Robert,

I don't like it personally, but that's really not the point. I've handled and worked with maybe a thousand individual monitors myself (mostly in the wild), and I've killed one. A gravid female glebopalma ran under my truck on a dirt track and I got her with the back wheel -- I felt badly about that. However, yes I would kill and pickle a specimen of a new species of monitor if my option to find one already preserved in a museum collection didn't pan out. You could also keep the animals as captives, and delay describing the species until an individual died. That isn't often done (because someone else who lacks your ethics will happily off one and "steal" whatever effort you put into the discovery), but there is nothing wrong with that concept.

The rules of zoological nomenclature don't suck, and I do defend them, for the reasons I listed, and others. There is no substitute for a preserved specimen as the type of a new species. Too many bad things can happen to a living type specimen, period, end of discussion. As I said above, this is done for the future, quite possibly for future uses that neither you nor I can now imagine. Do you suppose that Linnaeus anticipated gene sequencing? People have sequenced genes from specimens that were preserved in Linnaeus's time. I am not going to speculate on what biotechnology may be able to achieve in a decade, let alone a century, other than to point out that some Australians are hard at work trying to conjure up a living thylacine (Tasmanian wolf) from DNA taken from preserved museum specimens. Jurassic Park, no, not in my imagination, but if you have a complete gene sequence for something, my imagination is less constrained. I am glad that there are pickled thylacines, and passenger pigeons, and yes, even bits of a dodo.

I think you're focusing too narrowly here: Do you feel the same way about someone killing a type specimen for a new species of fly or rat? If not, that goes a long way towards clarifying the issues -- the rules are OK except for animals I like.

Interestingly, I think most of the specific recent cases that people here have in mind did not involve scientists as the original, field collectors of the animals (V. mabitang is the exception). Instead, at least one dealer/exporter had groups of each of the new species in hand, and cut some deal to make them available for description. I don't know those specifics, and likely would not have been party to the deals I suspect were made, but that's a separate issue.

What I'd like to know is how many of those animals died while the exporters/dealers had them, and what happened to those dead monitors? I bet you a nickle they got thrown in a ditch, because their value was felt to be zero unless they were alive. Is that a waste? You betcha.

Now, for those who want to believe that they just couldn't bring themselves to kill a monitor, and want to condemn anybody who would defend doing so, there is self-evident hypocrisy here if you've ever bought a CH or WC animal. No need for much more discussion of that, I think.

Lastly, I don't actually understand what you mean by 'money thing' -- is there some idea out there that a scientist gets a 'bonus' for describing a new species or something? Jeez, tell me where, I need to move! What actually happens, once your paper is accepted for publication in some scientific journal, is that you get a bill from the journal for "page charges" -- most journals ask for, and some demand, payment of around $100 per printed page to offset their costs. How much of a money thing is that?

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Hide Replies ]