Discovery kingdom fight12/13/2023 And then there was the snark among the entomologists in my Twitter feed, some of whom called the work irresponsible or embarrassing or just wrote “Wooooooof.” appearing in scientific journals, and then, later, there were responses to those critiques, and responses to those responses. There were long critiques of Sharkey et al. I don’t remember precisely when, only that I gradually started to notice the name-always followed by “et al.”-in more and more places. I first encountered Sharkey’s name months before I called him up and asked if we could look at bugs together. The process “hasn’t changed an awful lot” in the past 200 years, the British hymenopterist Gavin Broad told me-except that nowadays “we’ve got nicer pictures.” If it is, the taxonomist may formally welcome it into the realm of human knowledge by publicly conferring upon the species a Latin name, along with an official description of the physical characteristics that make it unique and identifiable for future observers. When other entomologists find specimens they think may not yet have been named, taxonomists are the specialists they call in to investigate whether this seemingly new-to-us thing is actually new to us. Huge parts of the braconid family tree are, as the saying goes, still unknown to science.Īs a taxonomist, Sharkey is part of a small group of people who can transform anonymous insects into known species. But most humans have probably never heard of them, much less been aware of seeing one. Entomologists believe that there are tens of thousands of species of braconid sharing this planet, having all sorts of important impacts on the environments around them. This was a braconid wasp, part of a family of creatures that Sharkey has been studying for decades. Dried off and placed under the microscope on his desk, the first speck revealed itself to be an entire, perfect insect with long, jointed antennae and delicately filigreed wings. Instead, he began pulling little brown specks out of the soup, peering at them through a pair of specialized glasses with a magnifying loupe of the sort a jeweler might wear. He ignored, in fact, all of the creatures the average person might recognize as wasps-or even recognize at all. Though Sharkey is a hymenopterist, an expert on the insect order that includes wasps, he ignored the obvious stripes and stingers. This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue.
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