[Taxacom] How many species have been reported only once

[Sara Lubkin]

In my field, fossil beetles, a single specimen could be pretty good.  In
fact, for Permian beetles a whole specimen would be pretty exciting. Many
species are  described based only on a single elytron or collections of
elytra.



On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Stephen Thorpe
<stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>wrote:

> Given the state of some collections, with large amounts of unsorted
> backlogs, it is impossible to make any precise sense of "known only from a
> single specimen", except in the very rare cases of something big and obvious
> and interesting
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Doug Yanega <dyanega at ucr.edu>
> To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
> Sent: Sat, 20 March, 2010 12:00:01 PM
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] How many species have been reported only once
>
> >Does anyone know of analyses that explore this matter, or have any
> >data to confirm the proportion of 'once only' species in their
> >sphere of expertise?
>
> I believe a major aspect of this is that only in certain disciplines
> do people routinely *document* occurrences of "miscellaneous" taxa.
> The proportion of bee species which have had anything published on
> them *aside from their original description* (and not counting
> catalog records) is a rather small proportion, yet many of those
> "single record" species are things which can be found in collections,
> sometimes fairly abundantly; but people don't often issue "county
> checklists" for bees, while they DO for things like butterflies or
> birds or herps, etc.
>
> The bottom line is that hoping to use literature records to determine
> a general pattern is going to be very misleading if one compares
> broadly across taxa.
>
> Sincerely,
> --
>
> Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology        Entomology Research Museum
> Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314        skype: dyanega
> phone: (951) 827-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
>               http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
>   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
>         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
>
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