This is not a question, this is just a heart-felt thanks from the
ichthyologists of the world for saving us this much time.
Bill Eschmeyer:
Thanks. Thanks, Bruce.
Gary Rosenberg:
I was wondering, with your search for dates of publication, is
your system built in such a way that as people learn more about dates
of publication changes in dates would automatically propagate
through to the species, or does that have to be changed and caught up
with on an individual basis.
Bill Eschmeyer:
I was surprised at the number of sources that were out there for
dates. Many journal editors will put out a list of publication dates
every thirty years or so. There are not going to be wholesale changes in
names because of this date thing. There are some, but not a lot of
them because many time the year's the same, and the same species described
twice in the same year is not that common. But if the librarians could
really track... well, in the early years the librarians did a wonderful
job of stamping a date of receipt on journals, and at the
Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and the California Academy
of Sciences you could go to their meeting dates, and go actually
examine the minutes, which I did for a lot of the meetings for the
ANSP to determine those dates. I'm not sure if I answered your
question.
Stuart Nelson:
This is tremendous work and I don't mean to detract from it at
all, I'm just kind of curious; do you have any feeling for how
reproducible what you have accomplished is?
Bill Eschmeyer:
For other groups?
Stuart Nelson:
If we took another scientist and gave him the same set of data
would he come up with the same result?
Anon. (M.):
He'd come up with a different batch of mistakes.
Bill Eschmeyer:
Yeah, a different batch of mistakes. There are a lot of mistakes
in there. Somebody told me there may be 50,000 genera of insects.
So I think you could do 50,000 genera of insects the same way, no
problem. And there's a lot of commonality; a lot of the journals are
the same, and so forth. I had estimated that if you took a group
with 200,000 species of insects and 2,000 genera; their genera are a
lot larger than in fishes—20,000 references, and you didn't do
the search for specimens, it would probably take you $20 record and
that would be a little over four million dollars to treat a group of
200,000 insects.
Chris Thompson:
I would just like to make a comment on magnitude. I'm going
where Bill's going, but I now have 20,000 names for the order of
Diptera alone. So the magnitude in insects is huge.
Stan Blum:
I'm not sure if the question that Stuart asked about how
reproducible this is was answered. The items he [Bill] is looking at are
just facts in the literature; there can be interpretation in some
cases, but it most cases things are plain enough. If someone were to
go and re-do fishes, they would come up with something very, very
comparable, I think—with a different set of mistakes.
Bill Eschmeyer:
One thing that came up is that basically an ichthyologist had to
do the final proofing for the fishes. There are just too many
complicated things that pop up, even a well trained technician will
not see things, will not be able to solve some of the technical
problems that pop up. It takes very careful tedious examination of
the references.
John Mitchell:
I would like to add on behalf of the Library
community, especially at the Library of Congress, we use your
publication and call it the bible of fish.