I stopped debunking the litter box story on Facebook because responses like this gem would stop me in my tracks--"well, if it's not true, the way things are going it soon will be and we have to speak up". (literal quote from some rando). What do you say to that? Myself personally, these days I wish them well and head out of the pool. I do always share your newsletter on my pages because others might have better luck getting through to someone. I just have no patience for it anymore.
I once attended a talk by Professor of photography who showed us dozens of "ghost" pictures and a fair few "UFO" pictures. He then explained what caused them. In every case it was some sort of artefact of the camera – either a double exposure, or a reflection, or something tiny and out of focus close to the lens. I hadn't realised so many things could go wrong with taking a picture.
Apparently neither do people who sell these videos and images to the tabloids. Nor do the tabloids care. It's all about clicking, views, and engagement, which is depressing.
Did the original article about the numbers of mammal species yet to be named really say that this would include hundreds of kinds of members of the orders Carnivora and Primates? I find it hard to believe that it would say that and would cetainly disagree strongly if it did, especially in the case of the Carnivora. The popular article linked to here doesn't say that. I wanted to see the original scientific publication but didn't want to pay for it, although I still may. There certainly must be quite a few mammal specimens in museum drawers, that, unknown to everyone so far, actually represent unnamed ''new'' species, I've named some of that sort myself, but there are certainly plenty still out there that haven't been collected yet and will be recognized as ''new'' right away or very soon after they're collected. I disagree with the statement that small mammals are necessarily harder to recognize as ''new'' than bigger ones, because of their smallness. We routinely use dissecting microscopes to study the teeth and fine skull features of the small mammals collected and there are often external features that indicate that they are new anyway. And the utility of DNA analyses isn't affected by the size of the animal.
Hi Ron. Thanks for the comment. I both misread the graph in the article and miswrote the section. I've edited that. It seems to me that rodents would be harder for the average person to recognize as novel because we don't have the expertise. But if you catch an interesting carnivore or primate, the information is more likely to be shared with the scientific community.
It would be exceedingly, exceedingly rare for there to be a case of the average person's catching a new species of mammal of any size and recognizing it as novel and then sharing this information with the scientific community. In fact, I can't think, right offhand, of a single case of that occurring, at least in the last hundred years. It generally works like this: Specimens of a new species are collected by someone like me, a museum-associated taxonomist who goes into the field and collects specimens to become incorporated into a museum's research collections, which may contain hundreds of thousands of specimens of mammals. Although such field workers are experts on mammals, it is unusual for them to realize, while in the field, that they've collected a new species. That becomes apparent after the specimens get to the museum and experts carefully examine the specimens, looking at such things as the shape and stucture of their teeth and other features in skulls that have been cleaned of soft tissue, and comparing these things with the conditions seen in specimens of already known species. Nowadays it is the universal practice of the collectors to preserve a tissue sample of each specimen collected, for later DNA analysis. The analysis will often reveal the existence of a ''new'' species that would not otherwise be recognized as such, owing to its having such morphological similarity to some already named species. It is also not unusual for us to find specimens that were collected in earlier times, sitting in a museum drawer, which represent unnamed species but which had not yet been recognized as such. These would be specimens collected before tissue samples were saved for DNA analysis. Some of these, though, can be shown by up-to-date experts on the genera that they belong to to be previously unrecognized species purely on their morphology. And new techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA in a small piece removed from these older specimens is now paying big dividends in recognizing the existence of unnamed species.
I stopped debunking the litter box story on Facebook because responses like this gem would stop me in my tracks--"well, if it's not true, the way things are going it soon will be and we have to speak up". (literal quote from some rando). What do you say to that? Myself personally, these days I wish them well and head out of the pool. I do always share your newsletter on my pages because others might have better luck getting through to someone. I just have no patience for it anymore.
I once attended a talk by Professor of photography who showed us dozens of "ghost" pictures and a fair few "UFO" pictures. He then explained what caused them. In every case it was some sort of artefact of the camera – either a double exposure, or a reflection, or something tiny and out of focus close to the lens. I hadn't realised so many things could go wrong with taking a picture.
Apparently neither do people who sell these videos and images to the tabloids. Nor do the tabloids care. It's all about clicking, views, and engagement, which is depressing.
Did the original article about the numbers of mammal species yet to be named really say that this would include hundreds of kinds of members of the orders Carnivora and Primates? I find it hard to believe that it would say that and would cetainly disagree strongly if it did, especially in the case of the Carnivora. The popular article linked to here doesn't say that. I wanted to see the original scientific publication but didn't want to pay for it, although I still may. There certainly must be quite a few mammal specimens in museum drawers, that, unknown to everyone so far, actually represent unnamed ''new'' species, I've named some of that sort myself, but there are certainly plenty still out there that haven't been collected yet and will be recognized as ''new'' right away or very soon after they're collected. I disagree with the statement that small mammals are necessarily harder to recognize as ''new'' than bigger ones, because of their smallness. We routinely use dissecting microscopes to study the teeth and fine skull features of the small mammals collected and there are often external features that indicate that they are new anyway. And the utility of DNA analyses isn't affected by the size of the animal.
Hi Ron. Thanks for the comment. I both misread the graph in the article and miswrote the section. I've edited that. It seems to me that rodents would be harder for the average person to recognize as novel because we don't have the expertise. But if you catch an interesting carnivore or primate, the information is more likely to be shared with the scientific community.
It would be exceedingly, exceedingly rare for there to be a case of the average person's catching a new species of mammal of any size and recognizing it as novel and then sharing this information with the scientific community. In fact, I can't think, right offhand, of a single case of that occurring, at least in the last hundred years. It generally works like this: Specimens of a new species are collected by someone like me, a museum-associated taxonomist who goes into the field and collects specimens to become incorporated into a museum's research collections, which may contain hundreds of thousands of specimens of mammals. Although such field workers are experts on mammals, it is unusual for them to realize, while in the field, that they've collected a new species. That becomes apparent after the specimens get to the museum and experts carefully examine the specimens, looking at such things as the shape and stucture of their teeth and other features in skulls that have been cleaned of soft tissue, and comparing these things with the conditions seen in specimens of already known species. Nowadays it is the universal practice of the collectors to preserve a tissue sample of each specimen collected, for later DNA analysis. The analysis will often reveal the existence of a ''new'' species that would not otherwise be recognized as such, owing to its having such morphological similarity to some already named species. It is also not unusual for us to find specimens that were collected in earlier times, sitting in a museum drawer, which represent unnamed species but which had not yet been recognized as such. These would be specimens collected before tissue samples were saved for DNA analysis. Some of these, though, can be shown by up-to-date experts on the genera that they belong to to be previously unrecognized species purely on their morphology. And new techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA in a small piece removed from these older specimens is now paying big dividends in recognizing the existence of unnamed species.