How Biology Could Evolve Beyond Taxonomy

There's a specter that's difficult to place spreading across the sciences—it's difficult to categorize because the scientists who name and categorize newly discovered species are themselves in danger of going extinct.

While you might think the job of naming newly discovered species and organizing on the tree of life would be the most popular job in the sciences, Mark Harvey, head of the Western Australian Museum's department of terrestrial zoology, told the Australian Associated Press that, “there has been a steady decline across the country and internationally (of taxonomists) as scientific research has focused on other disciplines.”

Some have said that taxonomy, like rock, can never die. A team of scientists wrote in to the journal New Phytologist, to say that “there are more people describing species new to science than ever before,” provided you define a taxonomist as “any author named in the publication of a new species.”

But Mark Stoeckle, senior research associate at Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, doesn't see it that way. He told PBS that there was, “wide agreement that classical taxonomy has declined—fewer new students entering the field, fewer full-time positions, and fewer institutions devoting resources to collections.”

This shortage, according to the AAP has among other things delayed the naming of a new and terrifying species of spotted wolf spider that hunts by walking on water. While there's a lot of Jesus references to shoehorn into some binomial nomenclature, there isn't anyone available to do it.

“There are hundreds of new spider species waiting to be described and named in the scientific literature,” Harvey said.

So where is the next generation of taxonomists? Part of what's eroding the appeal of taxonomy might be the perception that taxonomists are well on their way to becoming obsolete, in the face of advanced tech.

“Taxonomy is considered some peculiar, old-fashioned thing that we did in the 19th century,” Dennis Stevenson, vice president for botanical research at the New York Botanical Garden, told PBS's Newshour. “It seems that the newer generation is less interested in that.”

The Newshour report outlines how DNA sequencing, supercomputers, and massive databases that “can pinpoint a species using just an egg, a seed, or even bits or pieces of an organism,” threaten to make taxonomists of a more traditional ilk redundant.

But then there's that other specter that haunts specialization: crowd-sourcing. The real drawback with crowd-sourced taxonomy is that the public picks the exact names that you'd expect them to. Scientists at the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung in Berlin asked 300 visitors to vote on a name for a newly found red and black wasp, and the public went ahead and named it after “the dementors” from Harry Potter. Apparently the proper name, Ampulex dementor, refers to the way dementors suck souls, and doubles as allusion to the wasps' behavior of selectively paralyzing cockroach prey.

The researchers seemed pretty upbeat about "the dementors," concluding that it was evidence that museum visitors had learned something about the wasps. Maybe that's true.

And maybe that's the future of taxonomy: less specialized researchers supported by an eager publc.

It worked for that monkey that was named after a website, anyway.