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William Shear's avatar

As a practicing taxonomist for nearly 60 years, who has described and named more than 450 species as well as numerous new genera, families and even an order or two (both living and fossil) i agree with Quentin that more resources and efforts are needed in taxonomy. And I also agree that the "minimalist" approach using only a photo and a barcode is not the way to go, not only because of a lack of additional characters and criteria for species discrimination, but also because DNA barcoding is not at this time a practical means for nontaxonomists, such as ecologists, conservation biologists and natural history survey workers to identify species, as it requires specialized and expensive laboratory equipment and time-consuming procedures. From a biological standpoint, DNA barcodes deal only with a tiny fraction of the entire genome of a species and thus are quite likely to overestimate the numbers of species in a particular taxon. Perhaps in the future, field-reading of barcodes may become possible but at present it is hard to see how this could happen. At the other end of the spectrum of taxonomic effort is the trend to integrative taxonomy, which uses all available sources of data (morphology, genetic sequences, high-powered imaging techniques, geographic distribution, etc., etc.) to discover and describe new species. This, too, is time-consuming at the source, often requires specialized and expensive equipment and significantly slows the pace of species discovery. Of course, much of the data used in integrative descriptions will not be available to those who try to use the information in the future, for whatever purpose. Somewhere in the middle are taxonomists like me who are using primarily morphological and geographical data to describe species as quickly as is consistent with good practice--that means full descriptions of important characters, comparisons with other, similar taxa, and copious illustrations using as many techniques as practicable. I think that it is important not to minimize the service aspect of taxonomy--that taxonomists provide data that is extremely useful to other researchers. After all, geneticists and molecular biologists provide data that in many cases can be used by medical researchers (for example) to advance their own work. At the same time we should continue to argue for the autonomy and integrity of taxonomy as a science in its own right. I got into taxonomy rather than another field of biology because I found it exciting and challenging. I still feel the same way after several decades of work and the publication of 250 or so taxonomic papers, monographs, book chapters and review articles. We need to find a way to more effectively transmit that excitement not only to potential taxonomists but to the general public. That this can be effective is shown by the reception of the occasional article or radio/TV attention given to new species discovery--people get excited when something new is discovered. So let's do more of this. Let's become publicity hounds for taxonomy, instead of modestly hiding our light under a bushel!

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