Barcode stats reveal progress, challenges, opportunities
As Dirk Steinke’s recent blog post demonstrated, since the seminal 2003 Proc Royal Soc London B Biol Sci paper by Hebert, Cywinska, Ball, and DeWaard, barcoders around the world have…
As Dirk Steinke’s recent blog post demonstrated, since the seminal 2003 Proc Royal Soc London B Biol Sci paper by Hebert, Cywinska, Ball, and DeWaard, barcoders around the world have…
COI barcodes aim to enable identification of species, assigning unknown specimens to known species, and helping flag genetically divergent organisms that may represent new species. Might barcodes also help understand…
GPS devices for civilian use were first introduced 1982. The TI 4100 from Texas Instrument Company cost $150,000, weighed 50 lbs, and had heavy demand from land surveyors (GPS World,…
…absurd when applied to the large number of animal species that show low intraspecific variation. For example 97% of the 263 world cowrie species show constrained intraspecific variation (Meyer and…
What lives in soil? In August 2009 Pesq Agropec Bras (open access) an international cohort of 10 researchers from Canada, France, US, Taiwan, and Russia examine prospects for speeding assessment…
…of Life (EOL), Catalog of Life, World Register of Marine Species (WorMS), and Google images, among others. Having all that, inspired by Matt Damon’s character in The Bourne Ultimatum, we…
In 7 June 2006 Systematics and Biodiversity Andrew Brower examines application of DNA barcodes to identifying and defining new species. His Perspective piece “Problems with DNA barcodes for species delimitation:…
…revealed these 4 specimens, and a fifth stranded in 1997, to be a new species, designated Perrin’s beaked whale Mesoplodon perrini (Dalebout et al 2002 Marine Mammal Sci 18:577). The…
…inferences about the evolutionary past. It generally takes years or decades between specimen collection and publication of a new species description, and my impression is that most specimens in museum…
…Plymouth Marine Laboratory, England, report on new primers for amplifying 18S rRNA as a means of barcoding marine nematodes from environmental samples. As background, nematodes are an enormous phylum of…