I spent my professional life as a field biologist and taxonomist specializing in arthropods, especially insects and spiders. In the process I was fortunate to meet and converse with many people involved in the study of biodiversity and taxonomy. I thus could be accused of being biased in this issue. The reader is thus warned.
One of my associates at a meeting of a natural history museum curators in San Diego put it that taxonomy is really the oldest profession. Why?, because God told Adam to “name the animals,” before there was an Eve (Genesis: 2: 19-20.)
To some scientists, for example James Watson, taxonomy and biodiversity studies were a waste of time and money. The only real sciences are at the molecular and atomic levels; everything else is “stamp collecting.” E. O. Wilson saved field biology at Harvard against the attacks of Watson and for that I honor Wilson. I do disagree with him on other issues, but he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest biologists of the last century and an expert on ants beyond compare. Robb Dunn, another ant specialist, published in 2009, a book, Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys, that very eloquently argues the case for taxonomy and biodiversity studies much better than I ever could, but I can give a perspective from the point of view of a taxonomist and field biologist who worked on biocontrol for nearly 35 years and published his first taxonomic paper over 50 years ago. I presented some of these arguments in a diary on natural history museums (See: www.dailykos.com/...)
A number of years ago I was asked to attend a meeting with Egyptian agricultural officials who were concerned about an outbreak of cotton pests on the Sudan border. They had no idea what species were involved, but they did know their general classification. Years previously they had allowed a loss of taxonomists, or so they told me, and needed help in getting information of the biology of the pests so they could control them. Without a name they could not easily proceed. I identified some spiders from their fields and then the project somehow ended and I never heard about it further.
During my career I identified a number of insects and spiders for the public and for various governmental agencies. Many of those were of suspected venomous spiders. Of the specimens submitted only a few turned out to be Western Black Widows or Violin Spiders (we have several species of the genus Loxosceles in New Mexico and only a few people in the Southwest can separate them — I was one of them, a very geeky power! Without the revision of the genus, I would have been lost and I had to keep my eyes open for any taxonomic changes.)
Much confusion as to the true identity of the Red Imported Fire Ant (RIFA) caused them to be mislabeled for years. One of my colleagues, Dr. Buren, realized that the ants, which originated in the Pantanal of Brazil, were undescribed and so he described them and gave them their current name, Solenopsis invicta, and that name has proven to be prophetic, as these ants survived, despite nearly every chlorinated hydrocarbon known being thrown at them after their initial discovery at Mobile, Alabama. I was with Dr. Buren when he discovered them in Puerto Rico and also I identified the first RIFAS in New Mexico, where an ant infested load of soil was dumped on the New Mexico side of the Arizona-New Mexico state line after a trucker failed inspection in Arizona! Fortunately, these ants do not survive easily in the hot and dry Chihuahuan Desert, and had even less chance in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Unfortunately they made it to California. Recently they showed up in Europe (See:www.science.org/...), as they had in China, New Zealand and Australia. Only New Zealand has been able to eradicate them.
Identification of insects that feed on dead bodies are important in forensics. On one occasion I did identify several flies found in a dead body, but do not know the circumstances as it was a favor for an associate and he never told me about the case. I had a nice manual for the purpose, so the identifications were rather easy. Still, somebody had to write that manual!
i could go on listing times when taxonomic knowledge was important in determining the identity of a pest or venomous arthropod or for forensic analysis, but you get the idea. Having a description and a name is very helpful in formulating a plan to counter pests, from wherever they originate. Like the phone sanition people in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we can, at least on some occasions, be indispensable. But in any case these studies are important for the development of an understanding of the the fauna and flora of the planet and should be undertaking for that reason alone.
In recent times it has been suggested that AI take over describing and naming living creatures and that may well be the case in the future. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, based in Singapore and involving taxonomists from at least twenty countries, has had a recent discussion on this very issue. While AI programed with enough information has not, at least to my knowledge, actually written a description and published it on their own, humans have used it to write rough descriptions and edit them. I am as yet not convinced that computers will be able to do so flawlessly by themselves, but who knows? I never envisioned cell phones, yet I now use one.
In the meantime, I think that such work should be more respected than it often is. But then I have an axe to grind, don’t I?