We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s

And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.

Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features.

In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!)

All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.

I can't see how that would possibly be a requirement for determining the species of a bee. Wouldn't DNA be cheaper and easier?

Take the comment a little more gently. You didn't really address that by just saying "many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods". And even with this followup, it's not fully addressed. Dissection takes an expert, sure. But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about the species. And preservation requires skills but not taxonomy skills. Does SEM imaging for this purpose usually require species expertise?

I'm not saying you're wrong overall here, I'm just saying there are pretty obvious points where the average person won't know the answer or which of these skills end up mattering the most.

> It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience

I don't think that's what they were suggesting.

My country is not much better.

During the time when capitalism was first named an overwhelming majority of the populaces' exchanges of services and goods was not based on any capitalistic exchanges. And with capitalistic exchange I mean the exchange of good that were produced under a capitalistic agreement where the means of production are not in the hands of anyone with immediate social relations to the person controlling the means of labor. Most of the people were living and working in small villages, self-sufficient to a large degree and wholly preoccupied with agriculture. Goods and services were mostly produced in a feudal mode of production, not in a capitalistic mode.

Nowadays however, for a vast majority of the population of most industrialized and developing economies of the world this means of exchange is the primary - if not the exclusive - means of procuring goods and services.

So, I very much dispute that calling our society 'hyper capitalistic' is hyperbole, despite of the two sharing a prefix.

People will find meaning. It’s part of the human condition.

It’s only when you take someone who has been working day in and day out for years and you give them a week off, and they’ll collapse on the couch and watch TV and feel bad. Because they are exhausted and haven’t developed any healthy hobbies. But if it was their whole life, they wouldn’t stay on the couch forever. Also when you give a worker a bit of time off, their friends are still working. If everyone can take time off, people would meet with each other. And that’s the oldest human pastime. The company of others. And it’s free!

Would you? I sure wouldn't.

Nobody needs the threat of hunger or homelessness to motivate them to live normal lives.

No, no. The excuse for ignorance is not to blame the only people that have actually worked toward solutions to the current, ongoing extinction event. People that devote their lives to entomology, biology, ecology, and related fields have already done their part.

Endless propaganda and reality distortion has made everyone not care about plants and animals. This along with similar corporate and governmental mindfucking initiatives has made everyone go crazy.

Humour me; how would you have convinced the public that a pandemic was a real risk before it happened; such that they would need to fork out more money for taxes?

How would you have convinced someone before 2008 that regulating part of the finance industry might be somewhat a good idea; such that they would have to reduce profit on their pension funds?

And how do you convince someone, /today/ that climate-change might have quite far-reaching consequences; such that they'll need to pay more for consumer goods?

It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.

Suggesting we must sell everything feels short-sighted. Knowledge of the Earth benefits everyone in the long run. We should collectively have the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this.

For example [0] there are cases where a semingly-obscure wasp, describe by a seemingly obscure person, for an audience of seemingly a handful of people, turns out to be critical to the lives and livelihoods of many, many people. The knowledge that lead to this discovery came from the passion of the taxonomists who dedicate their lives to this gathering of foundational knowledge, not from those who best knew how to sell themselves as useful.

[0](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201124-the-tiny-parasit...)

That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.

We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.

We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.

The reason for the mocking tone of the above is that we have always solved this problem centuries ago yet somehow now everyone has decided they want to live in a crypto-neo-feudalist society that cares only for profit and stock price and screw everything else. Government will never work if we do everything we can to sabotage it at every corner. Enough is enough. We either fix this now or we resign ourselves to a dark future.

My point is that they do not, and that the line between different species indeed can be quite arbitrary, and can very often differ from one specialist to the other.

Most of the earth's oxygen is produced by plankton, which is especially a place where some members of the same species produce said oxygen, and some do not.

So; monkey systems -> other humans, albeit flippantly.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471...

Quoting:

Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines

Evidence is increasing that a range of taxonomic groups, including bivalve molluscs, ray-finned fish, and birds across the Northern Hemisphere, are deficient in thiamine (vitamin B1) 19, 20. Thiamine is required for basic cellular metabolism and functioning of neuronal membranes. Thiamine deficiency rarely is a direct cause of mortality, but impairs health and can cause immunosuppression or leads to behavioural and reproductive problems that ultimately could cause population decline or extirpation. Days of thiamine deficiency may present long-lasting sublethal effects, which makes recognition of the extent of thiamine deficiencies more complex. The deficiencies likely are caused by insufficient dietary intake, which may be related to shifts in thiamine-producing algal populations. A recent and extensive survey along the northwest coast of the US found evidence of thiamine depletion in the water column [21]. Additionally, exposure to environmental pollutants may interfere with thiamine uptake. The extent to which thiamine deficiency may pose a substantial long-term risk to a range of species remains unclear.

End quote.

So thiamine deficiency may also be partially induced by environmental pollutants which possibly includes insecticides (though the paper gives no citations for which pollutants). The scale of the known thiamine problems, at least in water systems, are scary, as is the fact that we don't really know what the extent of it is, especially on land. My experience in research, software, and life is that there are usually multiple simultaneous problems behind observable issues.

Sounds more like a loaded question.

I don't have kids, but I'd like to. I know even that's the "selfish" answer, but I can attempt to justify it by teaching them to be good stewards and thereby doing something positive about the problem. Calling it passing the problem on, but they'll have better tools than me to cope with it because we're building those tools right now. At the very least, I'd hope my daughter would be smart enough to understand that being "part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth" is a gross simplification of an incredibly complex social and scientific environment.

> So this is how you justify it to yourself?

I don't justify anything. In my opinion, a first world life as it exists today is unjustifiable. But that doesn't mean it's my fault, or that I can do anything about it.

> It seems you acknowledge the legitimacy and urgency of the problem but are unwilling to make changes due to it being social suicide?

It would be impossible for me personally to make meaningful changes. I live in a city with no infrastructure. The USA has so much inefficiency baked into its supply chain due to globalism it's ridiculous. Everyone is anti-nuclear, no politician represents me or these interests. I recycle, I carry my own bag to the store, etc. I drive more than an hour every day even though I would like to not own a car. I can't ever not be employed because losing the insurance would literally kill me due to a medical condition.

> Do you have kids?

I will probably never have children because I don't really believe in the future.

> Will you be able to tell them you did something positive about this problem? Or greedily stayed complicit due to the inconvenience? Are you prepared to tell your daughter you were the part of the people killing all the wildlife on earth?

Here's the deal. All of our carbon footprints here probably suck, but you're playing into the hands of the real evil by framing things this way. Counterintuitively, pushing for individual responsibility for pollution and environmental degradation is exactly what big corporations want because it enables their destruction more than any other single thing. If I had a child, I would educate them not to make this argument but to push for structural reform and deprogramming of this mindset.

Have you ever heard of the Keep America Beautiful [1] campaign? It's where a lot of this sentiment comes from, and it was funded by Coca-Cola in response to a rise in sentiment supporting legislation to reign in environmental destruction on the part of big corporations. Greenwashing campaigns have been very effective at shifting public attention away from corporate responsibility and towards the individual. I'll 'do my part' to consume less, but I refuse to put responsibility for these corporate / government structures on myself. Especially after they've gone to such lengths to gaslight us all.

> This stuff goes through my head for myself, so I'm curious how you address it?

One thing I've brainstormed with a similarly-concerned friend would be to create a series of localized handout materials tying politicians that people in the area can vote for to specific environmental atrocities directly in an easy-to-understand fashion. That would be a pretty non-trivial effort though, would require cooperation from a lot of other people, and could get us in a lot of trouble. Maybe one day.

[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful)

But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't understand your focus on capitalism. In any economic system, some people are going to be trying to increase the efficiency of food production (if not, they'll all eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done a good job. I don't see why only the "making money" incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.

In ecology there is a concept called extinction vortex. It works very much like a black hole. You pass a non-return point and then the extinction process accelerates suddenly. There is just not time anymore for plans B or C. To escape the gravitational field you need to add lots of energy in the opposite direction. You need, lets say it, a "god's hand intervention"; A few humans that will decide to spend huge amounts of money, time, technology and resources to try to save the day. A struck of luck that worked for Californian Condor or European bison, but failed for Californian porpoise.

> If the metaphor you're choosing is a company losing their clients, then your argument is wrong, because what happens is that the competitor(s) fills the void and the system balances itself.

What you say is exactly what I'm predicting that will happen.

If you wipe an obscure species of mosquitoes, and they pollinate X, in the 99% of the cases X will disappear. Period. There is not time for the other species to fill the gap or for X to adapt. Can survive only by cloning itself. If all mosquitoes were equally equivalent and equally replaceable, we would have room in the planet for one single species, not thousands.