We’ll never know so much about the world around us that there’s nothing left for naturalists to discover and just to prove that point, scientists recently announced the discovery of a new species (in fact it belongs to a whole new genus) of lungless salamander in the hills of Georgia.  Urspelerpes brucei , as it will be known, is the first new genus of four footed vertebrate found in the U.S. since 1961 (another lungless salamander, in fact). You can READ MORE from the BBC or go to the source, the abstract and paper in Journal of Zoology. So get out there and start scrounging around. You never know if the next creature you encounter might be your ticket to immortality! (Immortality among a select community of naturalists, that is.)

One thing that RINHS is here for is to encourage the practice of taxonomy: connect those with taxonomic expertise with those interested in learning and otherwise to facilitate by preserving systematic collections, maintaining a reference library, and organizing and publishing the results.

All this is useful (necessary, in fact) if you want to know what’s going on in Rhode Island’s environment, but it is also our small contribution to improving the prospects for taxonomy generally. Hopefully, as she picks up her nobel prize in biology, the next great taxnomist will cite the encouragement she received at BioBlitz! Here’s a very interesting assessment of the field of taxonomy, its importance and prospects, that was brought to my attention by Lisa Gould (my predecessor as Director for the newbies in the audience).

Link to taxonomy article in The Scientist.

Someone recently asked me why some plants are considered invasive while others, that arrived here earlier (after all they all arrived here from somewhere else because RI was once all glaciated), are considered native. You can give ‘em the usual cliche about how it’s invasive if it is reproducing outside its normal range to the detriment of native species, but even the least astute could pretty quickly respond that every organism reproduces to the detriment of something.  Hopefully, you’re not making assumptions about a pristine time zero before Europeans came because of course Native Americans modified the environment, too, so you end up thinking about time-depth and speed of change. Since my training is as an archaeologist, this is pretty much my natural state, but in this case it seems generally appropriate.

Once your brain is in “deep time depth” mode, you start to ask all sorts of new questions. There have been a couple of very interesting research projects recently that take that perspective in looking at the state of fish stocks and the degree of degradation in the marine environment and I recommend them. The first, which was in the news quite a bit when if first came out, is by Scripps Oceanography graduate student researcher Loren McClenachan and appeared in Conservation Biology. She looked at the fish in photos of Key West charter boat catches back through time and was able to show just how great has been the change in species and size into the present.  Here’s a link to the Scripps press release about the paper, or look it up in CB if you have access to it: Scripps Release

A whole raft of research on deeply historical fishing trends was recently announced by the Census of Marine Life. By using a wide variety of ancient sources, a number of researchers were able to reconstruct marine life trends back to classical times. Here’s a link to a news story about the research: Historic Fishing Reconstructed

In the interests of full disclosure (and in a self-serving bit of marketing),  you might be interested to know that RINHS helps to facilitate the Census of Marine Life by administering grants for some of its activities. Just another example of the good work made possible by your membership dollars! (If you’re not already an RINHS member, click HERE for information on how you can help make great research possible!)

I’m not even that old and what I learned in high school biology class is getting VERY out of date. The New Scientist is running a fantastic article in its 24 January issue on the changes being wrought on evolutionary theory by advances in gene sequencing. Speaking for myself, at least, I welcomed this easy to understand summary of new thinking on the development and organization of life. Maybe I’m older than I think….

Link to full article at New Scientist