A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/08/11/158570034/a-new-species-discovered-on-flickr

by llambda • 14 years ago

236 59 14 years ago

mikehotel• 14 years ago

Just how big of an unclassified specimen backlog do most museums have? When does it make sense to go through this rather than browsing insect tags on Flickr? Or, better yet, crowdsource the backlogs via Flickr...

phpnode• 14 years ago

pretty hard to crowdsource something like this, just how many people are there out there that would even know how to tell if a given image represents a "new" species or not. Not many.

savramescu• 14 years ago

And the museum refused to fund an expedition for finding this? And the Scientist waited a year until the photographer went back there. It doesn't look to me that it was hard to find (especially since thy had an uncataloged specimen). I see that in this case the Scientist didn't want to be bothered very much with it. Furthermore he named the specie after his daughter and not the finder.

When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?

unimpressive• 14 years ago

> When has the exitement for discovery got so casual?

When we realized that the number of species on the planet is large enough to give up on any hope of ever cataloging them all.

I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...

colincsl• 14 years ago

I don't think vision/ML techniques will be a viable option for quite a while. These algorithms have a hard enough time correctly classifying dozens of classes, let alone 8.7 million species of animals. This is especially true given that many of these species only have a small number of images.

masterzora3• 14 years ago

> I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...

You have to be careful with those things. My alma mater has a tale of a student 7 or 8 years ago who built a neural net to detect lizards in photos. He fed the system a bunch of pictures to teach it what lizards look like. When it came time to test he got remarkable results: it was 100% effective in positively identifying lizards. Then he fed it a picture of empty ground and the net happily confirmed that this picture contained a lizard as well! Turns out, if all of your training data is positive the computer just learns "everything is a lizard".

Of course, real-life researchers would never dare make such a mistake but this tale always amuses me so I couldn't resist :)

bagelicious• 14 years ago

I doubt machine vision is good enough to even classify known species.

withad• 14 years ago

Discovering something completely new still is a big deal - do a search for "new species" and then any recent year and you'll find numerous articles (usually written around December) about all the weird and wonderful creatures discovered that year.

But this was a lacewing with an unusual colouration and thousands of new insect species are discovered every year. If biologists and museums got all worked up and dropped everything they were doing over each one, they'd never have the time or money to do anything else.

ksec• 14 years ago

This may be totally off topic. But Flickr? While the story may be true It seems to be another new marketing things under new management to generate more buzz.

ajays5• 14 years ago

It's NPR, not your mom-and-pop radio station. I'm sure they verify the story before publishing it.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Just like This American Life verified every story, until they didn't and it blew up in their face.

whyenot• 14 years ago

Oh give me a fucking break. Read the journal article. It describes how the original picture was found on Flickr.

http://www.pensoft.net/J_FILES/1/articles/3220/3220-G-3-layo...

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Shame the entomologist didn't offer to let the guy who actually discovered, photographed, and collected the bug name it. I was waiting for that to be the happy ending of the story, but surprisingly he just named it after his own daughter.

[(optional) insert lame joke about proper attribution]

ajays5• 14 years ago

Yeah, this sentence: "The new species was dubbed Semachrysa jade — not after its pale green color, but after Winterton's daughter." just bothered me. A total dick move by Winterton.

wheels• 14 years ago

It's pretty presumptuous to call someone a dick when you know none of the details of the situation. It's entirely possible that he asked the guy if he wanted to name it and he turned it down.

robertpateii• 14 years ago

The photographer wasn't without recognition. He is now a published co-author in a scientific journal. That's something.

orionmystery7• 14 years ago

Not really. I am not getting much publicity out of this. No $$ for sure since the images were all under CC-BY creative common licensing. No much fame either due to the way the attribution was done. My real name was used rather than my more common nick: Kurt orionmystery.

Oh well.

jtokoph• 14 years ago

Yeah, he should have at least put the photographer's name in there somewhere.

inportb• 14 years ago

He did:

    Winterton SL, Guek HP, Brooks SJ

    A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered
    in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence
    of citizen scientist, online image database and
    cybertaxonomy

    ZooKeys 2012; 214: 1–11. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.214.3220

nnash• 14 years ago

Just to note.

> He also found a matching specimen that had been sitting in the museum's collection, unclassified, for decades.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

Fairies! I've seen them do it.

freepipi• 14 years ago

cool

raghus• 14 years ago

I can't help feeling that this story would have gotten more media attention if only the photo had been posted to Twitter or Instagram

nostromo• 14 years ago

Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back?

It's odd because it makes an insect that otherwise is very camouflaged much more noticeable. This makes me wonder if it's biomimicry of another dangerous/poisonous/distasteful local insect.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

My son and I both thought it looked like a spider on its wings. Maybe it's a trick to make predators think it already got caught.

malkia• 14 years ago

My first thought when I saw it.

orionmystery7• 14 years ago

Yes, that's what I thought too when I photographed that beautiful lacewing. The marking really resembled a jumping spider!!!

kurt (orionmystery)

maratd• 14 years ago

> Does anyone want to speculate on the evolutionary reason behind that interesting pattern on its back?

More than likely, it's a sexual display/indicator without any "practical" purpose related to survival. Like a peacock's tail. If you're really interested in evolutionary biology, read Darwin's original work. You'll be surprised to learn that most adaptations have little to do with survival.

1as• 14 years ago

Perhaps I'm niggling, but even adaptations which evolve by sexual selection have everything to do with survival.

spitx2• 14 years ago

Something akin to the evolution of the peppered moth, perhaps:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

But then again, the "original experiments behind the peppered moth story" were known to have "widely acknowledged flaws." http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/co...

DanBC• 14 years ago

Maybe they look like big eyes, which make the bug look like a bigger animal.

But this national geographic magazine seems to doubt that theory:

(http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080222-butte...)

Volscio• 14 years ago

No shoutout yet for Project Noah?

http://www.projectnoah.org/

"Backed by National Geographic, Project Noah is mobilizing a new generation of nature explorers and helping people from around the world appreciate their local wildlife. Our community is harnessing the power and popularity of new mobile technologies to collect important ecological data and help preserve global biodiversity."

orionmystery7• 14 years ago

I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago:

http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/12572689

rickdale• 14 years ago

"I swear this crazy weather has created new insects. Have you noticed that we have new insects this year?" - My brother, we live in Michigan, says this to me all the time.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Winterton comes across as a big of a jerk if you ask me. Without the photographer taking the photo initially and then a year later returning to the same spot and capturing this insect there would have been no discovery. Fair enough Guek not some recognition and has his name published co-author in a scientific journal, but seems like the importance of Guek is lost here.

All the scientist did was go, "Compare to any other lacewings we have on record, if no match, new species. Presto, new species give me my accolades" - the bug should have been named after Guek not Winterton's daughter.

205guy• 14 years ago

I'm curious: how do they know it's a new species? Seems like it could just as easily be a small mutation that does not affect interbreeding. From one (presumably dead) specimen, how did they determine it was an entirely new species, and not just a local population?

A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr

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