bottle is kept thin, light brown broth, with some uncertain dark matter bobbing on top – a soup, maybe, but one you’ll never want to eat. When it is poured into a white plastic tray, the blocks resolve to insect. These are butterflies and moths, the delicate patterns on their wings that fade after a week or two in ethanol. Here are beetles and wasps and lots of burly-looking flies, all piled up, plus a large swarm of wasps, their stripes and stingers still lit.
Michael Sharkey pulled out a pair of thin pliers and began examining his prey. It included anything small and winged that lived in the grasslands and woods around his home, high in the Colorado Rockies, and things that had suffered misfortune, during the preceding two weeks, when flying into the trap. the tent-shaped mess he set up in front of his house and we cleaned it up earlier that morning.
Although Sharkey is a zoologist, an expert on the insect order that includes wasps, he ignores the obvious stripes and stingers. In fact, he overlooked all the creatures the average person would recognize as wasps — or even fail to recognize. Instead, he began to pull small brown spots out of the soup, looking at them through a pair of specialized glasses with magnifying magnifiers of the kind that a jeweler might wear. Dryed and placed under a microscope on a workbench, the spot first reveals itself as a complete insect, complete with long, articulated antennae and exquisite wings. This is a wasp, belonging to the family of organisms that Sharkey has been studying for decades. Entomologists believe that there are tens of thousands of braconid species that share the planet, having all sorts of important impacts on the environment around them. But most humans have probably never heard of them, much less aware of seeing them. The huge parts of the braconid tree, as it is said, are still unknown science.
As a taxonomist, Sharkey is part of a small group of people who can transform unknown insects into known ones. When other entomologists find specimens they think may be unnamed, taxonomists are the experts they call in to investigate whether this seemingly new thing to us. really new to us or not. If so, the taxonomist could officially welcome it into the realm of human knowledge by openly giving the species a Latin name, along with a formal description of the physical features that make it so popular. should be unique and recognizable to future observers. British generalist Gavin Broad tells me the process “hasn’t changed too much” over the past 200 years – except that today “we’ve got better pictures”.
I came across the name Sharkey for the first time a few months ago when I called him up and asked if we could look into the bug together. I don’t remember exactly when, only that I gradually started to notice the name — always followed by “et al.” – in more and more places. There have been long-term reviews of Sharkey et al. appear in scientific journals, and then there are responses to those criticisms, and responses to those responses. And then there’s the sound of bickering among entomologists in my Twitter feed, some of whom call the work irresponsible or shameful or just write “Wooooooooof.”
“Sharkey et al.” stands for an article that appeared in a journal ZooKeys in 2021, along with a series of follow-up publications that used similar methods. That first article was not the kind of work that would normally cause such a ruckus. In it, Sharkey and a team of co-authors named several new species of wasps that have been caught in a volatile trap in Costa Rica. But instead of identifying just a few species, they named it 403. And instead of writing detailed descriptions for each new wasp species, the authors included just a photo and a snippet of the genetic code.
The technique Sharkey and his co-authors used, called DNA barcoding, is a quick way to classify and distinguish species. The researchers analyze a small portion of DNA at a specific location in each organism’s genome, upload that sequence to an extensive database, and then use algorithms to sequence the different sequences into groups. When DNA varies from organism to organism by more than a few percent, it is considered an indication that their evolutionary history has descended into separate tracks over a considerable period of time, possibly divide them into different species.
DNA barcoding is a popular scientific tool today. But some scientists think Sharkey and his colleagues have pushed its use too far. They refer to this work as “supercharged taxonomy” or even, as taxonomist Miles Zhang puts it, “taxonomic failure,” a term that refers to labeling taxa as new without There is not enough evidence of their uniqueness. These critics argue that the work could undermine the whole project of naming the natural world, beginning to make it legible to human understanding. Zhang – who was actually Sharkey’s academic “nephew” who had studied under one of Sharkey’s former students – was very disappointed because ZooKeys continue to publish articles from Sharkey et al. that he tweeted to the magazine, “I’m done with you, go find a new thread editor.”
