Parataxonomists.

[Kai]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Fall/ai_66240361/

Think of it like paralegals or paramedics. A /very/ cool idea.

My colleague and I were talking about how cool it would be to say SCREW THE DEGREE and just take off into the field somewhere remote and do parataxonomy. I mean, I think she was serious about it; I'm a horrible field biologist, and I like the work I'm doing. This idea has the whole "scientific monastics" feel to it though, which appeals to me. I'm thinking most about these lines:

Costa Rica's forty parataxonomists are beginning to solve a long-standing problem: "the taxonomic impediment," otherwise known as "the taxonomic bottleneck." The fastidious process of finding, collecting, preparing, identifying, naming, labeling, describing, and publishing new species can get bogged down at any step. But the biggest bottleneck of all is this: Today's taxonomists cannot pass on, to eager new students, the patient pursuit of taxonomy, because there are none. The best students are being lured into well-funded, high-tech, molecular taxonomy, leaving the job of collecting and naming new species underfilled, underfunded, under-respected, and fading into history.

Primary taxonomy, the science (and somewhat of an art) of describing "new" species, is as important now as ever. The science part of describing species deals with the question, "what is a species?"; the art and technology part deals with communicating both linguistically and visually the characters that determine and diagnose the species. There is also a level of parataxonomy involved; for example, I may see a specimen that looks like a particular described species but something isn't quite right, the look of it strikes me as odd and differs somehow from the gestalt visual I have in mind. This may lead me to look closer and do some visual comparisons, from which I end up determining I have a specimen in hand from a previously unpublished lineage of organisms.

Unfortunatly, as stated in the quote above there are fewer and fewer primary taxonomists willing to take the time to do real down and dirty cladistic type character analysis, and take the molecular route. Many systematists have argued sequence alignments by maximum likelyhood is a return to the days of phenetics and numerical systematics based on overall similarity rather than special shared characters (synapomorphies and synapotypies). Just like the ecologists who spend all their time in computer models, a systematist who spends all day doing multiple sequence alignments doesn't really KNOW what they're studying. Again, its all reductionism versus holism, but doesn't every argument come down to The One and The Many anyway? The solution is knowing when to use which.

I think that parataxonomists are an excellent resource for primary taxonomy as well as taxonomic inventories for the monitoring of biodiversity. I hope to see more of this sort of work in the future, much much MUCH more.

[Kai]

sounds like it would be more fun trawling about in the fields looking for new stuff, than analyzing it in a lab to me.

Both are fun, IMO. I actually really enjoy field work, I just suck horribly at it.

Okay, thats not completely true. Let me set up a black light trap and I'm not that bad. Or with a net in the water.

I'm the best at microscope work, and diagnosis in the lab, so since I like both I figure I should stick with the lab work.