[Taxacom] describing new species

[Dr Brian Taylor]

It has been my view always that the distribution of insects is equivalent to
the distribution of entomologists, or rather collectors!!!

I note that John has been "altered" to a bright green moth - perhaps he
meant "alerted".

Brian taylor


On 18/12/2012 23:39, "John Grehan" <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> What's rare or out of the way? Recently I was altered to a new moth that
> has a 6 inch or so wing span, is bright green and a unique wing pattern
> (unique in all Lepidoptera I suspect), but apparently never before
> collected. In this sense it is 'rare' but in another sense it might be as
> common as dirt where it occurs. Just got to get time to describe it now.
> 
> A colleague of mine has recently come across several new species in Brazil
> of similar size. The localities are not out of the way and the lack of
> previous description may just be because no one was interested in them
> before.
> 
> John Grehan
> 
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Peter Rauch <peterr at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Is it true that by and large new species (of insects) tend to be rare in
>> nature and/or in out of the way places ?
>> (I didn't think that this was close to being true ?)
>> 
>> How would one know whether the specimen in hand was one of the 20 known
>> species detailed in the Journal key, and not either a new species which is
>> indistinguishable by the given key, and/or is "the other sex" of a known
>> species (but not completely known by life form, geographic distribution,
>> etc) ?
>> 
>> The job of insect discovery, detailing, and understanding hasn't even
>> begun, were we to ask about the state of our ecological knowledge, our
>> biodiversity knowledge, whether we need screamingly larger amounts of
>> resources to make those discoveries, and to have them then become useful
>> information for managing our Earth.
>> 
>> This is a story not one iota different from what some of us stated in
>> Taxacom twenty years ago.  So, as Chris pondered, who cares --then or now ?
>> 
>> Peter
>> 
>> At 13:45 12/12/18, Stephen Thorpe wrote:
>>> ...
>>> So we can also ask the question: is general taxonomy/diagnostics relevant
>> any more? It is true that, by and large, new species tend to be rare in
>> nature, and/or in out of the way places, and so we should perhaps be
>> putting due focus on documenting the common species properly in areas where
>> we live. There is perhaps an assumption that this has all been done, but of
>> course it hasn't (maybe in the U.K., but certainly not here...)
>>> 
>>> Stephen
>> 
>> and
>> 
>>> On Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:30:22 +0000
>>> Michael Wilson <wilsomichael at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> ...How many places in the world are you
>>> able to identify 'common' species in many groups without special
>>> expertise and knowledge of the literature? Would the Journal that
>>> rejected Chris's paper publish a paper in which a key to say 20 known
>>> species was given that made life easier for users- or is that not
>>> considered science now?
>> 
>> 
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