is it still really necessary to get pinned specimens in order to get published?

I found this interesting wasp at the Ulladulla Wildflower Reserve on the NSW south Coast.

I believe it is a Calopompilus sp. and I think it is an undescribed species.

We can quickly eliminate 10 of the 11 known species of Calopompilus based on the descriptions and on iNaturalist photo observations. It does resembles C. ornatipennis but differs in some significant ways. It seems to lack “ferunginous coloured abdominals segments 1 and 2” [this is a quote from F Smith in 1855 – it is what we would today refer to as “metasomal segments 2 and 3”] and has a ferunginous terminal abdominal segment – both of which distinguish it from C. ornatipennis. The wing patterns differ from C. ornatipennis in that there is a distinct second black band – whereas ornatipennis has a single black band and possibly black markings about one third of the way from the base of the wings.

So that’s how I get to the possibility that it is an undescribed species – or maybe an undescribed subspecies of C. ornatipennis.

Would appreciate a more expert assessment or any pointers if I have missed something obvious!

Ken Walker
Phil – I agree with all of the character differences you note between your images and C. ornatipennis. I note also the antennal scape colour is the same as the flagella segments (light red-brown) whereas in C. ornatipennis the scape colour is black. Probably a different species.

Phil Warb
That’s a great summary Ken. Thank you!

Phil Warb
Ken Walker raises the important point that 70% of our inverts are undescribed. That prompts me to ask a question that has been on my mind for a while. In order to describe one of those species that is missing from our catalogues, is it still really necessary to get pinned specimens in order to get published? Is anyone describing new species based on photographic records? Have those observers been published and have their descriptions been recognised by the scientific community? Maybe I am crazy but I don’t like killing insects that are sufficiently uncommon that they have so far escaped being described!

Ken Walker
Phil Warb Good question Phil. In 2015, a fly expert published a new species from South Africa based on images only (see attached image). Taxonomists around the world condemned the paper. I know the person who wrote the paper and his main reason was that he was unable to obtain a collecting permit for where this fly occurred and it only occurred in a small area inside the national park. Having a physical specimen, called the holotype, as the reference point for the new species is extremely valuable. In my Australian bee revisions, I have borrowed, from the British Museum in London, the exact specimen that Fredrick Smith used when he described new species of Australian bees in 1853. I could examine these holotype specimens in great detail under a microscope. I could rotate and view all aspects of the specimen which is not available in an image. If a male specimen, then I could remove and examine the male genitalia. Not available in 1853, I could now remove a single leg from the 1853 specimen and run a DNA analysis. Who knows what new techniques will be available in 100 years to extract new datasets from old specimens. Holotypes are the cornerstones of taxonomy and nomenclature and these cornerstones are passed on from one generation to future generations. Science works on theories that get continually tested and either accepted, revised or rejected. A specimen is much better to test these theories than an image only.

Phil Warb
Good answer Ken – thanks.
In addition to my reluctance to kill specimens of uncommon insects, I am surrounded by National Parks, Botanic Gardens and Reserves in which taking specimens will be: a) unpopular with other visitors; and b) difficult to get a permit for. I suppose one just has to bite the bullet and tackle the layers of bureaucracy to seek the permits.

Phil Warb
Ken – I just had a read of the paper you clipped – thanks again for that!
The authors make some very good points for and against the proposition that photos can become adequate scientific evidence for taxonomy.
I notice that the paper that sparked it all was written in 2014 which was before the phenomenon that is iNaturalist. iNaturalist has now reached almost 60 million insect observations of 200,000 species worldwide. The observation count is up by roughly 30% in the last 12 months. It has become a body of scientific data that is now too large and too prevalent to ignore. In the period since the Minteer paper, another change is that camera tech has advanced considerably with 62MP cameras now in the mass markets. I suspect the debate that Minteer et al. started is likely to be raised again in the future!

Phil Warb
By the way, there is now a growing number of insects observations for which we have photos but no formal scientific descriptions. One way that I have seen to address this, is for a provisional name to be advanced pending the publication of a formal paper.
An example of this approach is with the provisionally named “Amorbus macropoda” in the family Coreidae. For many years, this was conflated with a similar species: Amorous alternatus. It now seems that it is a separate species, and indeed a majority of the observations that were labelled A. alternatus are now attributed to the provisional species A. macropoda.
iNaturalist does not allow the use of provisional species names (a very wise decision I am sure) so observations of this species are held at genus level with an observation field being used to record the provisional name.
https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations/206421710

Leander Bertsch replied to Phil Warb’s comment:
“Phil, whether or not you want to or feel comfortable with killing insects is your decision and of course it is perfectly fine if you choose not to for whatever reasons. But what seems a bit strange to me is your comment about killing individuals of „sufficiently uncommon“ species, because it seems to imply that collecting such specimens would be a danger for their respective populations. There is no evidence for that and it distracts from real threats like habitat loss etc. And even your basic assumption is at least on shaky ground: Just because an insect species is rarely collected by entomologists or encountered by photographers doesn‘t need to mean that it is a rare or endangered species in reality. It just means that it is rarely found and that can have various reasons. For example, some Pompilid and other wasp species are rarely ever caught by entomologists with a net or photographed by people, but can be caught in large numbers by traps such as yellow pan traps or Malaise traps. Also, insect taxonomists (or faunists) don‘t work the way they do because they love killing and pinning these animals. As Ken explained, there are many many reasons why we base descriptions and revisions of groups on collected specimens. There is also far more to describing a species than just catching a specimen and describing it because you think it is new. When people revise a group, they usually not only gather all the relevant literature and look at the original descriptions of the species, but also look at all the relevant types. Depending on the group, these procedures may also be supplemented by creating phylogenies, genetic analyses (like the COI „barcoding“), ecological investigations, etc. pp. It is a problem that large parts of Earth‘s biodiversity are still undescribed, but describing species by pictures only and thereby at least partially preventing the process that makes scientific knowledge gain possible, is not a good solution for the problem in my opinion. 🙂”

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