Taxacom: Minimalist revision of Mesochorus

[kotatsu at fripost.org]

> To me, the real questions are:
> 
> #1. how would you minimally modify the Sharkey approach to call it 
> acceptable?
> 
> #2. what would be the estimated time invested in carrying out #1?
> 
> #3. what would be the estimated cost of it?

It feels to me -- as someone who has never worked with wasps -- that 
there are lots of characters *in the photos provided* that they could 
have just described briefly in words (4–5 sentences each), and there 
would have been *no controversy*. For instance (note: I have no idea 
what the characters are called, so just making things up, but the point 
still stands):

Mesochorus sietenueve -- colouration as in Fig. 97A, with lateral sides 
of abdomen pale. Thorax uniformly brown dorsally (Fig. 97B). Wing cell X 
with multiple (>10) short hairs, shape as in Fig. 97C, distal vein 
complete.

Mesochorus unoceroseis -- colouration as in Fig. 127A, with lateral 
sides of abdomen mostly dark and distinct pale spot dorsally. Thorax 
uniformly black dorsally (Fig. 127B). Wing cell X with few (<7) short 
hairs, shape as in Fig. 127C, distal vein broken medianly.

Mesochorus unounodos -- colouration as in Fig. 134A, with lateral and 
dorsal sides mainly pale except for narrow dark strip medianly on dorsal 
side in distal half. Thorax pale brown with darker centre (Fig. 134B). 
Wing cell X with multiple (>10) short hairs, shape as in Fig. 97C, 
distal vein complete.

That took me ~5 minutes, much of which was just trying to find three 
good examples of variable specimens. Extrapolated to 158 species 
suggests that ~ 1.5 hours were saved by ignoring morphology. I cannot 
imagine that it would take an expert on the group much more than a week 
or two to write descriptions that are more useful just to avoid the 
controversy. They would be minimal, and perhaps not be sufficient to 
identify and separate all species, but they would have made the 
descriptions unambiguously available, regardless of what you think about 
the Code and how the Code phrases things.

The implication is that causing controversy was a goal in itself, 
similar to the "change all the eponyms" paper a few months ago. How this 
is different from trolling people for the lulz is beyond me.

Thus, in answer to your questions:
1) Provide some small morphological characters that differentiate the 
taxa from their closest relatives (which are explicitly identified in 
the paper), they do not need to differentiate all species from all other 
species.

2) 1–2 weeks, maybe? If this had been the groups I work on, that's what 
I would need to do similar work.

3) Depends on how much Sharkey (or his student) earns during the time. 
Other costs are negligible.

-- 
That said, I'm of the opinion that DNA sequence-only descriptions are 
probably inevitable, especially for parasitic, deep sea benthic, 
cave-living, or other organisms that have reduced morphology. At some 
point, as you imply, the time and energy and money consumption needed to 
find morphological differences (whether during the description or during 
subsequent identification) becomes so much larger than just comparing 
DNA that it is prohibitive, not to mention ridiculous. As a general 
rule, I would be comfortable saying that if you need anything more 
specialized than a standard light microscope to tell two species apart, 
then you would be justified in describing your new taxon based on DNA 
sequences only.

No idea how that could technically be implemented in the Code. However, 
if someone published a new species in my taxon, and showed within the 
text of that manuscript that they had made an effort to key the species 
and compare it with type material of similar species, but found no 
useful morphological characters and thus they were here describing it as 
new based on DNA, I would be happy with that. As long as they 1) provide 
evidence for that claim, in the form of e.g. photos or illustrations or 
whatever of both the new species and the previously known species they 
claim it is identical to, and 2) publish this in a peer reviewed journal 
so that other experts on the taxon could evaluate this lack of 
differences. As long as this assessment of "there are no differences" is 
the end point of a process of investigation, and not a starting point or 
a conduit for channeling more laziness into taxonomy,

The main reason Sharkey's approach is so preposterous to me is that he 
picked an obviously unsuitable taxon to make this point with. That and 
the whole "my students are too lazy to learn new words so we're going to 
throw all previous knowledge about these taxa out the window and pretend 
they never existed" argument.

Cheers,
Daniel

-- 
Dr. Daniel R. Gustafsson, Research Assistant Professor
Institute of Zoology Guangdong Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China.

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