Fuente: REALscience
Expuesto el: martes, 14 de agosto de 2012 19:33
Autor: Michael Bradbury
Asunto: Cyber Science Team Spots New Insect with Help of Flickr
| It’s not that weird that Shaun Winterton was surfing the web looking at bug pictures earlier this year. After all, he is an entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. But while looking at exotic insects on the social image site Flickr he came across a green lacewing and got all excited.
Newly Identified Lacewing Used Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to Get Noticed He sent the picture he found taken by a Malaysian nature photographer to his colleagues who also marveled at the little insect which has black lines and blue spots on its wings. To a casual observer it looks as though the delicate bug is carrying a fly on its back. After finding no other image or known description of this unusual lacewing, Winterton reached out to shutterbug Guek Hock Ping through his Flickr profile. He was disappointed to find out that Ping (who goes by Kurt) let the lacewing take flight after his brief photoshoot. To verify the insect as never-before-seen Winterton needed a specimen. This year, Ping returned to the same wooded park north of Kuala Lumpur and found another insect. This time he caught it and then sent a message to Winterton telling him of his find. Winterton tells NPR’s The Picture Show, “He told me, ‘I’ve got one in a container on my kitchen table — what should I do with it?’” This is the first documented case of a new species being discovered with crowd-sourcing. Winterton had the lacewing sent to Steve Brooks at the Natural History Museum in London where he confirmed this insect is indeed new to science. Then he looked through the museum’s collection and found a matching bug that hadn’t yet been classified.
ZooKeys Online Journal of Biodiversity Research The open access online journal ZooKeys reports this week that the new insect is Semachrysa Jade, named after Winterton’s daughter not the pale green color of the insect. Winterton gave Ping co-author status on the paper which he titled: A charismatic new species of green lacewing discovered in Malaysia (Neuroptera, Chrysopidae): the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy. Continuing their trans-continental collaboration, Winterton, Ping and Brooks wrote the paper in three parts of the world using Google Docs. Io9 says, “This incident points to the power of image hosting services as image crowdsourcing. Guek took the photo in Malaysia, but didn’t have the expertise to identify it as a new species.” Winterton says the bottom line of this story is that there is a world full of potential naturalists and many of them have powerful digital cameras ideal for capturing the level of detail necessary for scientists who identify plants and animals for a living. And these amateur nature photogs are posting their images online. He says, “There’s thousands of images a minute uploaded on Flickr so I think there are many more discoveries forthcoming, particularly as more people are getting out into the field.”
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