Fwd: Re: Tale of Two Continents --

[Chris J. Durden]

>Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 21:13:55 -0600
>To: Norbert.Kondla at gems3.gov.bc.ca
>From: "Chris J. Durden" <drdn at mail.utexas.edu>
>Subject: Re: Tale of Two Continents --
>
>Norbert,
>    I think you hit the nail on the head. The apparent paucity of North 
> American butterfly diversity does seem to be due to lack of critical 
> study. The number of butterfly taxonomists (indeed any taxonomists) per 
> square mile is well below that of the European countries. Serious 
> taxonomists in North America all know about difficult genera, intractable 
> problems, cryptic species  and problems they would look into if only they 
> had the time. Unfortunately these taxonomists are expiring before they 
> find the time to solve these problems. Are they being replaced? I think 
> not. Old-style (or even new-style) Museum Taxonomy has been a pariah of a 
> specialty for at least the last half century. Look at the dissertations 
> over this time span. Although there is systematics squirreled away in 
> some of the papers it is usually overshadowed by some genetic, 
> chromatographic, electrophoretic, or now molecular topic. It has not been 
> possible for some time to get a PhD in unadulterated general systematics. 
> We should not be surprised that there are very few PhDs now available to 
> solve our problems in systematics. A lot of the systematics of the last 
> half century has been done by amateurs, opportunists and junior level 
> academics. Although a lot of it has been fine work, it has not been 
> considered to belong in the leading edge of current research. At the low 
> point of this trend, back in the sixties and seventies I remember "great 
> scientists" proclaiming that there was no way we could hope to know all 
> the species in the world, and that just a sampling from selected groups 
> was enough. Personal computers changed all that, but we never picked up 
> the educational thread. We never reinstated the study of descriptive 
> systematics in our field.
>    How can we persuade our colleagues in the universities that taxonomy 
> and descriptive systematics is really important. How can we persuade them 
> to stimulate and educate our future researchers?
>.............Chris Durden
>
>At 12:19 PM 11/6/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>>Well, parts of two continents anyway. For whatever, reason my mind recently
>>turned to a quick and crude comparison of Europe as defined in Higgins and
>>Riley's field guide to butterflies and then the North American countries of
>>Canada and USA. This said crude comparison reveals that Can and USA is
>>roughly at least 3 times the size of europe, has a greater latitudinal and
>>longitudinal spread and seemingly more environmental diversity as a place
>>for butterflies to evolve. Yet, for some reason we only seem to recognize
>>about 1.5 times as many butterfly species as in europe. Geographers and
>>mathematicians are welcome to fiddle with the crude numbers above but I am
>>wondering if the species per area difference is real or if it is a
>>reflection of our relatively more primitive knowledge of the taxonomy of NA
>>butterflies and history of lumping different looking butterflies into the
>>same species. Thoughts are welcomed, and so too would be any literature
>>references in the biogeography realm or from other taxonomic groups of
>>organisms in case other people have wondered about this.
>>
>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>>Norbert Kondla  P.Biol., RPBio.
>>Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management
>>845 Columbia Avenue, Castlegar, British Columbia V1N 1H3
>>Phone 250-365-8610
>>Mailto:Norbert.Kondla at gems3.gov.bc.ca
>>http://www.env.gov.bc.ca



 
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