Figure 7.1 Alfred Russell Wallace. Senckenberg Deutsches Entomologisches Institut, Müncheberg, Historisches Archiv, Porträtsammlung, image #4358.
As 31-year-old Alfred Russel Wallace disembarked on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo on November 1, 1854, he didn’t realize he would be spending more than a year in Sarawak in the island’s remote northwest. He was far less able to predict that this was where he would finally commit to paper the ideas he’d been developing with regard to how new species emerge from existing ones. His travel assignment, however, was of a different nature. Wallace had traveled to Southeast Asia on his own initiative with the aim of collecting as many exotic animals as possible, which he sent whenever he could to Samuel Stevens, a London-based natural history agent. Many of the animals were unknown to science, whereas others were familiar but represented in local collections by single specimens in miserable condition and lacking background information. In Europe, the hunger for exotic specimens in science was insatiable, and Stevens ran a lucrative business selling Wallace’s extensive materials. With each of the approximately twenty shipments sent intermittently to London, Stevens was able to finance each stage of Wallace’s travels around the Malay Archipelago.
Figure 7.1 Alfred Russell Wallace. Senckenberg Deutsches Entomologisches Institut, Müncheberg, Historisches Archiv, Porträtsammlung, image #4358.
Before accepting the invitation to Borneo, extended by the “White Raja” Sir James Brooke—ruler of Sarawak, as appointed by the British Crown—Wallace was in Singapore, where he first encountered the huge species diversity of Southeast Asia. He had already discovered hundreds of new species there, expanding his collection exponentially. In Sarawak, however, the diluvian rains of the monsoon forced him into a months-long recess. Sir Brooke, who found great enjoyment in the spirited conversations with his guest, provided Wallace with a small house located directly on the Sarawak River in the foothills of Mount Santubong. Along with a Malayan cook, Wallace spent a large part of the rainy season from late 1854 to early 1855 in this house. During this forced hiatus, Wallace focused on the observations he’d made in the Amazon and composed the seminal essay that would provide the underpinning for the “Sarawak Law.” He had traveled through the Amazon from 1848 to 1852 with Henry Walter Bates and discovered that many species along the river occupied a distribution area typical of and often limited to themselves, and not only in the Amazon. Other explorers, such as Charles Darwin or Alexander von Humboldt, had also reported on the specific distribution patterns of various animals and plants. Why then, Wallace wondered, did some species appear only in certain parts of the world and not in others? Then there was the fact that similar species evidently emerged over time in fairly close succession, which geologist Charles Lyell had shown through studies of the earth’s geology and fossils in his three-volume work, Principles of Geology. Wallace combined the chronology of related species’ emergence with their geographical distribution and summarized this as a “law” and the central argument of his Sarawak essay: “Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.”1 Although Wallace could not yet explain why species emerged, he was already implying that species had close geographical and temporal ties because they originated from the same ancestors. Wallace sent the Sarawak essay to London for publication, where it soon appeared in a respected British journal in September 1855.
The Sarawak essay represents a significant milestone in the history of evolutionary theory but is often underrated given the impact of subsequent events. To this day, Wallace plays second fiddle to Darwin. Despite having more or less answered the species question at the same time, Wallace ultimately had to cede precedence to Darwin as the father of evolutionary theory in the public eye. In 2013, in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Wallace’s death, Matthias Glaubrecht published a comprehensive biography of Wallace, which reconstructed the events faithfully and reads like a real-life science thriller.
In addition to his unclear (as mentioned earlier) role as one of the founders of a substantiated theory of organismic evolution, Wallace is primarily known today for his work in biogeography—that is, the science dedicated to the geographical distribution of organisms. His critical contributions to the study of biodiversity in Southeast Asia, however, are easily overlooked these days. As a collector of natural artifacts, his odyssey led him straight through the Indo-Malayan island world to all of the major islands and most island groups. By the end, he had put away more than 22,000 kilometers, despite sometimes spending months in areas that proved particularly bountiful for his gathering endeavors. At the conclusion of his trip through the archipelago, he had captured more than 125,000 animals, appropriately preparing and preserving, labeling and sorting them, and by no means only insects, although at 110,000 specimens, they did constitute the largest portion of the catch. Wallace also collected great numbers of large animals such as orangutans, crocodiles, and especially birds, all of which were shipped to England.
After his return to England in 1862, Wallace could look back on this unusually successful one-man gathering expedition with satisfaction. Even before the start of the expedition, he had been determined to travel to a region that promised new, spectacular finds and would also provide him with the information he needed to answer the species question that so preoccupied him. It was to be expected that many of the animals caught in the tropics would be new and undiscovered, but even specialists were amazed by the percentage of undescribed species in Wallace’s material. Glaubrecht, his biographer, estimates that around 1,500 insect and bird species were described on the basis of his material.
British entomologist Andrew Polaszek combed through the publications released in the decades directly following Wallace’s return, counting all of the newly named species that had been described based on specimens Wallace had brought back from Sarawak. Polaszek arrived at impressive figures: Wallace had collected around 80,000 insects, representing 7,000 species, about 2,000 of which had been found on Borneo alone. For example, as far as we know, the species-rich longhorn beetle group comprises more than 1,200 species in the Indo-Malayan archipelago. In Sarawak alone, Wallace had collected 280 of these, 250 of which were unknown and later described by British insect specialist Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe in the 1860s. Wallace estimated he had gathered around 800 new insect species in total in Sarawak, whereas Polaszek suspects that over time, upward of 1,000 new species were described. Similarly for the butterflies, the renowned entomologist Francis Walker alone described 400 new species and 100 new genera based on Wallace’s Sarawak material. It goes on. Frederick Smith, another entomologist at the London Natural History Museum, described 150 new bee and wasp species, and Walker—the butterfly guy—took on other insect groups as well. Hundreds of new fly species and 140 cicada species from Sarawak can be traced back to him.
Matthias Glaubrecht’s estimate that Wallace provided material for no fewer than 1,500 newly described species is probably too low given the Sarawak figures. More accurate numbers aren’t available because in large part Wallace’s material was often sold to private collections and not infrequently resold from there. For most of his insects, Wallace used typical but unobtrusive labels. They were small and round and bore only a three-letter-long abbreviation of the respective discovery location, handwritten by Wallace or his assistant, Charles Allen. Several of these labels were unwittingly removed by later owners and replaced by new ones, meaning that not only are the Wallace specimens scattered among many collections, they’re also not necessarily recognizable as such. As a result, the material was then processed by many different scientists, who published in many different journals. The largest portion remained in the London Natural History Museum, where it was also put to scientific use. Many other specimens are found in other collections, however, and even the fly collection in Berlin’s natural history museum includes original Wallace specimens. Even the specialists—those who’d thrown themselves so fervently into Wallace’s material in the mid-nineteenth century—weren’t up to the task of processing this enormous number of species. Many remained long untouched and have only been described in recent years. To this day, researchers are discovering and describing new species in unprocessed material that still remains from Wallace’s Southeast Asia expedition.
Wallace is undoubtedly one of those collectors whose tremendous activity yielded outsize contributions to the discovery of new animal species. In the field of botany, British botanist Daniel P. Bebber and his team have dubbed such collectors “big hitters.” Compared with the majority of plant gatherers, these individuals have gathered far above the average amount of type material, which is later used as the basis for species descriptions. To suss out the significance of big hitters for the discovery of new species, Bebber pulled together the collection and collector data for approximately 100,000 type specimens from four of the world’s most important botanical collections. The result was surprising: a mere two percent of all collectors were responsible for more than half of all type specimens (and thus, for the discovery of these new species), whereas the majority of collectors managed only a few specimens—if not just one—of a new species.
Many of the top-ten collectors Bebber researched had been active in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. For instance, Scottish botanist Robert Brown collected untold numbers of plants in Australia from 1801 onward, and about 1,700 of Brown’s type specimens are still housed in the Natural History Museum in London. He personally described around 1,200 of the species based on these specimens. Like Brown, many big hitters were collecting at a time when the botany of many regions had scarcely been tapped. It was unquestionably easier in those early days to become a big hitter but not exclusively so. Bebber was able to demonstrate that big hitters have existed over the years and into present day, and that they don’t necessarily need to be gathering in the world’s most species-rich areas. They are, however, defined by five special characteristics: they collect over a long span of their life; they have a good eye for new and unknown forms; they collect in many different areas on Earth but specialize in one, usually within a single country; they collect various plant families, although they typically specialize here, too; and they collect significantly higher numbers of examples of unknown species toward the end of their careers.
Although these characteristics don’t apply to every big hitter, Bebber’s numbers suggest an interesting conclusion. In theory, the most effective strategy for rapidly growing the catalog of life with unknown species could be as simple as sending a few experienced and competent collectors to the right geographical regions.
The influence of big hitters in zoology hasn’t yet been studied as systematically as in botany, but it’s probably safe to assume that the situation is similar. In any case, there’s no doubt that this strategy began with Wallace, one of zoology’s biggest of big hitters. After his experiences in the Amazon, he deliberately sought out his next destination—the Indo-Malayan archipelago—with the expectation of finding mostly unknown fauna there, and in this way, finding many new species. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of other significant expeditions à la Wallace were undertaken—that is, trips characterized by the tremendous personal efforts exerted by the individuals in charge—leading to the discovery of enormous numbers of animals, many of which later turned out to be new species.
Figure 7.2 A stamped label attached to a dried specimen of Crocodylus moreletii, known as Morelet’s crocodile. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, M. Ohl photo.
In zoology, the best documented are not the people who have performed the gathering but those involved in the scientific evaluation of the gathered materials. Following the explorers’ successful return home and after the valuable objects have survived the often months-long passage from distant lands unscathed, a technical—but no less important—step must be taken. The objects must be well packed for shipping to prevent damage. Fish are packed tightly in vats of alcohol, vertebrate skulls wrapped individually in cloth, stacked in boxes. Fragile insects are particularly at risk on long journeys. In collections, they’re typically pinned—that is, impaled by special pins and dried. Pinning the collected insects during the expedition, however, can be problematic. Many collectors, for whatever reason, end up pinning their specimens on location at the end of a long day of fieldwork, preparing insects at night, for hours on end, by the glow of the kerosene lamp. Because insects are often caught in large numbers, the catch from a single day might be in the hundreds if not thousands. Treating every animal one by one, whether it’s a big and sturdy beetle or a transparent and delicate mayfly, requires a degree of focus and is certainly time intensive. It must first be taken out of the killing jar, its legs, wings, and antennae manipulated to hold the desired form and direction, before inserting the pin through a specific spot that doesn’t damage the animal too much, and finally sticking the freshly pinned insect to a base in such a way (maybe even with other pins to support it) that it holds the painstakingly attained position. On top of that, scientific guidelines call for pinned insects to be arranged in such a way as to allow for various features required for examination to be displayed—for instance, the wings must spread to a precise angle and the legs positioned in a prescribed direction. In the shipping crates, they must be placed a safe distance apart, should they start to loosen from the tight bond with the pin and start turning. Thus, not only are pinned insects fragile, they also take up a lot of space, unfavorably for large-scale collecting expeditions, where the volume of shipped items is bound to be of concern. The alternative is shipping in paper bags, where the insects are placed immediately after their death and dried. Layers of these bags, which can easily be created out of folded newspaper while in the field, are well suited for packing in shipping crates. A further advantage is that, should a leg or head break off, it will stay with the rest of the body in the bag and can later be glued back into place on the correct animal during pinning. Once the specimens make it back to the home museum, professionals must then be enlisted to take on the time-consuming task of pinning the insects, which in this case must be softened beforehand. Insect bags of folded newspaper, which are usually triangular, in this setting inadvertently become artful mementos of faraway lands, fragmented archives of the current events of the day of their packing, even if this can’t have been the collector’s intention at the time.
Labeling is possibly the most essential step to be taken when doing any kind of preservation back home. After all, labels—or, rather, the information they contain—are what actually turn a collected object into what it’s meant to be, namely, a scientific unit. In the field, objects will often have been given a temporary label that provides the most important shorthand details about the location and circumstances of the discovery, along with references to field notes and travel journals. For mammals, in cases where only a handful of individual specimens have been collected, it may be possible to write more detailed labels in the field or during transport, but for the thousands upon thousands of insects, crustaceans, and other animals, these initial bare-bones labels must suffice. A clear specification of the discovery location is the minimum requirement, and the collection date is usually also included. Specimens missing these metadata—save those from a handful of historically significant expeditions—are considered scientifically worthless. Proper labeling, which must promise to fulfill its purpose in the future, is therefore the linchpin of the processing that follows a collecting expedition. This also often includes an analysis of notes on the collection, field books, and journal accounts.
Quite some time before the voyage concludes, the collected material is thus accurately prepared and labeled. Further scientific processing is manifested as a shared group project, at least for the large-scale collecting expeditions, which have yielded new species across nearly all groups, from turtles to blow flies. The material, presorted according to animal group, is sent around the world to the appropriate specialists, who will have agreed to help, usually happily, provided it’s coming from remote regions of particular interest to their respective specialty areas. And thus begins the painstaking phase of taxonomic processing and description.
The species discoverers often encounter utterly unknown diversity. Many of the collected animals represent new species, and especially in “super-diverse” groups such as insects, huge numbers of species can require description. Describing dozens or sometimes hundreds of new species isn’t uncommon for full-time entomological taxonomists. For researchers working on a particularly diverse and poorly researched animal group, the number of newly discovered, described, and named species can reach into the thousands or even tens of thousands—a life’s work. The number of these “mass authors” is small, a clear indication of the level of exertion required to achieve this feat. Nevertheless, there are a few natural scientists approaching or even exceeding the 10,000 mark—a remarkable achievement over the course of decades of active effort. But what impels a person to dedicate his or her life entirely to the taxonomic pursuit of the tiniest insect species? Can we put this down to the admirable dedication of intellectual heavyweights? Or is it an expression of manic obsession, a sick compulsion that won’t let up, until every last specimen has been gathered and organized? What follows is an introduction of every known taxonomist documented as having described more than 10,000 species in an attempt to shed some light on these questions.
Prominent among these characters is Charles P. Alexander, the veritable “lord of the crane flies.” Crane fly is a common name for members of the superfamily Tipuloidea. The long-legged, large crane flies, which don’t infrequently invade our homes, have a striking appearance and different names throughout the English-speaking world, including gallinipper, gollywhopper, jimmy spinner, mosquito hawk, mosquito lion, and daddy long-legs. According to the most recent count, Tipuloidea includes 16,850 species-group taxa—that is, species and subspecies—11,278 of which were described by Alexander. In other words, a single entomologist discovered and named two-thirds of the world’s crane fly species. Not to mention approximately 200 further species descriptions of gnats and flies, along with a species of stonefly. All told, the number of insect species Alexander described totals up to 11,755. An immense number! Its enormity becomes especially obvious considering the following: Alexander was born in 1889 in New York State and published his first work on crane flies in 1910—that is, at age 21. His last publication appeared in 1981. Over those seventy years, he published 1,024 articles, or an average of 1.3 publications per month. Each of these publications contained an average of eleven newly described species, meaning he was managing an output of some three species descriptions per week. Alexander was a constant species author over long intervals of time, even if sporadic years broke the pattern. In 1929 alone, he described 394 species. The year before his death, 50 new names were published, and even in the year he died, a further 18. How on earth could Alexander find the time for all of this? And wherever did he find all that material?
Figure 7.3 A small part of the crane fly collection with labels created at different times. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, M. Ohl photo.
In Alexander, there is no mistaking his tremendous diligence and an almost manic power of concentration. For most of his career, beginning in 1922, he was a full-time faculty member and administrator at the Massachusetts Agricultural College at Amherst (today the University of Massachusetts). In addition to what was surely a busy workday, he was also president of the Entomological Society of America and repeatedly embarked on extended collecting trips with his wife Mabel. Ah yes, his dear Mabel. Congruent with the times, as is so often the case in life stories like these, Alexander’s wife stood behind him as a strong force and beside him as an active assistant. She organized and managed his enormous comparison collection, which was stored in an addition to their home in Amherst, built for this express purpose and known as “Crane Fly Heaven.” Thanks to Mabel’s work, the collection was superbly organized, such that all of the comparison specimens, microscopic preparations, and literature her husband needed were close at hand. Diligence, an extraordinary overview of the world’s crane fly fauna, a continuously growing comparison collection unmatched around the world, and especially the support of his wife Mabel, appear to have been Alexander’s recipe for success.
But where did the material that one needs to describe so many species come from? To describe 11,755 species, an absolute minimum of 11,755 individual specimens is required; in practical terms, this will have meant sifting through many times that number of specimens. Many species are common and collected in large numbers, but far more are rare or very rare. Alexander worked on crane fly fauna from every continent with the exception of Europe, and for the majority of his active career, he was the only specialist for crane flies in most of the world’s geographical regions. At the same time, crane flies are often caught as by-catch in the nets of specialists looking for other winged insects, and thus a steady stream of unidentified crane flies flowed from other collectors and museum collections toward the East Coast, where it emptied into Crane Fly Heaven. Alexander’s collection grew and grew, and his own expeditions only added to it. These factors together were enough to ensure that he never lacked for research material, and should the mood strike to work on crane flies from a certain region, unopened parcels were always ready and waiting for him.
Understandably, Alexander sought to expand his comparison collection with ever more species, necessary to distinguish undescribed species from those already described. In his efforts, however, he overshot the mark. After a specialist has processed material that has been sent to him, it’s common practice to keep a handful of individuals for his own collection, even if it’s type material and of course only by permission of the specimens’ owners. Alexander, however, who usually had to dissect his research material to reveal important features, would keep parts (even of holotypes) for his collection without asking—a wing, a few legs, the male genitalia. He sent back the rest.
On the surface, crane flies don’t appear to differ much from each other, at least not to the layperson. Microscopic examinations of the male genitalia and bristles on the body reveal a somewhat unexpected structural diversity. Differentiation between species is thus based on small, inconspicuous features; in addition to a good microscope, a researcher needs a comprehensive comparison collection, a good library, and lots of experience. Alexander possessed all of these in ample measure. The sheer mass of data before him presented its own huge challenge. Even today, when speedy computers with user-friendly databases are essentially part of the natural landscape, this task is no walk in the park. Alexander’s work process, by contrast, was entirely object- and paper-based, with introduced errors always a possibility.
A further question comes into play. Whether a certain morphological peculiarity of a certain crane fly individual should be considered an indication of its being a newly discovered species will always depend on the personal assessment of intraspecific variability and speculation as to whether the observable peculiarities represent constant and genetically inheritable characteristics. Two taxonomists can easily differ in opinion here, and what one considers to be two well-defined, distinct species can be interpreted by the other as synonyms of a single species.
Believe it or not, by 2009, only 355 synonyms had been found among Alexander’s 11,000-plus species. Twenty-seven of these were the result of objective mistakes, by which Alexander formally described the same species twice—the name, description, and image of the species were accidentally published a second time in the years following the original publication. Most of the remaining synonyms, however, are subjective synonyms—that is, the result of other scientists’ conflicting views on the species’ status. It’s estimated that around five percent of the species Alexander described had already been described, and that approximately one percent of those (about 115 species) he’d done himself.
Considering the high total number of species he described, his number of synonyms at five percent turns out to be low, both proportionately and as an absolute number, in comparison with other taxonomists, as we will see. A low rate of synonymy might be attributed in part to the quality of his taxonomic interpretations, but the poor state of scientific research in several of the regions Alexander studied can’t be discounted as a factor either. For instance, from a geographic area rich in crane flies, 3,574 species of South American crane flies are known today, 3,286 of which are on Alexander’s account. To date, only 15 of these have been interpreted as synonyms, meaning that Alexander described 3,271 of the South American Tipulidae species considered valid today. In other words, about 92 percent of the total known population of South American crane fly fauna can be traced back to Alexander. There hasn’t been any broad reassessment of South American crane flies that could be used as the basis for a new evaluation of the species described by Alexander. Simply put, no one has looked since. Whether his species ultimately prove good and sensible, no one can say, and to this day, Alexander holds the monopoly on the crane flies of South America.
Ultimately, synonyms are mistakes regardless of qualifications. In any case, it’s an unpleasant experience for a taxonomist when one’s own names, published with the best of intentions, vanish into synonymy. Thus, in a quantitative assessment of the life’s work of prolific authors, individual synonymy rates are the measure of quality for their activity. Charles P. Alexander’s estimated five percent is the stuff of dreams for other high-volume taxonomists.
Like Francis Walker. It’s hard to find another figure in taxonomy who enjoys a reputation as conflicted as his. In 1874, the year of his death, an obituary appeared in Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine, one of the best-known British entomology journals, that likely spoke from the heart of most of Walker’s colleagues. The opening sentence got right down to it: “More than twenty years too late for his scientific reputation, and after having done an amount of injury to entomology almost inconceivable in its immensity, Francis Walker has passed from among us.”2 The author of the obituary, an entomologist named J. T. Carrington, was undoubtedly aware that it wasn’t in good taste to speak ill of the deceased in an obituary, and toward the end of the text, he preempts potential criticism of the style he chose: “We earnestly hope that never again will it fall to us, nor to our successors in entomological journalism, to have to write such an obituary notice as this. That the motto, ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum,’ [‘Of the dead, nothing unless good’] will be directed against us we fully expect; and we answer before-hand that we have only judged Walker as an entomologist.”3 Other contemporary colleagues, however, saw Walker first and foremost as the “most voluminous and most industrious writer on Entomology [England] has ever produced” and emphasized that they’d never met another person “who possessed more correct, more diversified, or more general information, or who imparted that information to others with greater readiness and kindness.”4
To this day, Walker tops the list of most productive mass species authors of all time. According to the latest count, prepared by entomologist and fly specialist Neal Evenhuis of Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Walker christened a dizzying 23,506 species. Compared with Charles Alexander, however, Walker did not concentrate on a single insect order—not by a long shot. Butterflies were his obvious favorite, and with 10,628 names, they comprised almost half of all the species he named. After that came Diptera (flies and gnats), with more than 4,000 species; Hemiptera (true bugs and cicadas), of which there were hardly fewer; Hymenoptera (wasps, bees, ants), with 2,500 species; Orthoptera (grasshoppers), with about 1,000; and Coleoptera (beetles) and Blattodea (cockroaches), each with about 400 species. As if that weren’t enough, he was also interested in ten other insect orders, and he described smaller numbers of species for each of them: more than 200 Neuroptera (lacewings), more than 100 Trichoptera (caddisflies), nearly 40 Ephemeroptera (mayflies), 14 Isoptera (termites), 7 Psocoptera (booklice), and 3 Mecoptera (scorpionflies). Finally, Walker also contributed a species each to the Odonata (dragonflies), Embiidina (webspinners), Mantodea (praying mantises), and Thysanoptera (thrips) orders.
This number appears to stand in glaring contrast to the total number of Walker’s publications. As a reminder, by the end of his life, Charles Alexander had more than one thousand publications to his name, his average number of new species per publication was just over 11, and his number of publications per year about 15 over a span of 70 years. Walker’s record is a different story altogether. Although he may have published more than 300 pieces, most were barely more than notes a few lines long. The majority of his species descriptions can be found in about 90 publications, which amounts to an average 261 species per publication. If we take the total number of his publications as the basis, it would still require an average of almost 80 new species per publication. If one then also considers his significantly shorter career span, then the whole business becomes even more striking. While Alexander was active in science for more than seven decades, Walker worked only 42 years. Alexander averaged 168 species per year, Walker 560; that is, Walker described 47 species per month, or considerably more than a species a day.
In view of the standard course of taxonomic work, which involves carefully studying comparison materials, compiling all relevant literature related to the target group, and producing detailed descriptions, possibly even illustrations, Walker’s level of productivity is almost inconceivable. It’s tedious and protracted work, and to produce an overview of real depth—even after years of experience—is usually only possible for several hundred or maybe a couple thousand species at most. It’s with good reason, then, that taxonomists will usually focus on just one animal group. Walker, by contrast, described animals in widely different insect orders, and in huge numbers at that. How could he have achieved this almost industrial productivity? From the first, he published in a format that was conceived for the mass organization and administration of large numbers of species names: the catalog, voluminous tomes that he filled with names, page by page. In this regard, he held a privileged position: his 9-to-5 had him creating a complete inventory of collections at the Natural History Museum in London. Its collections were and are some of the most extensive and diverse in the world. The simple act of cataloging them would be a gargantuan task. In the process of working on his insect catalogs, Walker would frequently come across undescribed species that needed to be included in the collection inventory. What’s more, it’s new species such as these that enhance a catalog with the new and the innovative, turning it into something more than a mere list. So Walker accepted the challenge and added the as-yet-undefined species to his list, each with a brief description and new name. The majority of Walker’s catalogs containing species names always have the same title structure: “List of specimens of xyz insects in the collection of the British Museum. Part abc,” in which “xyz” stands for the respective insect order and “abc” for the subgroup. For instance, the “lepidopterous insects,” or butterflies, appeared in four “parts,” together totaling more than one thousand pages alone. This form of cataloging its own holdings was a long-held tradition at the Natural History Museum, and experts were often contracted to take on their own specialty area, whether mammals or leaf beetles. Most of these contracts were terminated in the 1860s, leaving Walker the sole remaining contract entomologist, most likely because of the productivity promised by his steady stream of catalog publications. Pay was on a fee basis for every publication completed within an established timeframe. Some sources claim that Walker was paid for every processed individual or species, to which they attribute his tremendous productivity, but those are probably just rumors.
Thanks to Evenhuis, an entire host of other numbers, no less impressive, is known from Walker’s life’s work. He published his catalogs over a period of 27 years, beginning in 1846 with a 238-page catalog on parasitic wasps, through 1873, with the final volume of the eight-part, 1,655-page catalog on true bugs. The number of catalog pages he produced thus totals 16,960; even if they aren’t filled with freely written prose, it’s still an impressive number. In doing so, Walker listed 46,066 species present in the British Museum. As part of the catalog, he described 15,959 (about one-third) of these species as new. These newly described species are unevenly distributed between the individual insect taxa. Only 9.8 percent of the wasps Walker cataloged are new species, compared with 46.6 percent of butterflies. In other words, nearly half of the butterflies held by the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century hadn’t yet been described, at least in Walker’s utterly professional estimation.
The publication of extensive catalogs for the British Museum—particularly those covering little-researched insect groups—was Walker’s preferred method of describing batches of new species at once. He became notorious in the scene overnight; owners of large private collections or well-endowed travel collectors who wanted their pieces named turned to him to process and define their specimens. As mentioned in Carrington’s critical obituary, it’s unknown whether Walker ever turned down this sort of request. In several publications, he thus also processed flies and gnats Alfred Russel Wallace had sent from Southeast Asia.
But what makes Walker so suspect that his death should be so heartily welcomed by some of his colleagues? Upon closer examination, a certain superficiality appears to have afflicted his methodology in direct consequence of his breakneck pace. In his 1858 catalog on cockroaches at the British Museum, for instance, he described one and the same species three times, variously as Ischnoptera ruficeps, Nauphoeta ruficeps, and Nauphoeta signifrons. If this treble synonymy weren’t enough, all three also happen to be synonyms of an older name, Oxyhaloa deusta (Thunberg, 1784). To be fair, synonyms regularly emerge from varying interpretations of intraspecific variability, and if this were so, Walker could be excused for simply emphasizing minimal differences that would come to be considered inconsequential by later roach experts. In Walker’s case, the error is more than a problem of subjectivity: the individuals used for the three species descriptions are as alike as peas in a pod, both sexes of the ruficeps species were available to him, and they all came from South Africa. At the very least, he should have noticed that both specimens to which he assigned the same species name ruficeps had a red head. To crown it all, Walker placed Ischnoptera ruficeps and Nauphoeta ruficeps in two different cockroach families—that is, in near opposition to one another within his own cockroach system. Cockroach specialists are in agreement that this serial production of cockroach names took a real toll, with plain negligence to blame.
It’s worth noting that the “star” of synonymy with one’s own names is unquestionably the French entomologist Jean-Baptiste Robineau-Desvoidy, one of the most important early fly taxonomists of the nineteenth century. His 248 newly described tachinid fly species bear particular mention: in a reassessment carried out a century later, every last one of them turned out to be synonymous with a single species, Phryxe vulgaris. Typically for Robineau-Desvoidy’s work, all 248 species he published are, in fact, based on the slightest nuances of color, and what’s more, all originate from around Paris, geographically a pretty manageable area.
As for Walker, instances like the thrice-described cockroach species are common to several groups he worked on. Take the numbers for dipterans, or flies and gnats. Of Walker’s 3,917 new species names, 2,691 are still considered valid today, making for a 31 percent rate of synonymy. In other words, about one-third of his fly names refer to species that had already been described. This certainly seems high, but compared with the general rate of 20 to 30 percent synonymy, depending on the animal group, Walker’s mistakes here were on the order of many other prolific taxonomists’.
Walker bequeathed to later scientists another problem. Given the huge number of his species descriptions, it’s hardly surprising that each individual description succinctly outlines what Walker felt distinguished the species. Walker’s descriptions typically consist of three or sometimes five lines of brief description in Latin, followed by ten, rarely more lines of somewhat more detailed description in English. At the end come country of origin and collector. The following catalog entry’s relationship to the preceding is unclear: it could be the next new species or alternatively the next known name from the British Museum’s stores. Even if Walker’s descriptions are certainly more extensive than those of Linnaeus, they are nonetheless too short for many later taxonomists, too sparsely detailed to use to recognize a species. Should the original description be insufficient, the only recourse is a look at the type material, which is cumbersome and time consuming, especially when hundreds of species are in question.
In the league of taxonomists with more than 10,000 new species names, only four other entomologists share the title with Charles Alexander and Francis Walker.
The world of beetles has Frenchman Maurice Pic to thank for around 20,000 species names—some sources say up to 38,000—but no one knows for sure because neither a complete list of publications nor a register of his names exists. In the beetle scene, Pic is probably more contentious a figure than any other taxonomist. His species descriptions were always short, forgoing any use of explanatory illustrations, and he worked without a microscope. What’s more, he attempted—quite successfully—to prevent his colleagues from reviewing the type specimens of the species he’d described. Pic published over a period of 67 years, and although the biological sciences—and with them taxonomy—developed and modernized continuously during that time, Pic’s species descriptions barely deviated in form, from his first in 1889 to his final publication in 1956.
Thomas Lincoln Casey Jr. just barely clears the 10,000 mark. Casey was the son of Thomas Lincoln Casey Sr., a highly decorated officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The United States has Casey Sr. to thank for the Washington Monument, whose completion he oversaw in 1884. Like his father, Casey Jr. became an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. From his early days as a young lieutenant, he tried his hand at theoretical and applied astronomy with success; on the side, he collected beetles wherever he was stationed as a soldier. He developed into one of the most productive North American beetle collectors and authors of his time. His collection ultimately included 117,000 beetles representing more than 19,000 species and subspecies. His collection boasts more than 9,200 holotypes, but the number of species he described was far greater. In the end, Casey Jr. was buried with his microscope in the cemetery at the family estate.
Another 10,000 beetle species were described by Austrian Edmund Reitter. The son of a forester and trained agronomist, Reitter was an autodidact when it came to insect taxonomy, which he pursued with élan. From 1867 onward, he undertook extended collecting trips, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe, building an enormous beetle collection through his own finds and habitual trading activities. In 1879, he opened a bookstore in Vienna specializing in insects and entomology, which he initially called the “Natural History Institute.” The revenue enabled him to undertake further collecting expeditions and also to send hired collectors as far as Mongolia. To this day, one of the key innovations behind his huge success in collecting was the systematic implementation of an instrument called the “beetle sieve,” used to sift through leaf litter in search of beetles. In 1886, Reitter wrote about his experiences with this known but at that point only sporadically implemented method in a publication with the delightful title The Insect Sieve, Its Significance in Capturing Insects, Particularly Coleopterans, and Its Application.5 His five-volume work Fauna Germanica: The Insects of the German Reich enabled the identification of German beetles through its detailed images and is still known today.6 In 1917, only a year after the final volume appeared, a little supplementary pamphlet of about 80 pages was published under the title Explanation of the Scientific Beetle Names in Reitter’s Fauna Germanica edited by Sigmund Schenkling, curator at the German Entomological Institute, then in Berlin-Dahlem, today located outside Berlin in Müncheberg.7 The three works are yet to be translated into English. As a young man, Reitter also wrote romantic nature poetry with titles such as “Forest Shadows,” “Evening Hush,” and “Night of Wild Flowers,” and he published a book of verse nearly two hundred pages long at age 20. In his final years, Reitter was also interested in the occult. He told his biographer Franz Heikertinger that during a séance, the death of his close friend Ludwig Ganglbauer had been communicated to him from beyond and was set to occur the following June of 1911. Ganglbauer didn’t die at the appointed time, but he did fall very ill and undergo surgery in June 1911. He died of his illness in June 1912, exactly one year later than had been foretold.
Last, there is the Englishman Edward Meyrick, like Reitter an amateur entomologist. His specialty was “micros,” as micromoths or microlepidoptera are lovingly known to butterfly experts. Micros encompass everything known in colloquial speech as moths. They are a species-rich, taxonomically challenging group. Especially deserving of respect are those like Meyrick, who have described thousands upon thousands of micros. In a 1955 catalog of the types of micromoths described by Meyrick in the British Museum of Natural History in London, where his collection has been housed since his death, 14,199 names are listed. Adding to that his work on the species-rich group of snout moths (Pyraloidae), omitted from the list, makes about 15,000 species, all told.
Meyrick grew up in England and published his first piece on microlepidopterans at age 21. From 1877, he spent almost ten years as a classics teacher in New Zealand and Australia, where he found an almost untapped world of new micromoths waiting to be discovered. An El Dorado for a micro taxonomist! He collected like there was no tomorrow, publishing scads of new species and genera and sometimes even higher groups. His work with Australian and New Zealand micromoths established his fame in the scene; as one of the only people active in the area of exotic microlepidopterans, from that point onward he was sent material from all over the world. Whether from Sri Lanka or India, China or Japan, South Africa or Zaire, huge numbers of micromoths reached him from every last corner, along with requests to identify or, if new, describe them. Meyrick processed them all. His works appeared in the standard scientific journals, often corresponding to the animals’ geographic origins. Thus, he published most of the Australian species descriptions in Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, those from India and Sri Lanka in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, and African species in the Annals of the Transvaal Museum and the Annals of the South African Museum. Because the publication process was complicated and inconvenient—the author and publisher were separated by oceans, and communication between them was limited to handwritten missives delivered by ship—Meyrick established his own publication organ, Exotic Microlepidoptera. Published at his own expense, five thick volumes totaling more than 3,000 pages were ultimately released, in which Meyrick—as the sole author—described approximately 8,000 species. Beyond Exotic Microlepidoptera, he produced 428 further publications. Over the course of 64 working years, Meyrick produced an average of almost seven publications per year, describing an average of 234 species annually. For comparison, Charles Alexander tallied 168 species per year, Francis Walker, 560. A happy medium for Meyrick.
In terms of the scope of their texts, Meyrick and Walker’s species descriptions are not dissimilar, usually only a few short lines, occasionally maybe a third of a page, almost always without images. Meyrick is credited with being the first to methodically study the venous systems of micros’ wings. Insect wings consist of an ultra-thin membrane stabilized by stiff wing veins. The wings’ venous network, common to virtually all insect species, is genetically fixed and often species-specific. Particularly the longitudinal veins, which are closely linked to the rather complicated wing joint, are comparable throughout most insect groups. Together with the many crisscrossing veins, the longitudinal veins form the typical, net-like venous pattern. Thus, for many winged insects, wing veins play a large role in the analysis of systematic position. On butterflies, the wing veins are concealed under a thick layer of scales and the optically dominating color patterns. Only after the scales have been rubbed off, the wings moistened or sometimes backlit, do the veins reveal themselves. With the exotic micromoths, Meyrick had recognized the systematic value of the wing veins, described each of them, and built many of his genera and families on the differences and similarities between them. So far, so good. What he wantonly neglected, however, and what has led present-day micro researchers to view his descriptions as minor catastrophes, are the genitalia so important to species recognition. Barring a reevaluation of his type material, the majority of his species descriptions are incomprehensible—in other words, they can’t be applied to today’s various species without further effort. Simply put, it’s impossible to know which species he was actually specifying.
Besides his general disregard for micromoth genitalia, there was another much simpler reason for his excluding them: Meyrick didn’t own a microscope. Instead, he performed all of his taxonomic comparison work with the help of a magnifying glass, securing the pinned animals in a small watchmaker’s tripod for examination under lighting. A magnifying glass, good eyesight, and his tremendous knowledge replaced the microscope for him, as one of his colleagues wrote after his death. Nevertheless, these strengths were his undoing: the notion of preparing the minute butterfly genitalia as embedded micropreparations didn’t even cross his mind. Meyrick simply didn’t possess the equipment needed for this method so crucial to proper identification.
It’s for good reason that all of the 10,000-species taxonomists are entomologists. Not only are insects the most species-rich animal group, but, depending on the particular insect group, they’re also relatively easy to catch and to handle, technically speaking. It’s not by chance that insects have been skewered and dried on pins for more than 250 years, a simple, effective method of preservation that ensures the insects will retain the chitinous exoskeletal form and often even the color they had in life. For one person to keep an eye on all insects—with a diversity in the hundreds of thousands, bordering on millions—is impossible. Thus, for the sake of efficacy, most entomologists specialize in a more or less narrow field. For Walker to publish huge numbers of new species in nearly twenty insect orders was highly unusual even if he did stick to insects.
Narrow specialization had not always been the norm. In the eighteenth-century tradition of natural history collections, Carl Linnaeus hoped to produce a comprehensive representation of all three natural kingdoms of animals, plants, and minerals: a feasible goal in an era when the known species to take into account numbered at the most a few ten thousand. In that context, Linnaeus managed to emerge as the author of species in nearly every animal group, from the common house mosquito, Culex pipiens, to the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, all the way to humans, Homo sapiens. In total, by the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, he had reached 4,376 species, about half of which were new and discovered by him. Still no mean feat.
With the birth of modern taxonomy, of which Linnaeus can be considered the father, naturalists found themselves increasingly confronted by what medical and biological historian Staffan Müller-Wille has described as “information overload.” The burgeoning wealth of knowledge about the earth’s living diversity ultimately required new approaches to managing large amounts of information. Initially, researchers into the early nineteenth century pursued a universalist project aimed at the complete compilation of every known thing. Encyclopedic books, tabular compilations, and tree-like visualizations of heredity—often in combination with individual methods of annotation and filing—represent attempts to control the flood of new data. Such innovations in the techniques of information management, in keeping with the times, were both enabled and constrained by the possibilities provided by paper and writing utensils. With classic “paper technology,” it was certainly possible to effectively organize and memorize thousands—perhaps even tens of thousands—of objects in tables and encyclopedias. In Linnaeus’s time, completeness was thus a thoroughly tangible goal for individual encyclopedists. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the corpus of knowledge had exploded such that described insects alone now numbered approximately 250,000 species. In the face of such volume, entomologists began to limit themselves to just one group within the array of described insect diversity. By now, this is standard practice for most taxonomists; in many cases, a taxonomist will specialize further, dedicating his or her entire career to a single genus of beetles, wasps, or butterflies.
Clearly, taxonomists who describe more than 10,000 species in their lifetime represent an extreme exception. In today’s context, a changing understanding of science toward increasing pressure to roll out high-level, synthesized publications instead of species descriptions makes it more unlikely than ever for a taxonomist to aspire to join this league. In addition to diligence, time, and access to the appropriate material, a certain mental disposition—to be less kind, an obsession—is a requirement if one is to dedicate one’s life to the description and naming of species. In a frank assessment, at nearly three species descriptions per week, including the time consumed by the necessary “side work,” such as collecting animals, correspondence, and the actual examination, not to mention the demands of his job at the university as well as the purely physical necessities, such as eating and sleeping—Charles Alexander can’t have had much spare time. In his married life, he was fortunate enough to find in Mabel a spouse willing to facilitate such a rigorous work regime.
Particular to all 10,000-plus taxonomists is the high percentage of publications for which they are the sole author. Granted, publications with multiple authors weren’t nearly as widespread in the nineteenth century as they are today. Even so, this can be taken as further evidence of the obsessive nature of the lone scientist, who can attain his high yield in a seemingly endless task only if he focuses on the next species, the next publication, without becoming mired in the tedious exchange with colleagues of potentially differing opinions. It’s not uncommon for these mass authors to attract attention through their eccentric behavior. To their mind, social interactions, in particular, are more a nuisance than a welcome distraction. Dedicating oneself in monomaniacal fashion to a certain insect group invariably turns these insects into the lodestar of one’s personal universe. When Wojciech J. Pulawski, the world expert on the digger wasp genus Tachysphex, relocated to the United States several decades ago, his friend and fellow wasp researcher Arnold S. Menke had “Tachysphex Forever” printed on a custom t-shirt for him. And it’s true that all his life, Pulawski has worked primarily on this genus.
Let’s come back once more to Francis Walker, the leader of the pack among mass authors. As previously mentioned, his reputation in the guild is understandably poor, and his colleagues seldom shy from scathing ridicule. In 1863, the Austrian butterfly expert Julius Lederer, for instance, circulated the derisive commentary that it must have been so dark in the basement of the British Museum where Walker worked that one couldn’t have recognized if one had described the same species “five, six, or even eleven times, and in different genera, no less.”8 Lederer mused further that it wasn’t actually a basement but an entresol, a mezzanine, and wondered moreover that, despite the terrible lighting, other colleagues were producing “sound” work. Besides, on foggy days, the museum was dark everywhere, basement or not.
Even today, when speaking about Walker with colleagues in taxonomy who are active in his specialty area, the response is largely deprecating, although the impression arises that the complaints about Walker are at least partly the result of a tradition we’ve grown fond of. I’ve had to recognize this in myself as well. Although I never had an unpleasant experience with Walkerian species among the wasps I was researching as an undergraduate and later a doctoral candidate, the consistently negative opinions of my older colleagues were enough to tarnish my views on Walker for a long time. I almost reflexively anticipated trouble with every wasp species Walker had described. Against this background, I prepared myself for the worst when researching Walker and his species, seeking out hard figures for the synonyms since discovered for the species he’d described. The synonymy rate is a common touchstone of taxonomic quality, provided enough time has passed to allow later scientists a critical perspective on these species. Not many figures exist for Walker’s synonymy rate, but the few that do were surprising and in no way met my expectations. As mentioned, Walker’s synonymy rate of 31 percent for flies and gnats isn’t even so bad, compared with those of other fly experts. Among the thirteen most productive dipterologists of all time, there are three whose synonymy rates are higher than Walker’s: Jean Baptiste Robineau-Desvoidy, who will eternally bring up the rear with 49 percent; Pierre Justin Marie Macquart, with 37 percent; and even one of the founding fathers of dipterology, Johann Wilhelm Meigen, with 36 percent. All of the top-13 dipterologists active in the nineteenth century are hardly better, with double-description rates between 25 and 50 percent. The picture is more varied in other insect groups described by Walker: 74 percent of his aphid species are synonyms, 55 percent of his cockroaches, 23 percent of his caddisflies, and only 6.9 percent of his North American chalcid wasps. Overall, the synonymy rates confirm that Walker’s taxonomy was of average quality.
Apart from Crane Fly Alexander, whose active period is still too recent to allow for a critical synonymy assessment, the synonymy rates of the other mass authors are scarcely better, many even significantly worse. However, they’re frequently praised in the literature for their tremendous productivity, whereas Walker is regularly denigrated. This raises the question as to why the entomologist guild’s distrust should be so targeted at Walker.
An answer may be found in a further criticism leveled against Walker’s work by his contemporaries: the linguistic quality of the names. In 1863, for instance, Julius Lederer wrote that Walker’s name creations were “largely horrific.” True, many of his names are unusual, classically upvalued word combinations that many taxonomists at the time—who preferred names based on morphological features—found objectionable. Of course, it is challenging to come up with more than 20,000 new names, and although understandable from a historical perspective, no one today focuses their umbrage on Walker’s nomenclature decisions.
Nevertheless, quality of description, synonymy rates, and perceived linguistic deficiencies are all criticisms that Walker’s contemporaries also faced to varying degrees. The quality of his scientific work thus doesn’t seem to be the reason for his poor reputation, nor was it his social behavior if the few extant accounts of Walker’s personality are to be believed. Even Carrington, who caustically rued Walker’s death as having come 20 years too late, acknowledged that Walker was “amiability itself, and probably there are few men who have lived to the age of 65 (his age at the time of his death), and made so few enemies.”9 A description from the minutes at a meeting of the Entomological Society in London records the following introduction: “This is Mr. Francis Walker, a perfect ambulatory encyclopaedia of entomological knowledge; you will find him very agreeable, and always ready to impart information.”10
In the final years of his life, Walker suffered from deteriorating eyesight. It’s unclear at which point this became a serious problem for him, but by 1873, his handwriting had been significantly impacted. Visual impairment didn’t stop him from his taxonomic study of tiny chalcid wasps, whose features were scarcely visible, even with the magnifying glasses common in those days. Chalcid wasps were the focus of his final publication, published posthumously in 1875.
Francis Walker didn’t leave behind an autobiography. The archive of his correspondence and, ultimately, his tremendous productivity bespeak an obsession with catalogs and the description and naming of insects. Whether driven by vanity and ambition, scientific curiosity or even a manic relationship with cataloging, his motivations remain obscured in the shadows of the past. Equally so the explanation for why he is admired by some, while others consider him a butcher.
Many of the animals Walker processed in the entomological collections of the British Museum had been gathered as material by Alfred Russell Wallace. Besides Walker, many other specialists occupied themselves with Wallace’s spoils, and consequently there are hundreds of plant and animal species with the name wallacei. To this day, undescribed species are still being discovered among the Wallace insects and named after him.
Wallace did not see himself exclusively as a taxonomist, even if he did describe and name around 300 new species. This included a dozen palm, 120 butterfly, 70 rose chafer, and more than 100 bird species. One of the best-known and most beautiful species he caught, discovered, and ultimately named himself, is the butterfly Ornithoptera croesus, also known as Wallace’s golden birdwing butterfly. In his 1869 travel report, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace describes his discovery:
During my very first walk into the forest at Batchian, I had seen sitting on a leaf out of reach, an immense butterfly of a dark colour marked with white and yellow spots. I could not capture it as it flew away high up into the forest, but I at once saw that it was a female of a new species of Ornithoptera or “bird-winged butterfly,” the pride of the Eastern tropics. I was very anxious to get it and to find the male, which in this genus is always of extreme beauty. During the two succeeding months I only saw it once again, and shortly afterwards I saw the male flying high in the air at the mining village. I had begun to despair of ever getting a specimen, as it seemed so rare and wild; till one day, about the beginning of January, I found a beautiful shrub with large white leafy bracts and yellow flowers, a species of Mussaenda, and saw one of these noble insects hovering over it, but it was too quick for me, and flew away. The next day I went again to the same shrub and succeeded in catching a female, and the day after a fine male. I found it to be as I had expected, a perfectly new and most magnificent species, and one of the most gorgeously coloured butterflies in the world. Fine specimens of the male are more than seven inches across the wings, which are velvety black and fiery orange, the latter colour replacing the green of the allied species. The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause.
I had decided to return to Ternate in a week or two more, but this grand capture determined me to stay on till I obtained a good series of the new butterfly, which I have since named Ornithoptera croesus.11
Over the course of several weeks, Wallace returned daily to the Mussaenda bush, where he was able to capture one to two specimens almost every day. His assistant Lahi contributed additional butterflies netted alongside a nearby river. By the end, Wallace possessed more than one hundred specimens of Ornithoptera croesus.
In a January 28, 1859, correspondence addressed to Samuel Stevens, Wallace reports on his newest finds, then en route to the natural history agent in London. Regarding his new butterfly, Wallace writes, “For the Ornithoptera I propose croesus as a good name.”12 Excerpts of the letter to Stevens were read at a meeting of the Royal Entomological Society on June 6, 1859, and published in the Society’s proceedings. Some of Wallace’s contemporaries were not satisfied with this brief sentence as a serious species description, and as a result, George Robert Gray, then president of the society, took it upon himself to examine this gorgeous new species. In November of the same year, he published the description—based on Wallace’s gathered materials, which had since arrived in England—in the proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. It really should have been named in Wallace’s honor, Gray argued, but because the butterflies on hand already bore Wallace’s croesus labels, and because Wallace had already announced the name to the Royal Entomological Society in June, Gray adopted the name proposed by the discoverer. Without question, only Gray’s publication can be counted as the proper detailed description in the truest sense. In fact, many lepidopterists have taken the stance that the name croesus, which appeared in the letter excerpts published in June 1859, only held the status of an unpublished manuscript name, rendering it unavailable with Wallace as author, although ultimately this view didn’t gain much traction. Perhaps because the availability clauses are fulfilled (albeit with a looser interpretation of the nomenclature rules), or simply out of respect for Wallace’s names and his poetic description of the capture of this extraordinary butterfly, Wallace remains recognized as the author of Wallace’s golden birdwing butterfly to this day.