Abstract
Halting biodiversity decline is one of the most critical challenges for humanity, but biodiversity assessment and monitoring are hampered by taxonomic impediments. We here distinguish between a “dark taxon impediment” caused by a large number of undescribed species and a “superficial description impediment” caused by species descriptions so imprecise that type specimens have to be consulted in order to resolve species identities. Recently, Sharkey et al. (2021) proposed to address the dark taxon impediment for Costa Rican braconid wasps by describing 403 species based on barcode clusters (“BINs”) computed by BOLD Systems. The default assumption of the revision is that BIN=Species (e.g., BOLD:ACM9419 becomes Bracon federicomatarritai Sharkey, sp. nov.) and therefore the diagnoses of most species consist only of a consensus barcode. We here argue that this type of “minimalist revision” is unnecessary and undesirable. It is unnecessary because barcode clusters (e.g. BINs) already provide grouping statements that overcome many of the obstacles associated with dark taxon impediments. However, minimalist revisions are also undesirable and problematic because the diagnoses are only based on one character system – that in the case of Sharkey et al. was poorly analyzed. Furthermore, the revision relies on units that violate basic rules of reproducibility because the BINs were delimited by a proprietary algorithm (RESL) that is applied to a mixture of public and private data. Here, we illustrate that many of the BINs described as species are unstable when the available public data are reanalyzed, reiterate that COI mostly measures time of divergence, and that BOLD Systems violates key principles of open science. We conclude by urging authors, reviewers, editors, and grantors to only publish and fund projects that adhere to modern standards of reproducibility.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
addition of Orcid IDs and reference
