vanishing taxonomists

[Tom Parker]

Greetings:

The Directory of Zoological Taxonomists of the World was published in 1961
for the Society of Systematic Zoology.  It is name-alphabetized and also
organized phyla and class expertise interest.  It also contains some
habitat preferences for each taxonomist and their affiliated institution.
 As this predates our modern spreadsheets, resorting and filtering is not
possible.

In the preamble to this book, it implies that 9000 taxonomists were
candidates for listing. The book has slightly more than 400 pages.

As the introduction lays out some of the methods used in compiling this
book, and that the NSF was the original grant agency for its creation,
possibly a new modern version could be attempted....making worthile
comparison between two such catalogs possible.

See Library of Congress Card No. 61-15306.

bye for now

Tom Parker
Marine Biology Laboratory
CSDLAC
<tparker at lacsd.org>
-----Original Message-----
From:   Christoffer Schander [SMTP:c.schander at ZOOL.GU.SE]
Sent:   Wednesday, March 28, 2001 11:44 AM
To:     TAXACOM at USOBI.ORG
Subject:        Re: vanishing taxonomists

Are the taxonomists really vanishing? Yes and no. I have in the past
two months written to 170 Natural history/Zoology museums and to date
received replies from 94 of them. The results so far shows that the
number of invertebrate (including insect) taxonomists (curators) have
decreased with slightly more than 50 in the last 20 years, but the
number of vertebrate taxonomists have actually increased with about
150. So, SOME taxonomists are vanishing, while others are
proliferating.

I will get back to TAXACOM with a more full report in a couple of
weeks when I have heard back from more institutions.

Chris Schander
Arctic Station, University of Copenhagen





The serious side of the whimsical(?) discussion on captive breeding of
taxonomists is that we ARE being out-Darwined as regards the opportunity
for "reproductive success", which in academia is defined as who gets to
pass their particular philosophy, techniques, values, gospel, etc. on to
the next generation of students.
Barbara Ertter
University and Jepson Herbaria
University of California at Berkeley