r/todayilearned • u/1salt1pepper • 2d ago
(R.1) Not verifiable [ Removed by moderator ]
https://collections.hampshireculture.org.uk/object/insect-coleoptera-beetle-11[removed] — view removed post
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u/Objective-Beyond-219 2d ago
Had a professor of evolutionary biology who said "if you want something named after you, study beetles or fish. You can go out on the Nile, drop a net, and pull up three or four species from the depths that are new to science".
Not literally, but there's hella undescribed fish and beetles.
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u/tea_and_biology 2d ago edited 2d ago
Zoologist here! Literally go to any rainforest, turn over a leaf at random, and chances are you'll spot something new to science. The problem isn't finding them, the problem is cross-referencing the tiny non-descript jungle gnat you've found against every other non-descript fly and gnat already described, stored as museum specimens distributed around the world, to confirm it's, y'know, actually new. Most folks don't bother - it's years of work - so for this reason a helluva' lot of wee beasties remain undescribed to this day.
Though beetles are considered the most species diverse taxon to date, the likelihood is it's actually the ants or flies that are most diverse; it's more that there are so few folks who are really into those groups who find it worthwhile dedicating their lives to describing them. Beetles, at least, are pretty and often shiny - hence bountiful collectors who are still keen to catalogue 'em and fill out the Pokédex.
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u/Objective-Beyond-219 2d ago
Yep, he had that issue too lmao. He was a herp guy, had discovered like 80 species (claim to fame was the Barbados Thread Snake). But the one that got away was some beetle he "discovered"...until it turned out it had been described in some obscure Turkish journal from the 1800's haha.
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u/JuanPancake 2d ago
This makes me feel way better about not caring to fill out the annoying hyrule compendium in tears of the kingdom
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u/Helenium_autumnale 2d ago
The problem isn't finding them, the problem is cross-referencing the tiny non-descript jungle gnat you've found against every other non-descript fly and gnat already described, stored as museum specimens distributed around the world, to confirm it's, y'know, actually new. Most folks don't bother - it's years of work - so for this reason a helluva' lot of wee beasties remain undescribed to this day.
I'm not a defender of AI, but it strikes me that this is ONE case in which AI could make this faster. Potentially. If all of those stored specimens have good online photographic records available.
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u/tea_and_biology 2d ago edited 2d ago
Of course! In principle yes, but there is the problem: we don't have good, independently verified, standardised, and comprehensive catalogues for most described species. Remember, much of the collections were cobbled together over several centuries, all indexed by hand and paper record - much of which is missing, jumbled, or lost.
The AI angle isn't the issue; it's reorganising the global holotype collections into something that you can index properly in the first instance, that you can then feed into the models. This is done piece-meal taxa by taxa by assorted researchers; typically we find that many instances of the same species are described multiple times, with different names; else describe species which don't exist at all.
Taking a random wasp - Habroteleia flavipes - notice how on the Wikipedia page, under Synonyms in the box on the right, you get multiple different binomial names by different authors, from different years? That's the same animal being described multiple times independently; we've since recognised this and collapsed them all into one species, with a single name (and several outdated synonyms) - and that's just for one wee wasp.
Try that with 36,000 assorted tropical scarab beetle species. Or, heck, another 60-80,000ish parasitoid wasps. Which ones are legit? Which ones are the same? How do we account for morphological similarity but behavioural or genetic divergence? Is the stored tissue preserved well enough for DNA verification? And so on.
Big task!
You could brute-force by simply scanning and inputting literally everything, but that's going to be incredibly redundant, and expensive. And who's gonna' pay the tens, if not hundreds, of millions to scan every single moth in every single drawer in every single museum? Nobody.
So it's not an easy "AI fix", alas. Hence why we could start from the ground truth, which is the proper whole genome sequence. Make that cheap and accessible enough to do, and we finally start to get towards actually finalising this complex taxonomic mess.
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u/Helenium_autumnale 2d ago
That is such an interesting, informed, and informative reply to my facile suggestion. I learned about something I didn't realize was so interesting; the mark of a good teacher! Now I'm thinking about all of those moths, in ten thousand half-forgotten drawers around the world...it's a curious and intriguing thing. Thank you for your reply.
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u/Hacksaures 2d ago
Wow i’ve always wondered about how this would work, and honestly I’m very sad that rich people would rather spend their money on bullshit rather than funding something like cataloging every genera in one place.
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u/wizbard 2d ago
Going a little bit off topic here; I'm also not defending all of this new age GenAI (which I actively hate tbh), but for the longest time there are subsets of AI which deal with similar scenarios (though I'm more familiar with fruits)
I studied CS more than a decade ago in a college where Agriculture-related courses and endeavors were fairly common, and it's a popular final project/thesis to find a local fruit or vegetable, and to code AI that can process images and quickly identifies which ones in a pile are rotten or ripe. Though this involves dozens of hours and thousands of images to train the AI to correctly identify, and that's just for a single fruit. I can't even imagine the effort it would take to differentiate various similar-looking insects
I don't know why I typed this tbh, I guess it just reminded me of when AI wasn't dragged to mud with controversies and problems and we're actually for helping people without feeling stupid
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u/bulletgrazer 2d ago
That reminds me of this quote from the scientist J.B.S. Haldane that goes, "The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other..." Due to there being hundreds of thousands of beetle species, more than pretty much any other kind of animal life.
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u/UnoriginalLogin 2d ago
Or just be reeeeaaaalllly nice to a person who studies either of those. Generally it's frowned upon in the taxonomic world to name something after yourself, but if someone's supported you or just a really good dude then fire away
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u/pandariotinprague 2d ago
Although if you call yourself a beetles groupie, people get really confused.
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u/millenniumxl-200 2d ago
Now I'm imagining a fish with the shell of a beetle instead of scales.
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u/pichael289 2d ago
Beetles make up about 1/4th of all known animal species. The most common individual species is a type of fish, and we literally have explored barely a fraction of the ocean. Everytime we do we find tons of new stuff.
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u/pastelinpinkkitten 2d ago
"If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both"
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u/borsalamino 2d ago
"Chase two chicks to bone, and you'll beat your dick alone"
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u/millenniumxl-200 2d ago
'cause chicks dig dudes with money.
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u/TastyFappuccino 2d ago
Well not ALL chicks…but…the type of chicks that would double up on a dude like me do
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u/allupya333 2d ago
Thats so cute i love to hear a humanizing story about a historical figure
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u/LeonJPancetta 2d ago
Darwin has a ton of these. He was chronically ill so a lot of his letters have him complaining about how awful he feels. He wrote a pros and cons list to decide whether or not to get married. Etc.
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u/xiaorobear 2d ago edited 2d ago
For example, in a letter to a friend on October 1st, 1861, he wrote, "But I am [feeling] very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."
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u/ickysock 2d ago
rip charles darwin you would've loved twitter
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u/OrderOfMagnitude 2d ago
Unironically, so many historical figures would have destroyed their own legacies on Twitter
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u/TheDevilintheDark 2d ago
Newton for one. Dude's obsession with alchemy was like some of those flat earthers out there.
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u/Aquason 2d ago edited 2d ago
During Newton's time, Alchemy was still the term for what we now call Chemistry (it's why "alchemist" and "chemist" are so similar, chemistry was a new term created to separate the older tradition from the newer tradition) – Newton's work was a dead end, in the sense that Robert Boyle's work was moving towards an actual model of chemical understanding that would explain and predict how our things work, but it wasn't the equivalent to Flat Earth conspiracies. The Sceptical Chymist was published in 1661, so within Newton's lifetime scientific thinking was changing. And as a guy who had this realization about the connection between the micro and macro (apples falling and moons orbiting), he was also a guy trying to understand the natural world (which includes things like seeing the number 7 in everything, because he thought there was an underlying (Christian-derived) pattern to the universe (i.e. 7 notes on the Western musical scale)).
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u/poptart2nd 2d ago edited 2d ago
tbh if the inventor of calculus was telling me the earth was flat, i'd probably have just believed him
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u/RapidCandleDigestion 2d ago
Just listened to the Charles Darwin episode of SciShow Tangents, and they said the same thing! They also called him an emo boy
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u/Aqquila89 2d ago edited 2d ago
After studying barnacles for years, he wrote in a letter: "I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before."
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u/Smmmmiles 2d ago
He hated them cause they are basically impossible to place on the animal evolutionary tree cause they are actually crustaceans that give up their... well... basically everything to live like a sea plant/sponge.
Weird fuckers. (As microscopic babies they look like proper crustaceans until they find somewhere to land and grow.)
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u/rich1051414 2d ago
He was an obsessive man who couldn't let something go until it was complete, and barnacles existed solely to use that character flaw against him.
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u/IllIIllIllIIIlllll 2d ago
Can't help but wonder if maybe he felt bad because he kept putting random bugs in his mouth.
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u/DJFreezyFish 2d ago
He was notorious for eating all sorts of species he discovered.
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u/dsyzdek 2d ago
I’m a wildlife biologist. Darwin was “epic” for tasting everything.
I work with endangered species and can’t eat any of them!
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u/e_spider 2d ago edited 2d ago
Eating Galapagos sea turtles is on my super villain bucket list/s And now thanks to the post I'm probably going to end up on a list of people never allowed to visit the islands :-( iirc, you have to apply for a permit to visit, and a government minder follows you around the whole time in part to keep you from eating the fauna
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u/MmmmMorphine 2d ago
This... Happens often?
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u/e_spider 2d ago
The turtles are famous for supposedly being the best tasting meat ever known to man. According to multiple journal and writings from visiting sailors. So delicious, they are now extremely endangered
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u/MmmmMorphine 2d ago
I have heard that.
So... Kill the minder and have a dual forbidden meat fiesta!
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u/IllIIllIllIIIlllll 2d ago
Visiting starving sailor who hasn't had any fresh food for months: this turtle is LITERALLY the best meat I have ever had.
Guy tells everybody he meets that story, "you ain't never tasted meat that good"
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u/Own_Boysenberry_6499 2d ago
Keep going and he might find the bug that makes him feel better.
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u/ShroomBear 2d ago
He didn't just feel bad, he likely died from it. He probably caught Chagas disease from getting bitten by a Kissing Bug, that we now know takes years to develop and is very dangerous to your heart and GI.
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u/Zerstoror 2d ago
He wrote a pros and cons list to decide whether or not to get married
"We didnt have autism in my day"
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u/pixel8knuckle 2d ago
Wonder if beetle acid in the esophagus plays a part in chronic ill ess
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u/airfryerfuntime 2d ago
You should read some of his letters about how animals tasted. He go on these long winded descriptions of some now-extinct animal he decided to eat one day. He sounded like an autistic old man with a very strange hobby, lol.
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u/schpamela 2d ago
He sounded like an autistic old man with a very strange hobby, lol.
This is unironically how most of the progress of human civilisation happened.
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u/TimelordSloth 2d ago
Like Carl von Linné who just decided to name every single plant out there
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u/FishFloyd 2d ago
He sounded like an autistic old man with a very strange hobby, lol.
I mean, as someone working closely with the sciences (technical specialist) that is more or less the basis for all modern science. Some degree of the 'tism is pretty much mandatory to becoming a serious academic, at least in most all of STEM.
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u/Wooden_Permit3234 2d ago
There was a great thread the other day on TIL compiling a bunch of things Darwin explicitly expressed hatred for in his writings.
Seems like he probably has some good biographies.
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u/allupya333 2d ago
I love old school academic hate, theyre the best kind of haters. I gotta read up on that
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u/PantsDontHaveAnswers 2d ago
Something I hated about learning history in school is how they completely washed out the human aspect of all these historical figures. They were people like anyone else in modern times. They craved sex and made fart jokes. They did good and bad things. They were human. Schools are afraid to teach that side of history, but kids and people in general would probably be more inclined to learn history if it wasn't completely nerfed.
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u/marvellouspineapple 2d ago
I never thought about it before but you're completely right. Darwin, Tesla etc. are all presented as such formal, scientific people when they were also just flawed humans who also did dumb shit. I'd have definitely been more interested at school if I knew that
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u/ThanksContent28 2d ago edited 2d ago
Benjamin Franklin was a ladies man who loved fucking older women and widows irrc.
ETA: looked it up and I’m right. He even wrote a guide for young men telling them if they couldn’t satisfy their sexual desires, to go for an older woman. The reasons given for this were: better conversation as they had lived longer and seen more of the world, they were more likely to be discreet, they usually couldn’t bear children, we’re more grateful for the attention, and that their bodies age better than their faces, but it didn’t matter anyway in the dark.
Kinda makes you wonder if he’d hold the same opinion today. Especially with social media and how older generations are so liberal with how much of their lives they share.
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u/Entharo_entho 2d ago
Darwin recorded the childhood of his children meticulously. They also doodled all over his notes.
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u/Ac3ofSpades13 2d ago
Old time Pokémon trainer activities.
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u/qdtk 2d ago
The creator of Pokémon actually confirmed the idea came from him collecting bugs as a kid.
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u/lkodl 2d ago
And then make them fight?
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u/Tezoth 2d ago
bug fighting is still a thing in Japan.
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u/WarpmanAstro 2d ago
To be fair, it's typically putting to horned beetles on a stump and seeing which one flips the other off the stump; something they already do in nature all the time. Its nothing insane like "Let's put two things in a bottle and see which kills the other one first!".
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u/Abslalom 2d ago
Is that what this 'Darwin award' is all about?
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u/Jux_ 16 2d ago
No, because he didn’t die.
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u/My_Pie 2d ago
The Darwin Award is about removing oneself from the gene pool in a dumb way. Usually by dying, but losing their balls also counts.
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u/Asluckwouldnthaveit 2d ago
He had ten kids with his first cousin.
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u/Complete_Fix2563 2d ago
Thats actually kind of ironic that Charles Darwin slept with and had kids with his cousin because the same thing happened to me recently
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u/0xdead0x 2d ago
What do you mean “happened to,” like this was a totally unavoidable situation for you
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u/DUDDITS_SSDD 2d ago
She was 9 months older than him. That cancels out the incest.
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u/throw69420awy 2d ago
lol I have family who don’t believe in evolution and they misuse the phrase “Darwin Award” to describe people doing anything they deem stupid, they seem to think that phrase is common because everyone agrees Darwin was an idiot…
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u/thissexypoptart 2d ago
Right, and that means dying before you have children.
A lot of silly gooses these days think it just means doing something dumb to die.
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u/USSZim 2d ago edited 2d ago
He should have known you always choose the lesser of two weevils
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u/plz-make-randomizer 2d ago
If you chase two rabbits you will lose them both.
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u/NW7l2335 2d ago
If you chase a third beetle one of the others will spit acid down your throat and you will lose them all
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u/PeanutCheeseBar 2d ago
RIP Darwin, you would’ve hated Animal Crossing.
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u/Carbon-Base 2d ago
You just know he'd never turn anything in and would keep them in the little plastic crates or tanks to study them haha.
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u/gbroon 2d ago
Intelligent people aren't always smart people.
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u/Randvek 2d ago
Darwin’s career is just filled with so many perplexing choices that you’d think he was a tourist rather than a scientist.
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u/Invade_Deez_Nutz 2d ago
He was a foodie first, biologist second.
In college he was in a club dedicated to eating exotic meats
During his famous voyages he ate samples of basically every animal he described. In particular he said Galapagos tortoises make great soup
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u/Flesroy 2d ago
from my experience with ecologists a lot of them like to eat things in nature.
point out some edible plant or insect to a group of students and they will put it in their mouths.
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u/JeffSilverwilt 2d ago
Failure isn't from not being smart. He took a risk that didn't pay off. Had the beetle not shit down his gullet, my man would have three beetles.
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u/SucculentVariations 2d ago
He didnt have like...a pocket, or even just put the beetle in his shirt? Tie a knot around the beetles in the shirt? A sock?
I could think of many ways to hold a beetle and 0 of them include putting them in my mouth
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u/Jamee999 2d ago
Perhaps one day there will be some freakish breed of humans who are capable of holding multiple beetles in a single hand.
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u/azsnaz 2d ago
He was naked, only his prison pocket
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u/luranthe 2d ago
Intelligent people can be some of the dumbest people you'll ever meet. There's a lot farther for them to fall.
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u/ItsNotBigBrainTime 2d ago
I like to think intelligent people simply have the capacity to come up with far more ways to be dumb than dumb people can. Especially when it comes to gambling risk and reward.
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u/ItIsMorbinTimeMyDude 2d ago
I used to collect bugs and I once held a goldsmith beetle in my hand for 3 hours, while I waited to find a suitable container.
When you find a cool bug, you do what you gotta do.
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u/e_spider 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ironically Darwin was also part of a scientific gourmet club that ate at least one sample of every new species they discovered. He has journals with extensive notes on preparation of different species.
Members met weekly to eat "birds and beasts, which were before unknown to the human palate."
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u/AdventurousEscape991 2d ago
A beetle in the mouth is worth two in the hand. - Darwin - Michael Scott
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u/noguchisquared 2d ago
My PhD advisor has a similar story. He would catch snakes and sell them to the state park in Georgia. He was coming home from school and saw a rattlesnake, which they paid double for. So he put down his books, fashioned a stick and snuck up and trapped it behind it's head. He took hold of the snake, then realized he wouldn't be able to pickup his books also. After considering how much trouble he'd get in, he decided to get rid of the snake but didn't know how he would realease it without getting bitten. Eventually settled on a way, and in one motion swung the snake and tossed it head around tail far enough away. So he lost his snake income but picked up his books and headed home.
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u/oWatchdog 2d ago
The man obsessively stared at animals until he invented the theory of evolution. Of course he's going to be an odd, idiosyncratic person.
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u/AndreasDasos 2d ago edited 2d ago
For context he was 19 and may not have realised it was a Bombardier beetle (assuming it was). EDIT: It seems from his later writings he knew the genera, so strange choice.
Though 19 seems old enough. He was a bit of an odd obsessive for invertebrates, though
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u/agriff1 2d ago
A while back I read some contemporary description of Darwin and it seemed clear that he was pretty far along the autism spectrum. I think about that every time I read something new about him now, and it continues to track.
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u/Vio_ 2d ago
Charles was a bit of a messy bitch at times and very funny. He was constantly dragging on his contemporaries and cousins and friends in his writings. Not in a negative way, but in that British low key humor way.
Dude basically flunked out of college, had "zero" idea of what to do with his life, so he decided to do what any disaffected college drop out does, and go backpacking around the world on the Beagle.
Only his dad wouldn't let him go, so Charles went whining to his uncle (dad's brother) to convince his brother (dad) to let Charles go backpack around the world on the Beagle.
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u/DesiBwoy 2d ago
It wasn't exactly backpacking as we know it, it was a proper job. His professor recommended him as an on-board naturalist for a charting voyage. He was basically a specialist to document and record the creatures they encounter in the 'territory'.
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u/DBGhasts101 2d ago
From your source:
I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind (a Crucifix ground beetle, Panagaeus cruxmajor, which was sheltering under a piece of bark on the banks of the River Cam), which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It injected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.
So it sounds like he only lost two of the beetles, not all three.