Doc Fancy

...in fact, I'm saying it here and now:

Imperfection is a prerequisite for excellence!

It can be imperfect and still excellent. I'd argue that just about every excellent thing ever is imperfect!

This is the most wholesome cute little bot post to cross my feed in *some time.*

You go, you excellent sphere.

(…the Earth is also an excellent sphere and I will be referring to it in this fashion henceforth)

10/10 would try to befriend

it might backfire

Me and the marine environment, marine biology in general, marine invertebrates, especially echinoderms, ESPECIALLY feather stars…

…and taxonomy and genetics abd evolution—

Just let me nerd out about the fucking sea, life is too short not to be super fucking excited by the things we don’t yet know.

Tbh at this point old bra for president

That just demonstrates their organisational skills!

Hell, showing up for band practice is already putting them ahead of the pack.

Key phrase: “showing up.”

Taking a moment to appreciate , ADHD hyperfocus—it can move mountains!

…did you need anything else done? Too bad! I’ve been moving mountains for the past three days and all I see when I close my eyes is a bunch of angry cartographers.

“We should be mad about this and not that” confuses me. Do you not have unlimited rage reserves??? Because that and yarn are really the only things I have an excess of. It’s why rage knitting works so well for me.

PS I want to add. SUPPORT MUSEUMS. support the NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS. Because those are absolutely critical for our long term understanding of species, species distributions, changes to species ranges over time... Pay curators. Pay collection managers. Make it MATTER.

Museums. Do. Research.

Anyways, that's most of what I wanted to rant about. I love what I do. I wish I got to do more of it.

...and look, I will be describing the nine new species for free, because HOORAY, FEATHER STARS.

Take care all,
-Doc out 👩‍🔬🌊

It's just... it's just a bit fucking shit, is all. Because there were people in that lab who were absolutely caning it, and they are volunteering their time, and it's not fair, and no one can afford to pay them what they're worth, because no one thinks it matters enough.

Otherwise I can't justify the petrol, the parking, the time taken away from the rest of my chaos. It's not that I don't want to. It's just that the math doesn't work.

On top of that payment: I have put in a TONNE of unpaid hours on this, because of the nature of the work.

I'm getting paid for the project I'm winding up now, but I think that's because it is well understood that my life is basically chaos, with constantly shifting priorities, and if you want me to ID the crinoids in a timely fashion, with a deadline, you're going to need to pay me.

There is a real disconnect between supporting science, and supporting actual scientists, and it's really hard when your particular field is overlooked time and time and time again.

It's expected that we have a passion for what we do, and we absolutely do, but that's not something you can live on.

And it isn't fair to expect us all to pour our hard-earned expertise and hours upon hours of our time into a project without *paying* us like you would any expert.

But most of those photos aren't sufficient for a species-level identification.

And it's something I do in my downtime.

The people who volunteer their time - that's a fragile system. It's not robust. That's time they could spend at a paid job, so they can cover rent, mortgage, food, etc.

And I will go on iNaturalist and volunteer my time - the biscuit stars are easy, I got lucky there, perfect field characters - and I can identify *some* feather stars (my field of expertise, I have been doing this for 20 years) by photograph.

I can do that for free. I don't mind. It's fun, for me.

But it's vastly undervalued. It's constantly under attack. The older experts are dying off, and in spite of all their efforts to publish and share what they know, a great deal of irreplaceable knowledge is dying with them.

Because no one is getting paid to keep it, curate it, improve it.

Taxonomy is a foundation science. I think it's incredibly interesting and exciting and mindboggling just how utterly diverse our world is, just how many times the tree of life has split, and split, and split, and split again.

It's a science that forms the basis of other analyses.

I had to sort the sea cucumbers on the Gascoyne trip, and as I am not a sea cucumber taxonomist, I absolutely fumbled the categories. It was the best guess, and unfortunately I was the only echinoderm specialist on board, so I had to try and learn fast.

OTU = "best guess."

Does it matter? It depends on how granular your analysis is. It depends on whether you're looking for an accurate assessment of biodiversity.

People without the background knowledge, trying to sort these into OTUs, *will* fuck it up. And that's expected!

We all will, outside our wheelhouse.

Can I do it from a photo? Maybe. It depends on the photo. It needs to be from the correct view (the view above, the oral surface). It needs to be pretty damn high resolution. And the animal has to have those bits still attached and clearly visible (they curl about and move a lot).

They both exist in an extraordinary variety of colours, which cannot in *any way* be used to tell them apart. They can be slender, or chunky.

Once they get above a certain size, they're C. solaris. Below that size, they could be either species.

There's one way to tell them apart.

They're both extremely common (I may have told boss-man that, if we were in less than 50m depth, and he threw a rock from the equipment deck, and *didn't* hit a Comatula, I'd be deeply concerned).

Their distributions overlap to a great extent. Find one, you'll find the other.

A ten-armed dark red feather star, oral view.

Another ten-armed red feather star, oral view.

Deep-sea holothurians (sea cucumbers) are perhaps not a fair example, as they are notoriously difficult and poorly understood.

Shallow water feather stars make up an extraordinary proportion of the biomass in the tropics, and yet.

These are two different species (colour has nothing to do with it).

Three images of deep-sea holothurians (sea cucumbers). Top left: small fuzzy lilac blob. Bottom left: long wriggly bright pink deflated sausage. Right: enormous purple football, almost like a cobb loaf. The barcodes are 5cm in length for scale. They are all the same species of Paelopatides.

People want to pretend that taxonomy is stamp collecting. That it’s somehow easy and anyone could learn to do it in five minutes.

That they can divide groups into “operational taxonomic units” (OTUs) and still get a meaningful result.

Ahahahahaha nope.

Guess what? these are all the same species.

There is *one* funding body that focuses on taxonomy in Australia.

ONE. The ABRS.

For everything else, trying to explain that it’s a good idea to know what a species is when that’s the basic unit of biodiversity AND ecosystem assessment and thus ecological analysis— they don’t want to hear it.

And that’s for a multiplicity of reasons I won’t go into here, between health concerns, household expenditures, and a constant tug-of-war of priorities…

But paying me sure does shift those priorities around.

It’s just that’s really not straightforward.

They turn up and share their decades of hard-won expertise — peer reviewed, internationally recognised — FOR FREE.

I can’t do that. I can try to show up one day a week to sort out some taxonomic tangles because if I don’t do it there is literally no one else in the country who can. That’s it.