I'm so glad that entomologist Doug Yanega's list of funny, actual scientific names is still online. It's from the very early days of the internet, and still updated.
Support is urgently requested to help keep Kew Herbarium at Kew.
The Director and Trustees intend to move the #Herbarium over an hour away from its current location at the heart of Kew.
Separating the herbarium from the gardens, library, and laboratories will cripple the ongoing taxonomic work at a time when we are facing a dire biodiversity crisis.
Taxonomy is fun until you have to track down a paper written 20 years ago in an obscure Japanese journal about beetles that has near zero online presence.
Recent genomic studies show that the parasitic fly Braula evolved within Drosophilidae, flies we know as the workhorses of genetics. See link.
The problem: Braula was named in 1818.
Drosophila was named in 1823.
By the rules of priority, if we organize taxa by their ancestry, then the correct family placement for all these flies, including everyone's precious Drosophila melanogaster, is in Braulidae, not Drosophilidae.
I have taken exactly 1 programming class. I know about this squints at gap between fingers much Python.
I really, really want to build a tiny little database thingie for plant taxonomy. I have enough Python written up to make a JSON dictionary or a CSV that I can then feed to a web thingie that makes pretty force-directed graphs. I'm a very visual person, so to relate to this data I want floating bubbles GIMME FLOATING BUBBLES THEY MAKE ME HAPPY.
I'm trying to figure out how to download/scrape or whatever the info from places like calflora and the USDA plants database to populate my thing. In the meantime I've manually typed up about 500 partial entries.
I'd really like to at least be able to generate a taxonomy tree. From the species binomial it should be easy to just relate each plant to its parent branches-- species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom. Simple, right? Ish?
Later I also want to be able to tell my bubble cloud to rearrange itself according to, say, which plants need more or less water, which ones are edible, which ones grow together in different habitats in different areas, all sorts of different things.
Oof. I miss being in class, where I could go to the computer lab and hunker over this sort of thing with buddies.
Taxonomists have a long history of cataloging everything they could find. Worldwide expeditions, museums and universities have all committed to classifying specimens. Yet no single, unified list of all the species on Earth exists. Some scientists want to change that. Popular Science explains. https://flip.it/ram4oV #Science#Animals#Species#Taxonomy#Earth