Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

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A species' discovery is never about first "seen", it's first described. There's no way to know whom first saw it.

Your assumption regarding splitting known species is wrong as it comes to numbers. It often happens for birds but this doesn't move the needle as there's only 10K birds.

Almost every species on this planet is an arthropod and most are not described. It's trivially easy to "discover" new ones. Go to a bio-diverse area (say a jungle) and fill a wheelbarrow with soil. Filter the dirt and describe anything you find. It will take you forever but there will be dozens if not hundreds of "new" species. The main bottleneck is not finding them, it's describing them, which is very time consuming.

Put some specialized lights up in the same area at night. One remote site I attended in Colombia discovered on average 20 new species of moth every single day. There's expected to be 150K moth species, which still may be an underestimation.

And this doesn't even describe the truly tiny organisms living in soil and rivers and oceans.

As it comes to species, the public has a bias for mammals and birds. Combined they're about 17-18K species only. Not even a drop in the ocean. You can split each of them into 10 separate species and this still doesn't do anything to inflate the total amount of species.

Do you get to name ones you identify? Seems like a good tourist opportunity.

It's complicated. If you're a tourist and just stumbled upon a species not yet described, that's only the start.

Next is a whole lot of work to actually describe it which a tourist would typically not be doing, so the idea that you should get naming credit is not a given. There's no hard rule for it.

You can definitely give input for the name, and there's rules to naming. You can't name it after a company, for example.

The most generous example I've seen is a research organization where you can "buy" a species name. Within taxonomy rules, you can decide on a name for a fee, even if you didn't discover the species at all. It's a way to fund research.

In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.

> In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.

Ah, so wait, is there a central taxonomy office (or at least relatively centralized ones for different species groups) that is basically backlogged like a government passport office? Is that how it works?

Unfortunately, that too is a mess.

In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority.

But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status.

All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.

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