Kurtis Lindsay wrote:
Hi all,
I'm not sure if anyone else has posted about this on BA, but I recently read
an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about a new form of technology being
developed by a conglomerate of scientists which will be able to identify
every bird and many more organisms in existence.
The system will apparently be in the form of a hand-held scanning device
which reads a mitochondrial DNA segment (quite like a barcode reader) from a
specimen, say a bird feather or an insect leg. And it will then send the
code back to a database to be identified.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/gotcha-8230-nature-unmasked/2008/11/1
9/1226770542509.html
The following website was set up by an associated team of scientists who are
aiming to obtain a 'genetic barcode' in the form of this standard segment of
mitochondrial DNA for every bird species in the world. By 2011 the team
declare they will have recorded every bird species in the world in their
database and in doing so will discover a further 1000 bird species
previously unrecognized to science as a result of splitting from known
species.
I also read this and the manager of our local NPWS office says that it
will take much longer to complete the info for flora and insects which
could go well into the next century - think how many more of both will
be discovered using this technique. Will put birds numbers into total shade.
In the case of birds, obtaining a specimen could be a problem. Useful
for road kill, and of course will be so for netting and banding
programmes. Might once more upset the recent Christidis and Boles
classification.
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