The thrill is gone

One of the biggest challenges for me is to push through a work to publication, when I have figured everything out. Last week I was on Twitter telling the world about how awesome it feels when you finally figure out something -- a unique characteristic that unites a group a three undescribed taxa into a genus.

That glorious moment when you finally find a unique characteristic for a group of species that you thought belong to a new genus #taxonomy

— Stelio Chatzimanolis (@schatzimanolis) October 18, 2017

But then the thrill is gone. I have figured out that this is a new genus. I know that there are three new species. Now I have to show this to the rest of the world. But by this point there is nothing (or almost nothing) new to be discovered. I just have to spend endless hours taking photos, drawing and writing descriptions to persuade my peer community that these are indeed new taxa. But there is very little personal satisfaction in the process and this can slow down the process a bit.

Two new genera and at least five new species. 

When I was starting out as a graduate student, I was trying to maximize the number of papers I could get and sometimes published papers as"least publishable unit". Now I think I am at the opposite spectrum. Last week I submitted a paper where I was reviewing two genera (Dysanellus and Torobus). And for my next paper I seriously consider putting together a description of two NEW genera together. 

Twitter to the rescue

A short story on how twitter (and specifially Lu Musetti ‏@osuc_curator) really helped a lot with a project today, despite my obvious typo on the original tweet.

Head and pronotum of Triacrus dilatus

I have been working on a project to redescribed Triacrus dilatus Nordmann and at the same time we are doing some fancy allometry work with them. These are fascinating beasts because according to the literature they live (and attack) with paper wasps. Wassman (1902) pointed out that they live in the nests of Polybia vicina Sauss. and later Kistner (1982) in his monster chapter (222 pages long!) "The social insects' bestiary" refer to the wasp genus as Stenopolybia.

I have been trying to find out information about that wasp for a long time, but Google was not returning many results -- a clear indication that something was sketchy, but who am I to doubt Kistner, right?

But as shown above, the name Stenopolybia  is typo of the genus name Stelopolybia, which was synonymized by Carpenter (1999) with the genus Agelaia.

So, the correct name of the wasp is Agelaia vicina, a wasp used as a keystone species in southern Brazil and with its own wikipedia page. 

Now, who said again that Twitter is a waste of time for academics?