For many years, there was a failure to acknowledge or even study the “big” question. Finding and describing new species is exciting and rewarding in and of itself, but students need to develop their taxonomic expertise within the framework of theory and larger scientifically-interesting question. It doesn’t matter what the question is, just that you are working on it and the taxonomy helps you get there. This can be biogeography, biodiversity, dispersal, evolution of habitat use, the list goes on.

Describing species based on morphology and DNA evidence (the way I personally feel is the *right* way to do it under ideal conditions) will have a place for a long time. I always like to think of morphology as a proxy for the suite of genes that encode that character. By looking at several characters you are broadening your scope and ideally approach something closer to the true phylogeny (which can never known). But why look at only the picture when you can easily view the metadata that helped to create that image?

Initially, I was vehemently against DNA barcoding. Karen James can attest to this. But that was become some idiots thought you could do taxonomy based only on sequence information. But barcoding was never developed for taxonomists or to replace them. It was developed as an ecological and forensic tool. We’ve used it to test tuna at our local sushi shop (not tuna, but still delicious) for shits and giggles. In fact, barcoding was developed in part to help alleviate some of the burden on taxonomists. Traditionally, taxonomists at museums were either required to, or did it as part of their job, sort and voucher ID huge amounts of specimens. Barcoding doesn’t replace the taxonomist, but assists the researcher in narrowing down possibilities making it easier for taxonomists and potentially facilitating discovery of news species.

We might have found a new vent shrimp this way. It was barcoded and it came only 94% similar to the species it had been identified as for several years. Now, I will go in and take a closer look and see if I can distinguish morphology or histology.

For instance, a very important group of insect called Diptera, have basically no expert in our parts of the wood. Neither do Chironomidae, a very important group for assessing river/lake water quality. All are in need of revision or discovery!

Unfortunately, most of the money goes for various environmental project and charismatic animals (think whale, bear or wolf like) because the of the même. It’s cool to work on those sort of things. Ah, que serra serra.

When I look at models of the MOC what it seems to be missing is some detail, e.g. tropical downwelling in the West Atlantic, but I’ve never questioned the idea itself. Suppose that would be a healthy thing to do. I find lots of papers criticizing overturning rates, etc.

My experience is that morphology is an important framework and reference for molecular analyses. I hope we can steal some fire, because it seems like morpho taxonomy needs a bail-out!

I do, however, have doubts about DNA barcoding. I don’t see it as the method of identification of the future. Reaffirmation perhaps, but good morphology will still need to done. Unless there is an extremely easy, cheap, safe and sure way to scan through a number of regions of DNA and mtDNA. Then, I think we could see morphology slowly being pushed out of the way.

But if my gut feelings are correct, we’ll be lucky if we manage to steal fire from the neighbors.