Taxacom: Minimalist revision of Mesochorus Gravenhorst, 1829

Jose Fernandez-Triana cnc.braconidae at gmail.com
Wed Aug 30 14:22:43 CDT 2023


Hi everyone,

So far VERY interesting comments and opinions, most of which I find
useful to read -and I agree with at least some points raised by almost
everyone who has commented so far, although I also disagree on many
other points.

I want to share my opinion as a braconid taxonomist who has described
close to 500 new species over the past 12 years or so, using a
combination of DNA barcoding, morphology, biology, and any other
available resource. I am only pointing this out not to brag about
anything but merely to state that I coming from a perspective of
someone who has also done a lot of new species descriptions and used
DNA barcoding extensively, but not in the same way than the authors of
this paper propose (and the others in this “Sharkey saga”). [Also, and
for full transparency and clarity, I also want to say that I consider
myself a friend of the majority of the coauthors of the Sharkey’s
papers; and I also collaborate with most of them, including Sharkey,
in spite of my many discrepancies with his championed approach].

Let me start by pointing out one thing that readers of this list might
find interesting or useful to know: in the Acknowledgements of the
paper the authors thank Gavin Broad, Andy Bennett and myself for the
comments and corrections we provided. This requires some clarification
to the entire community, as the way it is worded does not tell the
entire story. First, the paper now published in the journal “Revista
de Biologia Tropical” was originally sent to ZooKeys around two years
ago, and I was asked to be the subject editor for it. In ZooKeys that
paper went to three rounds of revisions that included 15 reviewers,
from the broader Ichneumonoidea community. The majority refused to
revise the paper, many saying that they did not want to be associated
with that. The only two who provided thorough reviews and really
useful feedback were Gavin and Andy… but in both cases they
recommended the rejection of the paper; which I also recommended after
my own revision and feedback was also provided to the authors. I have
not read the current version of the paper in detail, but at a first
glance I do not see there much of what the three of us had
recommended, so I am not sure if mentioning us in the Acknowledgements
is warranted or if it is presented with the idea that we “supported”
the paper, which is not entirely accurate. I am only speaking on my
behalf here, of course, so perhaps Gavin and Andy have a different
perspective, but I wanted to add this to show that there are multiple
interpretations of things and I found it very curious that I am listed
in the Acknowledgements when my comments were not really followed.

Now, to the topic at hand I want to add that I believe that there is
value to this new Sharkey paper (like the others in the saga) and that
indeed we need to move from the “traditional taxonomy” approaches –
those that take an specialist 20 years to produce a monograph where 10
new species are described. We are indeed in the middle of a
biodiversity crisis! And yet, we taxonomists continue to expect that
our “normal” pace should be the way to go. In this point I am fully in
agreement with Sharkey et al. (and with Marko Mutanen’s comments here)
that we need to speed up the pace for species descriptions and that
molecular approaches will have to lead the way. But I also found very
troubling (to borrow Doug’s expression) the express ignorance of
previous knowledge that the authors chose to follow, therefore
creating two parallel systems for Neotropical Mesochorus, one with
200+ species (pre-barcoding) and the new one with 100+ species (using
mostly DNA barcodes). This will be a nightmare for the poor souls that
will work on Mesochorinae in the near future…

There is a middle of the ground that could be considered. I proposed
some ideas in a paper a year ago
(https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzookeys.pensoft.net%2Farticle%2F76720%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cdb49ebcd6a41498d13a708dba98e83ff%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638290201794587768%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Hb%2BXQQAuEAbTiAuWPs8ks3jYB9A5snpzIUbZZCnZL44%3D&reserved=0) and tried to advocate for
some intermediate solutions. The fact that paper was completely
ignored -to the point is not mentioned, in spite I personally sent it
to most of the coauthors; makes me think that Sharkey et al. are just
fixated on pursuing their approach without any consideration to
alternative possibilities. [Of course, one may argue that they did not
bother with my paper because the comments there were so poor that they
were not worthy of further consideration. Fair enough if that was the
case; however, I would ask the ICZN commissioners that are part of
this list, and the wider audience as well, to at least consider some
of the points I raised there (I would recommend reading the section
“h)” in my paper, where I discuss some ideas].

I have continued to ponder how to better articulate this
“middle-of-the-road approach”, and in fact in the Congress of the
International Society of Hymenopterists that was held in Romania a
month ago I presented a somewhat crude follow-up talk which I hope to
soon prepare as an opinion paper to ZooKeys. But, in short, and very
summarized I think the following:

1- We should try to associate sequences to species names in a similar
way as name-bearing types (NBT) are done (to be clear, I mean “in
addition to” not “instead of”!). Therefore, we would have the NBT
specimen(s) (holotypes, lectotypes, syntypes or neotypes) AND we would
have a sequence (or sequences) associated with a species name.

2- Obviously, for many historical specimens it is not possible to
obtain sequences, be it because the specimens are too old and/or in
poor condition or because of museum policies not allowing barcoding
types. In those cases we could try to associate sequences based on
other approaches (e.g., fresher specimens from the type locality,
available paratypes, specimens authoritatively identified as that
species by a specialist in the group…). Anything that is not based on
NBT is, of course, potentially not correct, but that is the same case
when doing IDs based on morphology alone. In this case, the effort is
to be as accurate as possible, acknowledging that in some (perhaps
many) cases, it is not possible to be 100%. [But then taxonomy is
never 100% sure, no matter the approach you take!].

3- By having “barco-types” (if following DNA barcoding, any other
molecular approach could arguably be preferred) for species already
named, we can then associate new material and determine relatively
easily if they represent new species or not. Once/if we have all or at
least the majority of the species in a group with sequences
authoritatively associated with previous names, then we could move to
a fully/mostly molecular way of doing taxonomy and speed up things
considerably.

4- Having all/most species names associated with barcodes is not a
fairy tale wish, it has been done already for many groups in Europe
and perhaps everywhere else (e.g., butterflies, bees, some aculeate
bees, some beetle families… I do not claim to know all examples!).
Even for hyper diverse parasitoid wasps I am currently involved with
some German colleagues where for some groups the work has already
allowed to get two thirds of all species with associate barcodes, that
is far from perfect but is arguably a good foundation for future
studies! But indeed, it may take a while before a reasonable “barcode
library” can be built, in an authoritative manner, for many of the
hyper diverse taxa. In the meantime, we must still consider previously
described species, and there are possibilities to organize that work
as long as we treat the species in different ways depending on the
amount of information available for the “historical” species. I cannot
detail more here (the email is already too long) but I hope to provide
more information in that upcoming paper that I may send to ZooKeys.

5- Marko mentioned that he cannot imagine a key to 1 million gall
midges, and he is right. However, we could still have a key (or keys)
to species groups where some basic morphology could be used to
separate taxa in more manageable chunks. And, for the many
morphologically cryptic species that remain, then we go entirely with
DNA barcodes (or any other molecular marker that works) but the
backbone morphology would still be useful. I did an exercise with the
previous Sharkey paper (the one describing 400+ new species of
Braconidae from Guanacaste) and went to check the single images they
provided for the 40+ new species of the genus Bracon that were part of
the paper. This was the largest genus dealt with in the paper, and I
am not a specialist in Braconinae, the subfamily where the genus
belongs to. Based just on those images I could construct a crude key
based on just four morphological characters (visible in the photos)
that allowed to split those 40+ new species into a few groups… and
this was done in a few minutes of looking and tabulating those
characters, from the images not even the actual specimens. My point is
that, even in such a “crude” way, things could have been improved in
that paper if an intent was made to get it done. I have not tried the
Mesochorinae of the new paper, but I would argue that it is equally
possible to at least provide some sort of basic key to supplement the
paper… and in the process probably some of the previously described
species could be accounted for there. Of course, I may be wrong with
this last assumption, but I suspect that it could be done.

6- Please do not forget that barcodes do NOT always work! For many
reasons that I will not list here. So, abandoning everything to go
purely barcoding is really poor science, no matter how many “excuses”
we could use for that. I want to point out to another paper that came
very recently, also about the Ichneumonoidea fauna of Guanacaste, in
this case the genus Alphomelon, where we dealt with 49 species, 30 of
them new, and we also relied heavily on DNA barcode… but nevertheless
we also provided a key to all species and accounted for all of the 19
previously described species
(https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzookeys.pensoft.net%2Farticle%2F105068%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cdb49ebcd6a41498d13a708dba98e83ff%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638290201794587768%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=YXZDHQ%2FUDl9K4eJ627uSuZY8DC3JpEZJRcTOR5FflGc%3D&reserved=0). And we found that, in
some cases, DNA barcodes did not work (in other cases morphology did
not work either), and it was only because all pieces of evidence were
used and analyzed that we could realize that (see in that paper the
section “Describing new species by combining morphological,
molecular, and biological data while integrating previously described
species based on less comprehensive data”).

7- Some people here are commenting if the new species of Mesochorus
are validly described, based on the current (or future) codes. But
perhaps that is not the main point. I would fully agree with those
that said that, from a “legal” perspective those species are valid.
But it is the problem that those species will create, by ignoring the
250+ years of previous work that is troubling. And NO, it is not the
only way to deal with the biodiversity crisis, there are other
possibilities! I sincerely wish that we could discuss this more,
because there is no need to go to any of the two extremes… and right
now only the extremes' voices are the ones that sound the loudest. But
there are other ways, hopefully we can consider them.

And I will stop here because I am already abusing the patience of the
readers, but there are many more things to say…
Cheers,
Jose

--
José L. Fernández-Triana, Ph.D.
Research Scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Canadian National Collection of Insects (CNC)
960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0C6, CANADA
Phone: 613-759-1034. Email: jose.fernandez at agr.gc.ca
Alternative email: cnc.braconidae at gmail.com











On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 1:05 PM Marko Mutanen via Taxacom
<taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
>
> Precisely, Mike!
>
> Excellent points by Rod and Thomas too!
>
> It is so easy to provide criticism instead of solutions. The fact is that (traditional) taxonomy is facing a serious crisis as it cannot provide credible solutions to the taxonomic impediment. The approach designed by Sharkey and colleagues has huge potential to provide an escape from this dead-end. Their approach may not have seen full maturation yet, but when was any revolutionary idea fully mature at birth? It already works very well. Criticism has had all focus on minor issues such as newly created synonyms (so rarely created otherwise...) and completely has completely ignored the huge benefits of the approach, both practical and conceptual.
>
> We taxonomists have started describing species of this planet from the easiest end. After ca 270 years of hard work, perhaps 95-99% are left. They are gall midges, Nematods, parasitic wasps, microfungi etc. Groups that each may contain tens of thousands or even over a million species. As more species are described in any of such megadiverse groups, the number of required comparisons increases exponentially, making it all finally impossible to manage. Who believes that one day we will have a morphological key for one million gall midge species? I don't. But I believe that one day all or most of them are described and named, and that then they can easily be identified by their DNA. Elucidation of their life histories and connections to other species becomes straightforward too. The future of taxonomy looks bright if we only would let the field to flourish. The future of taxonomy is in DNA and genomics.
>
> I hope that taxonomic community would recognize that for the survival of the field, we must find better solutions to the above-mentioned problems and stop making war. Taxonomy has been poorly funded largely because it hasn't been able to provide efficient solutions. Sharkey et al. have made a revolutionary and feasible proposal, and they would deserve much more appreciation by their peers than what we thus far have seen.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Marko Mutanen
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Michael A. Ivie via Taxacom
> Sent: keskiviikko 30. elokuuta 2023 19.07
> To: taxacom at lists.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: Taxacom: Minimalist revision of Mesochorus Gravenhorst, 1829
>
> While I am not a convert, can we restart this conversation by recognizing we have a problem?  I have discovered (collected and
> curated) a couple to several thousand new species of beetles and other things in my career, but have managed to describe a couple dozen, and colleagues have added a couple dozen more.  I suspect I am pretty representative of 69 year old systematists with an active field program.  If our goal is to distinguish and share information of the type in this new paper, where they describe "158 new species and host records for 129 species," the approach those who work like I do is simply not going to work.  I will die with thousands of new species, their associations and characteristics still hidden from the people of the tropical countries where I obtained them.  Don't we have to discuss how our current system is failing to achieve our goals?  Isn't Sharkey et al challenging us to face this?  If we don't want to follow their path, don't we have to propose something equally effective rather than just blast them for not doing it our (admittingly failing) way?  I suggest that for ever criticism, an alternative be proposed.
>
> Mike
> _______________________________________________
> Taxacom Mailing List
>
> Send Taxacom mailing list submissions to: taxacom at lists.ku.edu
> For list information; to subscribe or unsubscribe, visit: https://lists.ku.edu/listinfo/taxacom
> You can reach the person managing the list at: taxacom-owner at lists.ku.edu
> The Taxacom email archive back to 1992 can be searched at: https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftaxacom.markmail.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Cdb49ebcd6a41498d13a708dba98e83ff%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638290201794587768%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kBsUZ6hMpaVxkUifvYE001wnruwsD8QuNFacyU6SA7c%3D&reserved=0
>
> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for about 36 years, 1987-2023.


More information about the Taxacom mailing list