It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience by making, literally, millions of observations, then "power-up" with their free access to SEMs, sequencers, high-powered microscopes and lighting, digital imaging systems (etc.) then "farm for $" to get access to travel and gear then gain "clan-clout" to navigate collecting policies and permitting, etc. etc. Something to strive for, but sadly not a reality anytime soon.
That's only the specimens that have been sequenced and archived at BOLD. That doesn't include the various other bee families, notably Halictidae, Colletidae, Melittidae, and others roughly all the "sister groups" in the Apoidea [1].
An example of why is this important? The Africanized honeybee, known perhaps from bad horror movies, is characterized (identified) as a hybrid of two species. It can be more or less aggressive (to the point of killing you if you don't GTFO) depending on then nature of its DNA. Hybridization has blurred the limits of the species in many areas, including in the US. Sequencing specimens is the only way to confidently determine which of the species you have, A (friendly bee honey), AB (grumpy bee honey), or B (deadly bee honey) (gross simplification here, not Mendelian).
[0](http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Public_BINSearch). [1](here: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/?taxonKey=625GP)
You're talking about The Swarm (1978), which is absolutely so-bad-it's-good. Fans of Michael Caine will I think in particular find it rewarding, and I was especially impressed with its frankly prescient treatment of the drawbacks inherent in mass insecticide application given that the ongoing research increasingly points to exactly that as the culprit for pollinators disappearing.
That said, my understanding is that A. m. scutellata x A. mellifera hybrids aren't unusually aggressive in nest defense by the standards of social hymenopterans generally, but only by the standard of the European honeybee (A. mellifera). I can't claim close familiarity with the relevant literature on bee hybrids, but from what I have seen, their nest defense behavior seems roughly comparable in aggressiveness to that of many yellowjacket (Vespula, Dolichovespula) species. On the other hand, a wild bee colony is likely to be one or two orders of magnitude greater in size than a wild yellowjacket colony, which means that a comparable level of aggression in nest defense could pose a significantly greater hazard.
Using the figures from the Wikipedia article [1] and its relevant source [2], it looks like A. m. scutellata x A. mellifera are responsible for an average of around 15 human deaths per year since the introduction of A. m. scutellata into Brazil in 1956. So I don't really see that there's very much to worry over here, in any case.
Are you? They attack rarely (although are thought to have done so fatally a few weeks ago here in NZ) and aren’t even seen usually, but they are close to popular beaches.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/123902863/four-reported-great...
Given that the shark attack stats cover a period 25 times as long as that for the bees, wasps, and hornets, I do feel like "considerably" is a fair choice of adjective here.
[1] https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/maps/world/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/pdfs/mm6829a5-H.pdf
Probably people die of bee stings more than sharks attacks here in NZ, but those bees certainly aren’t africanised. I suspect most US deaths aren’t all from africanised bees either but that’s going to be hard to prove.
I've also got to say that for the same reason, I don't have a lot of confidence in the 'fungal genomic analysis' thing in particular, because, on the whole, it seems to me to be so easily manipulated.
Some argue that latin binomials should be abandoned, see "Against the naming of fungi":
Russula sanguinea was described from a European mushroom and therefore probably isn't here in North America at all. The name has been applied to many red Russula in N. A. adding to the confusion. Out west where it may be sorted it is being called Russula rhodocephala which itself is a lookalike for Russula americana but under different trees according to Danny Miller here [1]. Mushroomexpert's Kuo and Mycoquebec say that a lookalike under oaks in the east is Russula tenuiceps or R. sanguinaria under conifers/pines, but it is probably a group of species, and also not the same as the European one in the case of R. sanguinaria. We are trying to downvote these identifications for this reason. Hopefully, any people interested in identifying mushrooms will pitch in and help to vote any Russula that is being called Russula sanguinea in the eastern US back to genus level anyway, but we are concerned with a few other species too. Read fungee's journal post here [2]. Check out the master list here [3]. Another thing that is daunting for Russula ID, there are well over a hundred known red Russula in the east, many are not named yet, and, if they are, the name is not in use.
[1] http://www.alpental.com/psms/ddd/Russula/index.htm
[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/fungee/46596-new-ai-comp...
[3] https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-clean-up-wik...
/r/mycology had to say stop posting “please identify this mushroom” because it was so common. I’d imagine its easier with insects. And you don’t have as many people who care because they aren’t trying to eat them as often.
I still like to ID random bugs I find in my house and backyard and it’s always a probability exercise.
Those tree identification apps by taking a photo never work. I used it at a UofT garden where every tree was labelled and it got it wrong every time. So even the ML is way off.
There are a lot of mushrooms that are very easy to identify, and learning edible mushrooms is imho a lot easier than learning edible plants. But if you pick up mushrooms at random then yeah, it's generally extremely difficult.
That whole experience made me very skeptical of citizen-science projects once I knew how much training was required to do good work. While they are a great compliment to professional research they are no replacement (though often funders are treating citizen science as just that).
Take the comment a little more gently. You didn't really address that by just saying "many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods". And even with this followup, it's not fully addressed. Dissection takes an expert, sure. But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about the species. And preservation requires skills but not taxonomy skills. Does SEM imaging for this purpose usually require species expertise?
I'm not saying you're wrong overall here, I'm just saying there are pretty obvious points where the average person won't know the answer or which of these skills end up mattering the most.
> It's a wonderful aspiration to live in a society where anyone will have the free time to "level-up" to a taxonomists level of experience
I don't think that's what they were suggesting.
> But DNA extraction doesn't require deep knowledge about the species.
The act of extraction doesn't, but interpretation of the results does. So to does actually knowing where to get the specimens in the first place. So to does building up experience knowing where to look, how to collect, building up a feeling for the diversity and variation in the group you study. Without these tools in hand all the images, sequences, and assays etc. in the world will a) cost you way more than anyone wants to pay and b) will have you floundering around in a giant pool of dirt-common species that are well known rather than pulling that series of uncommon and ultra-rare specimens and making a contribution that really extends our knowledge. It takes years to know where to focus precious time, this isn't peculiar to taxonomy.
I can't see how that would possibly be a requirement for determining the species of a bee. Wouldn't DNA be cheaper and easier?
In any case, it's not rare in the literature to encounter whole genera categorized almost entirely through analysis of the males' aedagi, with microscopic imagery and line drawings included to highlight features by which distinctions are made. Some of these features are only easily distinguished at SEM scale, so that's what is used.
That said, it's thought among at least some taxonomists that these unique and incompatible genital configurations may be the only thing that prevents interfertility among individuals of these otherwise separate species. So it's going to be really interesting to see what comes out of genomics as applied to the Hymenoptera over the next decade or so - something else that's not rare in the literature is to encounter reclassifications and rearrangements of large branches of the family's taxonomic tree, as phylogenetic research heavily revises prior results. Beyond that, there's a lot else coming out of genomic research into the family, including a rare example of heritable mutualism between a virus and a eukaryote in the form of Bracovirus [1] [2].
So, while yours is a fair question, there is a lot going on with hymenopteran genomics and phylogenetics these days, and my understanding as an interested amateur who does a great deal of reading in the literature is that, for the moment at least, established taxonomical methods still are likely to provide a more precise, albeit still provisional, placement of an otherwise ill-characterized species. In a decade or two, though, that might no longer be the case.
And that's just one example! I could give more, like the effect the virus has on the wasp's reproductive host, and how it's honestly surprising that Peter Watts hasn't written a novel about that yet - I'm always happy to talk at length about wasps, or at least to whatever extent my interlocutor of the moment is happy to listen.
When these are correctly identified, it's often because the person has a particular investment in that exact plant. So if the expert on irises or two-stripe bumblebees is offline at the moment you might get crickets, or wild-ass guesses.
There is something about video that makes it easier to identify things. The object feels more three dimensional, I suspect, which makes it closer to field identification.
That said, we use camera 'traps' for very shy mammal species. I wonder if we could tune those systems for bees. (A fox or cloud leopard might run if the camera gears make noise, but do bees give a damn?)
Another option is BugGuide (https://bugguide.net), which I've actually found more useful - it did me a lot of good figuring out those auplopids. It doesn't provide any sort of dichotomous key (that I've been able to find), but there are a lot of observations available, often with very high-quality images, which helps a lot when specific identification depends on subtle features.
In general, though, hymenopterans and especially solitary wasps are just difficult. There are many genera and even whole families that are hard to tell apart with much confidence. One of the first things you notice in the literature is the importance to specific identification of male genitalia, which are internal, practically microscopic, and only even potentially useful if you have the good fortune to happen on a very rare male of a solitary wasp species - and even then, sexual dimorphism can be such as to make a solid male identification useless for spotting a female unless you actually observe them to be in copula. (Female mutillids, aka "velvet ants", don't even have wings!)
All of which is to say, I would expect the more obscure solitary bees to pose the same sort of difficulty.
Bugguide seems to be North America only, but while I stayed in a remote area of the Indio Maiz reserve in Nicaragua I stumbled upon a spider that I haven't identified in years and can't quite find any place to simply share the photo[0].
[0] unknown spider on a banana leaf in eastern Nicaragua: https://i.imgur.com/iFMJxtl.png
Without having the eye arrangement is not easy, but taking in mind the habitat and shape, a member of Ctenidae would be my first candidate
Compare for example with Ancylometes or Ctenus.
If not, we could start weaving further from there. Zoropsidae, Lycosidae or Sparassidae (check Heteropoda venatoria for example) would be other acceptable family candidates. Those last couple of legs seem very characteristic.
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't particularly known, considering it was deep within the Indio maiz reserve (not just by the only town of Greytown but 5-10 hours by boat into the reserve from there)
The name Lycosa aragogi is already taken...
That said, I wouldn't necessarily expect a whole lot. I'm not even an amateur arachnologist, but my sense is that spiders are about as complicated as hymenopterans, if not more so; especially outside well-known families like the salticids, it seems like it's not rare to find difficult identifications.
And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.
Think of biodiversity as a curve, with a long tail. Will AI on poorly taken images specimens work for the bell? Probably. Will it actually get at the numbers at the tail? Almost certainly not. This is largely because 1) getting at the tail requires intimate knowledge of where to find that biodiversity (the vast majority of iNaturlaist pics are shockingly close to civilization, where diversity may not be) and 2) intimate knowledge, often of internal features or other non-imagable data, so that one can actually record data that fits in the tail.
This xkcd from just a few years ago has already aged poorly: https://m.xkcd.com/1425/
We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified.