#the final frontier

[dakywich]

All those marsh melons 😞

[chazchaschad]

punctured bicycle, on a hillside desolate

Will nature make a man of me yet?

[mr--spock]

Admit it, Spock. For people like us, the journey itself… is home.

[idontwanttoboldlygo]

I like to think I'm funny

[imadoctornotanescalator]

TOS Textposts pt 26-???

[trek-tracks]

A handy disambiguation guide

[markscherz]

Sir how did you single Handedly discover 95 species of frog. I am still in college for Bio rn, and the academic process seems to take 100 Years to get anything finalized, how were we missing 95 species of frog and how did you discover all of them in a timely manner?

Simple: I didn't. None of my work is done without a large and amazing team, including me and my colleagues, the students we take along, the local guides, the camp cook (the most important member of every field team!), the lab technicians, et cetera. You don't have to do it all by yourself.

Taxonomy is a generation ship; we have to train our own successors in order to see the discipline survive, and hope to achieve the dream of 'completing' the inventory (possible in vertebrates, impossible in most invertebrate groups). If every generation had to start from scratch, or if a lack of collaboration meant all workers would have to work on their own, we would constantly be losing decades of work (and we do in some disciplines, which is a disaster!).

Most of the species I have described (or perhaps 'co-described' would be a better way to say it) were not actually discovered by me, but by my colleagues, including my former PhD supervisors. I myself have actually discovered (i.e. been the first one to collect for science) less than a quarter of the species I've described, I think (but have also discovered many more that have not yet been described).

Also, Madagascar is just special; it has huge levels of endemism, including micro-endemism, and just off-the-charts frog diversity. Consequently, visits to even well-surveyed protected areas frequently result in new species discoveries. But my team and I mostly target previously unvisited or poorly known forests, and consequently we stack the deck in favour of discovering new species.

(by the way, it's actually 103 now, but that is not the point)