A cool new paper appeared today in Science by Holt et al (link - unfortunately behind paywall) where they redefine the zoogeographic areas of the world originally proposed by Wallace in 1876.
I particularly like the establishment of the Panamanian area, since many of the taxa I study seem to have a Panamanian distribution. And that brings me to my only problem with this paper: the areas were established using mammals, birds and amphibians. True, they used data from ~21,000 species, which is impressive but arthropods were ignored [the authors claim that data on plants, reptiles and invertebrates are not available, although I am not sure what available means here].
My question is this: are we ever going to see studies of this magnitude using insect data?
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| Image Credit: Science/AAAS |
My question is this: are we ever going to see studies of this magnitude using insect data?
My answer to your question is YES, absolutely, just as soon as we get all insect collections fully digitized!
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