[Taxacom] Paper on one fly, but of general significance

[JF Mate]

"Let’s assume for a second that the de Meijere had the equipment and
publication tools that we have today. He could have illustrated the
holotype and still provided the rudimentary description that was adequate
at his time. We could have ignored the shortcomings of his description and
relied on the images of the holotype. We would have been done with the
identification in 20 minutes. de Meijere didn’t have the tools and
opportunities, but we do. Should we ignore this and continue as ever? "

OK, I was not going to enter the fray but your angle hinges on a
strawman. If taxonomic descriptions were still being written like in
1913 (http://publication.nhmus.hu/pdf/annHNHM/Annals_HNHM_1913_Vol_11_114.pdf),
with the present availability of digital tools and media, I would say
that you are correct. But this is not so and hasn´t been for over a
decade (and if you consider the transition period we can go to early
mid 90´s when SEMs were an annoying fad). For example, I have just
retrieved a paper from Zootaxa, Konstantinov, 2002
(http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/2002f/zt00124.pdf). As you can see it
is already there, eleven years ago, illustrated to the hilt, combining
SEMs, regular pictures, drawings, etc. Hardly breaking news now. Here
is another beautifully and rather thoroughly illustrated article from
Insecta Mundi in (2007(0022): November 2, 2007 (1-15)New South
American taxa of Odontolochini Stebnicka and Howden (Coleoptera:
Scarabaeidae: Aphodiinae).PAUL E. SKELLEY). There are more but I think
the point has been made. Maybe dipterologists are still using quills
and parchment, I honestly don´t know. But the rest of entomology seems
to have gone digital picture crazy a long time ago. I´m sure that some
older workers are still publishing with less illustrations than now
but these are still orders of magnitude above and beyond anything pre
1960´s (I am not even going to mention WWI strawmen).

Nevertheless I still consider your paper a job well done, clean,
concise and beatufilly illustrated and I am sure dipterologists will
be glad to have a modern redescription.

Best

Jason

On 30 November 2013 05:15, Perochaeta cuirassa <sepsidnet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the discussion of the paper. We expected that these points would
> be raised. That’s why they are addressed in the paper. Just to summarize:
> It took one day to do all the digital images and another 3 hours to do the
> SEM. Compare this with trying to sort out what de Meijere and Duda were
> trying to describe via text and diagnostic drawings. This took much longer
> including the time of Lengyel in Budapest who helped by photographing the
> type.
>
>
> Let’s assume for a second that the de Meijere had the equipment and
> publication tools that we have today. He could have illustrated the
> holotype and still provided the rudimentary description that was adequate
> at his time. We could have ignored the shortcomings of his description and
> relied on the images of the holotype. We would have been done with the
> identification in 20 minutes. de Meijere didn’t have the tools and
> opportunities, but we do. Should we ignore this and continue as ever? This
> depends on whether we are confident that our current descriptions will be
> adequate for the next 100+ years. To judge this, we can go back in history.
> Diptera taxonomy is all about the discovery of an increasingly large number
> of characters that have to be considered for species description and
> identification. We have some indication from molecular data, that there are
> more species out there than we currently distinguish based on our current
> morphological, diagnostic tools; i.e., we already know that our current
> diagnoses will be inadequate before soon. So, should we incorporate this
> knowledge into taxonomic practice?  We think we should because not doing so
> is creating work for the future generation of taxonomists. They will
> consider our current descriptions focusing on currently diagnostic features
> as inadequate as we consider de Meijere’s descriptions today. De Meijere
> didn’t have a choice. We do.
>
>
> In a way, the time that we can save today by not “over-illustrating” is the
> time that we take away from future users. If it was a 1:1 time exchange, we
> would agree that we shouldn’t do this. However, as discussed earlier,
> tracking down types and making sense of inadequate diagnoses takes a lot
> more time than including a few additional images. Of course, we agree that
> current descriptions should highlight characters that are diagnostic by
> today’s standards. That’s why we have a section highlighting the diagnostic
> differences of all described 6 species of Perochaeta. We didn’t do a key
> because reading this section will do the trick without being too tedious.
>
>
>
> Yuchen and Rudolf
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