Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Taxonomist Appreciation Day

In case you didn't know - today is Taxonomist Appreciation day!

Some people have accused us DNA Barcoders that we are working hardly on accelerating the global extinction of taxonomists. On the contrary, we have the greatest admiration for their work and efforts and it is our hope that we have been able to build a tool to help them out with some really big tasks. 
After all a good reference barcode is only as good as its taxonomy!

The Taxonomist Appreciation day was an idea of Terry McGlynn of Small Pond Science. It is the first official one I believe and many people are spreading the word. Just check out Twitter with the hashtag #loveyourtaxonomist.

In his post to the occasion Terry showed a video which I find great. It has been created by some undergrads that went on an expedition sampling ants throughout remote areas of Mesoamerica. A nice animation that shows a lot of what fieldwork in biodiversity science is all about:



With that I like to send out greetings and my best wishes to all the taxonomists I had the pleasure of working with in the past 12 years. Among those are experts for fishes, marine invertebrates and terrestrial arthropods. Too many to list them all here but in case they read this post they'll know they are meant. 

A sincere Thank You to all of them!

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