Slashdot Mirror
Flickr Photo Leads To New Insect Discovery
rhettb writes "Scientists have discovered a previously unknown species of lacewing insect after stumbling upon a series of photos posted on Flickr, according to a paper published in the journal ZooKeys. Entomologist Shaun Winterton first found evidence of the species when he randomly stumbled upon a set of photos posted by Hock Ping Guek, a Malaysian photographer. Winterton recognized the insect as a potentially new species, but needed to collect field specimen in order to formally describe it. About a year later, an individual was collected at the same site, enabling Winterton to write up the description in ZooKeys. Hock is a co-author on the paper."
Oh wait, never mind.
That's brilliant! /me adds eyespots onto my backpack.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
"Scientists are eager to find the species, known only from Facebook pictures for its distinctive bright green body and lacey wings, which vaguely spell oit the letters 'p', 'w', 'n', and 'd'."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Many rare and interesting animals are tasty.
Ezekiel 23:20
While it's funny that this happened via Flickr, many new species are discovered yearly. I live in Mexico for a little over 8 years now and have stumbled upon at least 2 new scorpion species, and maybe as many as 4 the recent years. Discovering is not the hard thing to do, describing is (there seems to be quite a backlog in Mexico regarding describing scorpion species).
Perl Programmer for hire
There is no one simple definition of species and being able or unable to interbreed would require a lot of time to confirm and is impractical with most non-domesticated animals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#Difficulty_of_defining_.22species.22_and_identifying_particular_species
I'm no biologist, but with regard to insects they probably mostly judge based on appearance. The cases where appearance is not enough to determine are probably fairly rare.