7 ms·

A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr

236 points by llambda 14y ago

mikehotel 14y ago
Just how big of an unclassified specimen backlog do most museums have? When does it make sense to go through this rather than browsing insect tags on Flickr? Or, better yet, crowdsource the backlogs via Flickr...
- phpnode 14y ago
  pretty hard to crowdsource something like this, just how many people are there out there that would even know how to tell if a given image represents a "new" species or not. Not many.
savramescu 14y ago
And the museum refused to fund an expedition for finding this? And the Scientist waited a year until the photographer went back there. It doesn't look to me that it was hard to find (especially since thy had an uncataloged specimen). I see that in this case the Scientist didn't want to be bothered very much with it. Furthermore he named the specie after his daughter and not the finder. When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?
- unimpressive 14y ago
  > When has the exitement for discovery got so casual? When we realized that the number of species on the planet is large enough to give up on any hope of ever cataloging them all. I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...
  - colincsl 14y ago
    I don't think vision/ML techniques will be a viable option for quite a while. These algorithms have a hard enough time correctly classifying dozens of classes, let alone 8.7 million species of animals. This is especially true given that many of these species only have a small number of images.
  - masterzora 14y ago
    > I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos... You have to be careful with those things. My alma mater has a tale of a student 7 or 8 years ago who built a neural net to detect lizards in photos. He fed the system a bunch of pictures to teach it what lizards look like. When it came time to test he got remarkable results: it was 100% effective in positively identifying lizards. Then he fed it a picture of empty ground and the net happily confirmed that this picture contained a lizard as well! Turns out, if all of your training data is positive the computer just learns "everything is a lizard". Of course, real-life researchers would never dare make such a mistake but this tale always amuses me so I couldn't resist :)
    - relix 14y ago
      So he really didn't understand neural networks?
      - masterzora 14y ago
        I wouldn't say that. I've always seen it like a physicist dropping a negative: he understands and when he sees the result he immediately knows what he did wrong but a little careless thought at the time led to a silly mistake.
    - tripzilch 14y ago
      David Icke would get better accuracy than that. My university background is in Machine Learning. Sounds like this person did not understand ML. Was he new at this? You should learn about false positives, false negatives and plotting ROC curves from the first experiments with simple artificial random point cloud datasets (toy problems) before you even bother stepping up to image recognition. When a ML researcher gets a 100% accuracy rate, they go look for the bug in their program, not think "oh awesome, it must be very good then"--it's a bit of an embarassing mistake if it turns out it's because your training set only contains examples for one of your two classes ("has a lizard" vs "does not have a lizard").
      - masterzora 14y ago
  - bagelicious 14y ago
    I doubt machine vision is good enough to even classify known species.
    - FaceKicker 14y ago
      There is recent work along these lines for birds specifically, e.g., [1]. It's not anywhere near human accuracy and I think it's only a couple hundred species but it does kind of work. [1] http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~farrell/birdlets/iccv11-camera-ready.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~farrell/birdlets/iccv11-camer...
- withad 14y ago
  Discovering something completely new still is a big deal - do a search for "new species" and then any recent year and you'll find numerous articles (usually written around December) about all the weird and wonderful creatures discovered that year. But this was a lacewing with an unusual colouration and thousands of new insect species are discovered every year. If biologists and museums got all worked up and dropped everything they were doing over each one, they'd never have the time or money to do anything else.
ksec 14y ago
This may be totally off topic. But Flickr? While the story may be true It seems to be another new marketing things under new management to generate more buzz.
- ajays 14y ago
  It's NPR, not your mom-and-pop radio station. I'm sure they verify the story before publishing it.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    Just like This American Life verified every story, until they didn't and it blew up in their face.
    - Apocryphon 14y ago
      This American Life isn't even on NPR. It's part of PRI.
    - ajays 14y ago
      "This American Life" is not a news program. But you already knew that.
      - smallblacksun 14y ago
        "The Picture Show" is not a news program either.
        ajays 14y ago
        I don't understand where the hate is coming from. What are people disputing here? That the picture was found on Flickr? That the scientists didn't really see the picture? What is it, exactly, that's getting in your craw? It's a trivial little story. The thing that got me to comment here was the fact that it (the new species) wasn't named after the photographer; that's all. But I am really surprised to see people questioning the veracity of the story which is so insignificant (there are 100s of new species being discovered all the time; it's not like they found Sasquatch or something), and the baffling assertion that it's got something to do with the management at Flickr.... really?!?!?
jasonkester 14y ago
Shame the entomologist didn't offer to let the guy who actually discovered, photographed, and collected the bug name it. I was waiting for that to be the happy ending of the story, but surprisingly he just named it after his own daughter. [(optional) insert lame joke about proper attribution]
- ajays 14y ago
  Yeah, this sentence: "The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter." just bothered me. A total dick move by Winterton.
  - wheels 14y ago
    It's pretty presumptuous to call someone a dick when you know none of the details of the situation. It's entirely possible that he asked the guy if he wanted to name it and he turned it down.
    - spitx 14y ago
      Only if anecdotal, I find people from English speaking nations outside of North America being incredibly opportunistic in these things. This observation purely emerges from my experience.
      - nilved 14y ago
        isn't that a bit of a generalization
      - miahi 14y ago
        Some are in for the fame, others for the money. I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their (American) boss was setting targets on number of patents registered by their support gig.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
Fairies! I've seen them do it.
freepipi 14y ago
cool
raghus 14y ago
I can't help feeling that this story would have gotten more media attention if only the photo had been posted to Twitter or Instagram
nostromo 14y ago
Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back? It's odd because it makes an insect that otherwise is very camouflaged much more noticeable. This makes me wonder if it's biomimicry of another dangerous/poisonous/distasteful local insect.
- maratd 14y ago
  > Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back? More than likely, it's a sexual display/indicator without any "practical" purpose related to survival. Like a peacock's tail. If you're really interested in evolutionary biology, read Darwin's original work. You'll be surprised to learn that most adaptations have little to do with survival.
  - 1as 14y ago
    Perhaps I'm niggling, but even adaptations which evolve by sexual selection have everything to do with survival.
    - graue 14y ago
      Genetic survival, yes. Survival of the individual, no.
- spitx 14y ago
  Something akin to the evolution of the peppered moth, perhaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution But then again, the "original experiments behind the peppered moth story" were known to have "widely acknowledged flaws." http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/content/article/127.html http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/co...
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  My son and I both thought it looked like a spider on its wings. Maybe it's a trick to make predators think it already got caught.
Volscio 14y ago
No shoutout yet for Project Noah? http://www.projectnoah.org/ http://www.projectnoah.org/ "Backed by National Geographic, Project Noah is mobilizing a new generation of nature explorers and helping people from around the world appreciate their local wildlife. Our community is harnessing the power and popularity of new mobile technologies to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity."
- orionmystery 14y ago
  I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago: http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689 http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689
rickdale 14y ago
"I swear this crazy weather has created new insects. Have you noticed that we have new insects this year?" - My brother, we live in Michigan, says this to me all the time.
DigitalSea 14y ago
Winterton comes across as a big of a jerk if you ask me. Without the photographer taking the photo initially and then a year later returning to the same spot and capturing this insect there would have been no discovery. Fair enough Guek not some recognition and has his name published co-author in a scientific journal, but seems like the importance of Guek is lost here. All the scientist did was go, "Compare to any other lacewings we have on record, if no match, new species. Presto, new species give me my accolades" - the bug should have been named after Guek not Winterton's daughter.
205guy 14y ago
I'm curious: how do they know it's a new species? Seems like it could just as easily be a small mutation that does not affect interbreeding. From one (presumably dead) specimen, how did they determine it was an entirely new species, and not just a local population?

236 points by llambda 14y ago

Just how big of an unclassified specimen backlog do most museums have? When does it make sense to go through this rather than browsing insect tags on Flickr? Or, better yet, crowdsource the backlogs via Flickr...

phpnode 14y ago
pretty hard to crowdsource something like this, just how many people are there out there that would even know how to tell if a given image represents a "new" species or not. Not many.

savramescu 14y ago

And the museum refused to fund an expedition for finding this? And the Scientist waited a year until the photographer went back there. It doesn't look to me that it was hard to find (especially since thy had an uncataloged specimen). I see that in this case the Scientist didn't want to be bothered very much with it. Furthermore he named the specie after his daughter and not the finder. When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?

unimpressive 14y ago
> When has the exitement for discovery got so casual? When we realized that the number of species on the planet is large enough to give up on any hope of ever cataloging them all. I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...
- colincsl 14y ago
  I don't think vision/ML techniques will be a viable option for quite a while. These algorithms have a hard enough time correctly classifying dozens of classes, let alone 8.7 million species of animals. This is especially true given that many of these species only have a small number of images.
- masterzora 14y ago
  > I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos... You have to be careful with those things. My alma mater has a tale of a student 7 or 8 years ago who built a neural net to detect lizards in photos. He fed the system a bunch of pictures to teach it what lizards look like. When it came time to test he got remarkable results: it was 100% effective in positively identifying lizards. Then he fed it a picture of empty ground and the net happily confirmed that this picture contained a lizard as well! Turns out, if all of your training data is positive the computer just learns "everything is a lizard". Of course, real-life researchers would never dare make such a mistake but this tale always amuses me so I couldn't resist :)
  - relix 14y ago
    So he really didn't understand neural networks?
    - masterzora 14y ago
      I wouldn't say that. I've always seen it like a physicist dropping a negative: he understands and when he sees the result he immediately knows what he did wrong but a little careless thought at the time led to a silly mistake.
  - tripzilch 14y ago
    David Icke would get better accuracy than that. My university background is in Machine Learning. Sounds like this person did not understand ML. Was he new at this? You should learn about false positives, false negatives and plotting ROC curves from the first experiments with simple artificial random point cloud datasets (toy problems) before you even bother stepping up to image recognition. When a ML researcher gets a 100% accuracy rate, they go look for the bug in their program, not think "oh awesome, it must be very good then"--it's a bit of an embarassing mistake if it turns out it's because your training set only contains examples for one of your two classes ("has a lizard" vs "does not have a lizard").
    - masterzora 14y ago
- bagelicious 14y ago
  I doubt machine vision is good enough to even classify known species.
  - FaceKicker 14y ago
    There is recent work along these lines for birds specifically, e.g., [1]. It's not anywhere near human accuracy and I think it's only a couple hundred species but it does kind of work. [1] http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~farrell/birdlets/iccv11-camera-ready.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~farrell/birdlets/iccv11-camer...
withad 14y ago
Discovering something completely new still is a big deal - do a search for "new species" and then any recent year and you'll find numerous articles (usually written around December) about all the weird and wonderful creatures discovered that year. But this was a lacewing with an unusual colouration and thousands of new insect species are discovered every year. If biologists and museums got all worked up and dropped everything they were doing over each one, they'd never have the time or money to do anything else.

ksec 14y ago

This may be totally off topic. But Flickr? While the story may be true It seems to be another new marketing things under new management to generate more buzz.

ajays 14y ago
It's NPR, not your mom-and-pop radio station. I'm sure they verify the story before publishing it.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Just like This American Life verified every story, until they didn't and it blew up in their face.
  - Apocryphon 14y ago
    This American Life isn't even on NPR. It's part of PRI.
  - ajays 14y ago
    "This American Life" is not a news program. But you already knew that.
    - smallblacksun 14y ago
      "The Picture Show" is not a news program either.
      - ajays 14y ago
        I don't understand where the hate is coming from. What are people disputing here? That the picture was found on Flickr? That the scientists didn't really see the picture? What is it, exactly, that's getting in your craw? It's a trivial little story. The thing that got me to comment here was the fact that it (the new species) wasn't named after the photographer; that's all. But I am really surprised to see people questioning the veracity of the story which is so insignificant (there are 100s of new species being discovered all the time; it's not like they found Sasquatch or something), and the baffling assertion that it's got something to do with the management at Flickr.... really?!?!?

jasonkester 14y ago

Shame the entomologist didn't offer to let the guy who actually discovered, photographed, and collected the bug name it. I was waiting for that to be the happy ending of the story, but surprisingly he just named it after his own daughter. [(optional) insert lame joke about proper attribution]

ajays 14y ago
Yeah, this sentence: "The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter." just bothered me. A total dick move by Winterton.
- wheels 14y ago
  It's pretty presumptuous to call someone a dick when you know none of the details of the situation. It's entirely possible that he asked the guy if he wanted to name it and he turned it down.
  - spitx 14y ago
    Only if anecdotal, I find people from English speaking nations outside of North America being incredibly opportunistic in these things. This observation purely emerges from my experience.
    - nilved 14y ago
      isn't that a bit of a generalization
    - miahi 14y ago
      Some are in for the fame, others for the money. I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their (American) boss was setting targets on number of patents registered by their support gig.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

Fairies! I've seen them do it.

freepipi 14y ago

cool

raghus 14y ago

I can't help feeling that this story would have gotten more media attention if only the photo had been posted to Twitter or Instagram

nostromo 14y ago

Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back? It's odd because it makes an insect that otherwise is very camouflaged much more noticeable. This makes me wonder if it's biomimicry of another dangerous/poisonous/distasteful local insect.

maratd 14y ago
> Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back? More than likely, it's a sexual display/indicator without any "practical" purpose related to survival. Like a peacock's tail. If you're really interested in evolutionary biology, read Darwin's original work. You'll be surprised to learn that most adaptations have little to do with survival.
- 1as 14y ago
  Perhaps I'm niggling, but even adaptations which evolve by sexual selection have everything to do with survival.
  - graue 14y ago
    Genetic survival, yes. Survival of the individual, no.
spitx 14y ago
Something akin to the evolution of the peppered moth, perhaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution But then again, the "original experiments behind the peppered moth story" were known to have "widely acknowledged flaws." http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/content/article/127.html http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/co...
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
My son and I both thought it looked like a spider on its wings. Maybe it's a trick to make predators think it already got caught.

Volscio 14y ago

No shoutout yet for Project Noah? http://www.projectnoah.org/ http://www.projectnoah.org/ "Backed by National Geographic, Project Noah is mobilizing a new generation of nature explorers and helping people from around the world appreciate their local wildlife. Our community is harnessing the power and popularity of new mobile technologies to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity."

orionmystery 14y ago
I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago: http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689 http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689

rickdale 14y ago

"I swear this crazy weather has created new insects. Have you noticed that we have new insects this year?" - My brother, we live in Michigan, says this to me all the time.

DigitalSea 14y ago

Winterton comes across as a big of a jerk if you ask me. Without the photographer taking the photo initially and then a year later returning to the same spot and capturing this insect there would have been no discovery. Fair enough Guek not some recognition and has his name published co-author in a scientific journal, but seems like the importance of Guek is lost here. All the scientist did was go, "Compare to any other lacewings we have on record, if no match, new species. Presto, new species give me my accolades" - the bug should have been named after Guek not Winterton's daughter.

205guy 14y ago

I'm curious: how do they know it's a new species? Seems like it could just as easily be a small mutation that does not affect interbreeding. From one (presumably dead) specimen, how did they determine it was an entirely new species, and not just a local population?