The etymologist emailed Guek Hock Ping, the photographer of the insect and the man that had posted it on Flickr, to find out whether he had captured the specimen.
Unfortunately for Winterton, Guek had chanced upon the lacewing while on a hike in Malaysia, and had snapped the interesting insect before it had flown away. Without a specimen to analyse, they would not be able to tell whether it was a new species or not.
However, a year later Guek returned to the same spot, and managed to capture one of the insects. He emailed Winterton to let him know the good news. "He told me, ‘I've got one in a container on my kitchen table - what should I do with it?'" Winterton said.
The specimen was sent to Steve Brooks at the Natural History Museum in London to be examined. Brooks confirmed that not only was this species of lacewing was new, but that the museum had been holding a matching specimen on file for years that had yet to be classified.
The new species was named Semachrysa jade, after Winterton's daughter, and the paper that Winterton, Brooks and Guek collaborated on to introduce the insect was written on Google docs from three different continents, keeping with the digital nature of the lacewing's discovery.
With more and more people uploading images taken on high-quality cameras, Winterton believes that this method of identification will become more common.
"There's thousands of images a minute uploaded on Flickr," he told NPR. "I think there are many more discoveries forthcoming, particularly as more people are getting out into the field." The paper written on the Semachrysa jade be found in the latest issue of scientific journal ZooKeys.
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在線雷達
發表於 2012-11-12 15:41:44
發表於 2012-11-12 16:08:12
