#taxonomist talks

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

How do you become a gimmick blog?

step 1: think of a gimmick

step 2: blog

[thegimmickblog]

Hey taxonomists, how many single letter counting siblings are there?

9

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

Confuse a Gimmick Blog for 10s (1/1)

[markscherz]

My friend said he hates taxonomists because they make stuff up. (There was also a rant about fish not existing and birds being reptiles mixed in there, but yeah). What's your opinion on this, as a taxonimist?

I was having a similar debate with a sixteen-foot tall animated candelabra the other day. No idea where they get it from.

[essektheylyss]

this is getting TARGETED, spotify

[tysonfurybattlepass]

no word has ever angered me in such an immediate primal way upon seeing it for the first time as “subgenus”

[serenesirene]

I wonder how sirens weathered the cold. I suppose if you go with the original feathered version, it'd be a simple enough answer- Annie says that the chickens on her farm back home are actually better suited for cold weather due to their feathers- but what about the aquatic ones? Just how much of a siren is mammalian and how much is fish?

[hawkpartys]

would you be willing to talk about the different red tailed hawk colour morphs/variations?

Yeah sure!

Quick preliminary ramble, I assume this was about me saying that one hawk was a "probable Krider's" cuz it was very lightly marked + the location, and Krider's isn't a morph itself, it's a subspecies. I don't do much with subspecies because they are a scam created big by taxonomy to sell more genetic analysis(kidding. real reason is that they are very finnicky, get reorg'd a lot, and just aren't my thing). To me, RTHA is RTHA is RTHA. However I CAN talk about RTHA morphs, because if there is one thing buteos love, its have variable plumage(except RSHA, who does not do this, because they love me)

First lets set up a quick baseline. This is the platonic ideal of a RTHA

Dark, prominent, neat patagial bars, a thin but prominent belly band, red tail, clear throat and breast, dark head, clear flanks

Now the morphs: There are three main "morphs", and nobody can agree on what they are. For simplicities sake, discounting that platonic ideal up there(which I think most would call intermediate), I'm gonna talk about light morph, dark morph, and rufous morph.

Here are some pretty extreme light morphs, like this is the far end of the variability scale

Light head, barely visible or almost completely absent bellyband, really really lightly marked patagials, "bleached" reddish tail bordering on white with thin to no bars and no terminal band

This ones a bit less extreme, but you can still see what I mean. Very lightly marked, but it still looks like a RTHA lmfao(i swear its the white head that does it)

Some extreme dark morphs

Fully brown chest, you can just barely, if you squint, deliniate a very very thick belly band from the slightly lighter throat, but yeah, basically the whole bird is dark brown. You can't really make out the patagials either.

Sometimes they'll have pretty prominent dark terminal bands on their tails, which are never quite that bright brick red, but that might be ssp dependent, and as we've established, ssp scare me.

Rufous morphs: AKA they dunked my man in some chilli

Pretty similar to dark morph(and I think is occasionally lumped in with it, barring again, ssp shit), but the bellyband is more visible in contrast to the more red chest/throat/flanks. These guys are mostly notable for being constantly misid'd as RSHA by randos on iNat for some reason

Bonus: Partially Leucistic

Why are you white

any taxonomists or orinthologists feel free to yell at me for my complete disregard of subspecies, but i will not listen

[cnestus]

re: your last post about career options in entomology, consider this an invitation to talk about what you think about molecular systematics and its role in taxonomy/phylogeny. i'm an undergrad currently in a lab focused on the phylogeny of benthic marine inverts, and the vast bulk of our work is based on molecular data. i'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the topic!

i should be clear and say that i have no inherent problems with molecular systematics as an approach to taxonomy, and in many cases it can be a tremendous boon to the field and pretty much the only way to untangle some particularly gnarly taxonomic knots.

i guess my problem arises from how the ascendancy of molecular systematics is crowding out traditional morphological taxonomy, to the point where, like i was complaining in my last post, many subdisciplines are disappearing because nobody is replacing the aging and dying experts on many groups of insects and other organisms. i think that very few people who do molecular systematics would themselves argue that they should replace traditional taxonomists, but i also think that academic administrators and funding agency bureaucrats see the difference in "efficiency" between one scientist who needs years if not decades to publish a comprehensive monograph on their study group, and another who can slam a bunch of samples through a machine and describe a hundred new species in a semester, and would prefer to fund the latter. i'm being unfairly reductive here of course, but my point is that in the publish-or-perish culture of academia, being able to churn out papers faster will always be rewarded and tilts the game way towards molecular taxonomists. even incoming grad students who want to study to become morphological taxonomists are having a harder time securing the funds to do so.

i just worry about what things are going to look like in even 10 or 20 years from now when the last of the old-timers have died off and very few have been replaced. even if you can technically identify an organism of interest through sequencing it's CO1 gene or whatever, that's no replacement for having an actual expert who can way more quickly and authoritatively tell you what it is without having to be connected to Genbank.

(far more minor, but i also think that molecular work places far too great of an emphasis on dogmatic phylogenetic taxonomizing over more practical groupings. this is pure old man grumbling but i absolutely can't stand how every few years someone recategorizes some group of insects based on their genetic sequences and suddenly i gotta relearn a bunch of new taxonomies and relabel a bunch of shit because every group's just gotta be 100% monophyletic. fuck monophyly! i will not elaborate on this!)

anyway back to my main point, again i'm sure i'm being reductive and unfair and there are absolutely labs that make use of both morphological and molecular taxonomic methods, but it's just a worrying trend to me. i just can't help but feel like the ascendancy of molecular systematics is of a piece with the inexorable automation of so many other jobs and disciplines, like a robot replacing the craftsman it was ostensibly designed to assist.

[cat-identifier]

is there a good way to see if your cat is actually a chimera aside from pestering taxonomists such as yourself lol 😅 (and paying for tests) i’m starting to notice things about this blue lynx point scottish straight my mom and i adopted. when i bring her outside i can see so many colours in her coat.. anyways you do great stuff 👍🏻 thx

I'm not a taxonomist! Or a geneticist, which is what I think you're thinking of? (Taxonomy is the science of classification of organisms!) I'm just a person on the internet who likes talking about cats. Just to be clear!

Generally you can't really tell a cat is a chimera just by looking at it, much like how you can't tell a human is a chimera by looking at them. Even otherwise impossible color combinations might be due to somatic mutation (rather than two embryos combining, one cell mutates while the embryo is still developing). You'd have to do genetic testing to confirm it.

Furthermore, cats just look a bit different in the sunlight sometimes 😅 my black cat looks more brown when she's basking in the window!

[notasocialismjoke]

three friends who all love animals go to college together and each go into different disciplines. after graduating, they get together to talk about how college has changed them.

the first, an agronomist, says "with everything i now know about agriculture, i see how easy it is to stop eating meat, and i've decided that i'm going to become a vegetarian!"

the second, a medical doctor, says "with my understanding of the human body's function, i know what i need to cut animal products out of my life entirely. i'm going to become a vegan!"

the third, a taxonomist, says "i'm ahead of you both! i'm already a pescatarian!"

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

Have you considered checking out the OSHAverse blogs? Also the blogs rping as various government agencies?

Good idea. For all future anons, to ensure I won't get any repeats, I'll pin this post, displaying all the gimmick blog families I'm cataloging, or planning to catalog.

• Mimmick Blog(s) - CURRENTLY UPDATING

• Painters - NEXT TO BE CATALOGUED

• OSHAverse - NOT STARTED

• Wizardbloggers - NOT STARTED

• Busbloggers - NOT STARTED

• Shower Thinkers - NOT STARTED

• Snoms - NOT STARTED

• Identifiers - NOT STARTED

• Heritage Bloggers - NOT STARTED

• Bloggers from another Timeline - NOT STARTED

• Reddit-esque - NOT STARTED

• Restaurants - NOT STARTED

• I [blank] at [height] - NOT STARTED

• Tennis Balls - NOT STARTED

• Fast Food Blogs - NOT STARTED

• Potatoes - COMPLETE

• Completionist Blogs - COMPLETE

• !CU (The Exclamation Point Cinematic Universe) - COMPLETE

Why do trees take so long?

With larger trees, more time has to be committed. Also, doing internet taxonomy is, surprisingly, not my primary commitment. Kindly allow my ADHD brain to take as much time as it needs.

I have a website now!

gimmicktaxonomy.neocities.org.

What pronouns do you use?

She/They/It.

[thegimmickblog]

hey gimmickblog taxonomist how many children blogs does alphabet completionist have

29

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

my job will never be complete.

not enough fandom related completionist blogs for this being tumblr and all. we only know of the one podcast one. blump

ABCDEFGHI KLMNOP RSTU W Y

21/26

[markscherz]

how the hell do you find so many frogs

This is a photo I took of Miguel Vences, one of my two doctoral supervisors, and I believe the most prolific living frog taxonomist, demonstrating how one finds so many frogs: looking carefully in the right place, and knowing what one is looking for/at. Here, we were at the top of Marojejy, a mountain in northeastern Madagascar. On this trip we discovered several new frog and lizard species.

You can also watch a film where I talk a bit about some of the work that goes into discovery, from my trip to the Bealanana district in northern Madagascar.

This expedition yielded MANY new species.

[futurebird]

Man gave names to all the animals

The way that I think religion really works is:

We have texts and traditions, myths and songs, folk stories and superstitions. Fragments of truth are there but in the sense of a palimpsest the glyphs of dead languages faintly visible in the space between words.

A signal to noise ratio beyond hopeless. We won't ever know exactly what was correct. It could be anything

There is only one true fragment in all those pages and it is:

"The human would name all the animals, those of the sky and of the earth and until so-named the human would stand alone."

Is that disappointing? Were you hoping for something more central to the greater themes of the text?

I cannot emphasis enough how over-run with propaganda, mistakes religious texts must be to stand of chance of preserving even a fragment like this one.

I can't promise you I'm right either. But, there is power in names. And you are already engaged in this sacred project of naming all of the living creatures. That's why I've sought you out, a biologist, a taxonomist. I want to know if there is any way to rush the work along. Please don't laugh at me. --- In recent years we have perfected methods to detect the DNA present in soil samples. These fragments of DNA come from many animals, fungi, plants. It's a way to assess the biodiversity of an ecosystem. But DNA sampling has resulted in some unsettling observations. The kingdom of the fungi are woefully understudied and under-classified. We have named thousands, but their species number in the millions. And from the soil comes even more unsettling news. A great portion of fungi are parasitic. They can only live on a particular host, sometimes a particular plant, sometimes a particular fungi. There are millions of telescoping families of parasites and hyper parasites hinted at by the DNA of the soil of a mature forest. There are whole clades of fungi we have never seen, that only live deep in soil and only in association with other fungi that we have never seen. Adversarial and sympathetic ecological networks wherein none of the participants have been named or described. This is as close to a proof that the prophesy will never come to pass. We will never name the last living thing. We will always stand alone. As you can plainly see it's impossible! --- I refuse to accept that. I refuse to accept it is impossible. Why would the fragment talk about naming all living things if that task were impossible? Why would it describe what happens after all living things are named if that will never happen? I need you to use your imagination. Use technology. If we can find their DNA we can name them. ---

But, that's not how it works! You can't just name ... DNA. You need a type specimen. You need an exemplar of the organism. How are we supposed to find that? --- Can't you use the DNA to grow it or something? I can't believe that we could be so close to achieving the ultimate fate of all humankind and a bunch of mushrooms get in the way. -- You should have more respect for fungi. And don't call them "mushrooms" they don't all have those fruiting bodies. Especially these dark types found in soil. But... I suppose you are correct. We could contrive a type specimen directly from the DNA. Sort of revive each organism we detect and see what grows. I know how much this means to you so I will begin immediately.