
A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr - llambda
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/08/11/158570034/a-new-species-discovered-on-flickr
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jasonkester
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]

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ajays
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.

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wheels
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.

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spitx
Only if anecdotal, I find people from English speaking nations outside of
North America being incredibly opportunistic in these things.

This observation purely emerges from my experience.

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miahi
Some are in for the fame, others for the money.

I find North Americans incredibly opportunistic in registering patents. A
friend that does network support outsourcing was complaining that their
(American) boss was setting targets on _number of patents registered_ by their
_support_ gig.

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savramescu
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?

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unimpressive
> 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...

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masterzora
> 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 :)

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relix
So he really didn't understand neural networks?

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masterzora
I wouldn't say that. I've always seen it like a physicist dropping a negative:
he understands and when he sees the result he immediately knows what he did
wrong but a little careless thought at the time led to a silly mistake.

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Volscio
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."

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orionmystery
I put it up at projectnoah a moment ago:

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

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nostromo
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.

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SoftwareMaven
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.

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

kurt (orionmystery)

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mikehotel
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...

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phpnode
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.

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DigitalSea
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.

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205guy
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?

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rickdale
"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.

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raghus
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

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freepipi
cool

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Kilimanjaro
Fairies! I've seen them do it.

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ksec
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.

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

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

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ajays
"This American Life" is not a news program. But you already knew that.

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smallblacksun
"The Picture Show" is not a news program either.

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ajays
I don't understand where the hate is coming from. What are people disputing
here? That the picture was found on Flickr? That the scientists didn't really
see the picture?

What is it, exactly, that's getting in your craw?

It's a trivial little story. The thing that got me to comment here was the
fact that it (the new species) wasn't named after the photographer; that's
all. But I am really surprised to see people questioning the veracity of the
story which is so insignificant (there are 100s of new species being
discovered all the time; it's not like they found Sasquatch or something), and
the baffling assertion that it's got something to do with the management at
Flickr.... really?!?!?

