surprising, and I'm not making a real value-judgement on either approach. BTW- the problem is not that we've run out of species to descr [0](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/12/942/390232 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/12/942/390232) [1](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/latest-endangered-species-scientists-count-endangered-species https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/latest-endangered-speci...) [2](https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1017/S1367943002002299 https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...) [3](https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article-pdf/35/6/729/10346383/jcb0729.pdf https://academic.oup.com/jcb/article-pdf/35/6/729/10346383/j...) [4](https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5451 https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5451)
- titzer 6y ago
  Thanks for the links.

anigbrowl 6y ago

in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important Without disputing your claim, why is this taxonomists' job? Imagine spending 10-15 years of academic work to get a PhD and become the world expert on something important but obscure, and then being told you need to market yourself to the general public and devote a significant portion of your time to answering stupid questions (as in 'who cares about this boring stuff' as opposed to 'what is the airspeed of a pigeon'). If I understand your 3rd paragraph correctly, maybe the real problem here is university administrators ending up actually in charge of things rather than as mere functionaries whose job is to facilitate the academics' goals, mysterious as those may be.Every single academic person I know loathes the administrators of their institutions (as a class rather than at the individual level, though I can think of exceptions) but seem helpless to displace them.

z77dj3kl 6y ago
Because that's unfortunately how the world works: you have to sell to people the importance of what you do.
parsimo2010 6y ago
Because if you want to make a living you either have to do something that people are asking for, or you have to convince people that they should be asking for. If the world doesn’t see taxonomists’ worth on their own, it is up to them to educate us if they want to keep their jobs. We don’t have unlimited research funds and they need to play the game just like everyone else. Taxonomy has a tougher time of illustrating value compared to cancer research (as one example), but they still need to convince people that they should be funded. Hopefully the field will figure this out before there is a crisis. As a recent example, the field of public health usually struggles to get funding compared to individual medicine. Before the COVID-19 pandemic very few people saw the value in having robust public health policy, agencies, and research, especially when they considered that they could add a new wing to a hospital or buy ambulances with the same money. Public health as a field did a poor job of convincing people that the field had something valuable to offer. Hopefully taxonomy can figure out how to convince the world that they offer something valuable before they go extinct (pun intended).

hertzrat 6y ago

> in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) What tools did they fail to learn? If we went from a state of identifying species to not identifying them, and the major change is removing the taxonomists, isn't it arguable that they were doing fine if not better than without them?

xipho 6y ago
Not sure I understand. A - we identified species B - we removed our ability to identify species A & B therefor C - we're better off ... doesn't seem to follow. Something is missing.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

> This is not to say that species richness is not declining, I continue to be baffled by how many take serious this rather arbitrary concept as though it actually mean something. Apparently Clostridium botulinum as a species is purely defined by the ability to produce botulinum; many members of this species have acquired this trait by way of horizontal gene transfer and are otherwise vertically not specially related and vertically related strains that lost it recently are considered different species. The species of the neanderthal man has recently gone extinct, or not, depending on a sheer matter of semantics of whether it and the cro-magnon man are of the same species, or not. Similar arguments can of course be made for languages. A dialect with an army-and-a-navy being lost is a tragœdy; a dialect that lacks such being lost is inconsequential, — for the former is a separate language, and the latter merely a variant of another.

xipho 6y ago
Do you feel confident that you can apply an individual measure of meaning as to whether each of the 2 million + estimated species on Earth is "valuable"? If not, perhaps blanked statements might be of use. For example all species that produce food, perhaps useful. All species that are part of an ecosystem that decomposes dead things so that we are covered in filth - also useful. Species that cause viral death- extremely useful to know about. Species that produce oxygen for us to breath, I'm for them. Species that fix nitrogen so we can eat, count me. You get my drift, suggesting nothing matters/has meaning is a dead-end/non-starter argument.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  You assume that these traits necessarily lie on the arbitrary lines men have drawn between so-called “species”. My point is that they do not, and that the line between different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can very often differ from one specialist to the other. Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which is especially a place where some members of the same species produce said oxygen, and some do not.
  - xipho 6y ago

svara 6y ago

> the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), [...] has most certainly declined. That sentence is close to falsifying itself. If species can be identified by molecular methods, then anyone trained in basic molecular bio techniques can do it. Now, I don't know how many insect sequences that would enable identification are actually available in databases (might be a few, might be a lot...), but "molecular methods" make this easier, not harder.

pvaldes 6y ago
> anyone trained in basic molecular bio techniques can do it. In the same way as anyone with a laptop can program. The quality of the results... may vary.