Journal: 24 New Lizard Species Found in Caribbean

[Judi Lynn]

Journal: 24 New Lizard Species Found in Caribbean
By DANICA COTO Associated Press
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico May 2, 2012 (AP)

U.S. scientists say they have identified 24 new species of lizards in the Caribbean whose ancestors immigrated to the region millions of years ago atop floating vegetation.

About half of the new species described are nearing extinction, and the other half are extinct and had been misclassified by several museums in the U.S. and Europe, said Blair Hedges, a biology professor at Penn State University who led the research team.

"They misclassified them, but it's not their fault. Very few people can set aside that amount of time in their life to look at skinks every day," he said in an interview Tuesday after the roughly five-year study whose findings were published this week in Zootaxa, a peer-review journal for animal taxonomists.

Skinks are a type of lizard found around the globe, and those in the Caribbean are among the few that have up to a one-year gestation period and produce a human-like placenta, he said. The new species were identified through various means, including comparing DNA and counting and analyzing their scales, he said.

More:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/journal-24-lizard-species-found-caribbean-16256262

[pscot]

1. Is this real?

I see these posts about new species proliferating endlessly. How much of it is genetic hair-splitting? Is some of this driven by a need to build a professional reputation? Does speciation need to be taken to the molecular level?

[eppur_se_muova]

3. There may be humans living in most corners of the world ...

but that does not mean that trained biologists have had the time, or even the opportunity, to study every corner of Nature in detail. Many of the new species are very small animals, which don't come to the notice of most humans not looking for them. The author of this paper may be the first person to examine these lizards in decades.

Note that these are island species -- when organisms are isolated on islands and no longer interbreed with a mainland population, they often diversify into multiple species, all unique to that island. Witness Darwin's finches, and just about every creature in the Galapagos. Thus any intensive inventory of an island biome is likely to discover new species, unless it's been studied exhaustively (as very few have).

Maybe someday we'll have described so many organisms that the discovery of new species becomes a rare thing -- I'm sure that's not something most biologists look forward to.

[pscot]

4. That talks past my question

I can imagine a future in which every bird is it's own species. I seem to detect a trend. Is the struggle for status in the scientific community driving the categorization process? Would that be good or bad?

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Actually, there are biologists who tend to combine "species" together ...

Last edited Thu May 3, 2012, 01:15 AM - Edit history (1)

and those who tend to divide them. These are known as "lumpers" and "splitters" respectively, and taxonomy tends to represent a negotiated (at times hotly negotiated) equilibrium between the two proclivities. By your hypothesis, "lumpers" would be commiting career suicide, which doesn't seem to be the case, TBOMK.

The fundamental distinction of species is that a group of organisms can interbreed and produce viable offspring, so there is a limit to how far splitting can be carried. When two similar populations are found in widely separated locations, the question arises as to whether they are two populations of the same species which are unable to interbreed at the moment due to geographical barriers, or whether they have drifted far apart enough genetically that they can no longer produce viable offspring. When the "species" are known to produce hybrids in the wild, it is reasonable to assign them to the same species, but place them in different subspecies. As a result, at least one of the species will suffer a name change. For example consider the closely related flickers. As new hybrids and subpopulations are discovered occasionally, the taxonomy is revised to reflect this, but it is often a contentious process.





ETA: Bear in mind that "lumpers" tend not to make the news. "New species of ***" is a headline reporters can write in their sleep (and some probably do). The years of debate over taxonomic classification of these "new species" -- some of which may be determined not to be new -- don't get comparable coverage.

[pscot]

6. Thanks

It just seemed like it might be career booster to have your name, or your department head's name, attached to a "new" species. Human nature being what it is, it seems like a legitimate question. I hadn't considered the role of the press. In fact, headlines about hundreds of new species might even obliquely serve an AGW denialist agenda; if lots of new species are turning up every day, all this talk about mass extinctions must be fear mongering.

[Liberty Belle]

2. There are that many Republicans down there?