Figuring it out: part 3
In between phone calls, e-mails, and countless logistical puzzles, I'm working with an intern to taxonomically identify a set of samples I collected from the Arctic deep sea last summer. We've had some minor victories, and yesterday was very productive.
We had been working on a bryozoan specimen from a rock at 1700 m depth. I've told you about bryozoans before - they're small, crunchy animals that build calcium carbonate exoskeletons and live in colonies of clones. They're one of the most abundant taxa on hard substrata in the high Arctic. I was really excited to identify the bryozoan specimen yesterday because I had a new book to use as a reference guide: Bryozoa of the northern seas of the USSR. Yep, it's that old. But it's also chock-full of helpful illustrations and dichotomous keys. My intern and I pulled out the specimen, cracked open the book, and got to work.
We were having a bit of a hard time with the dichotomous keys. Very often, the hardest part about following a key is understanding the vocabulary in it, and this was no exception. What's the difference between an orifice and an aperture? How do I tell if an opening has a calcium carbonate operculum? And what in the world is an adventitious avicularium? (We were able to look up that last one, thank goodness.) We got down to Family and decided to cheat a little, flipping through the pages of the book in search of an illustration that looked like our specimen.
And we found it. Notoplites normani. It fit the illustration perfectly.
To you, this might seem like a stupid amount of work just to identify one specimen, but to me, it is time well-spent. Once I match a specimen to a species name, it unlocks a whole new world of information. I can look up where that species has been found before, how it reproduces, what it eats, what eats it (if this information is known), and I can keep notes on where I've seen it before. Eventually, patterns start to emerge, and we can learn important new things about the world.
 |
| The bryozoan on a rock from 1700 m deep in the Arctic |
 |
| Notoplites normani, photographed at 55x magnification using a dissecting microscope. |
We were having a bit of a hard time with the dichotomous keys. Very often, the hardest part about following a key is understanding the vocabulary in it, and this was no exception. What's the difference between an orifice and an aperture? How do I tell if an opening has a calcium carbonate operculum? And what in the world is an adventitious avicularium? (We were able to look up that last one, thank goodness.) We got down to Family and decided to cheat a little, flipping through the pages of the book in search of an illustration that looked like our specimen.
And we found it. Notoplites normani. It fit the illustration perfectly.
To you, this might seem like a stupid amount of work just to identify one specimen, but to me, it is time well-spent. Once I match a specimen to a species name, it unlocks a whole new world of information. I can look up where that species has been found before, how it reproduces, what it eats, what eats it (if this information is known), and I can keep notes on where I've seen it before. Eventually, patterns start to emerge, and we can learn important new things about the world.
Comments
Post a Comment