Walking the tightrope: trends in African freshwater systematic ichthyology.
Walking the tightrope: trends in African freshwater systematic ichthyology.
复制标题
走钢丝：非洲淡水系统鱼类学的趋势。
DOI：
10.1111/j.1095-8649.2011.03085.x
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发表时间：
2011
影响因子：
2
通讯作者：
Ernst R. Swartz
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
P. H. Skelton;Ernst R. Swartz
非洲拥有丰富多样的淡水鱼类，反映了其冈瓦纳历史和横跨赤道的地理位置。然而，非洲的科学服务相对较差，在这方面对养护生物多样性与可持续发展之间的紧张关系提出了挑战。生物系统学在过去的半个世纪经历了几次范式转变，包括分支系统学的兴起，以及最近在生物信息学大发展时代采用分子DNA应用于分类学和遗传学以及组装和操纵大型数据集。非洲丰富的生物多样性对全球系统社区来说是一块磁石，在一定程度上抵消了土著科学能力贫乏的不利因素。然而，保护生物学更贴近当地情况，因此需要不可避免地稀缺的土著分类服务。平衡科学知识产生和应用之间的紧张关系网络就像在现有非洲科学资源上走钢丝，为了科普这一问题，必须采用现代创新方法，如条形码来识别生物体。本文认为，非洲淡水鱼类学的历史发展，提出了一套最近的例子，说明在非洲系统鱼类学的趋势，并得出结论，建议传统和新时代的分类方法是必要的非洲淡水鱼类多样性和保护的全面理解和赞赏。所选的例子还表明，可以有效地管理的方法之间的紧张关系提供指数合作。新出现的证据表明，需要包括系统学家、生态学家、分子生物学家和地球科学家在内的复杂科学团队的综合技能和洞察力，才能解决进化在空间、时间和形式方面的深层复杂性。
Africa is blessed with an abundance and rich diversity of freshwater fishes, reflecting its Gondwanan history and geographical position astride the equator. Africa is, however, relatively poorly serviced scientifically, in this respect presenting a challenge to the tension between conserving biodiversity and sustainable development. Biosystematics has experienced several paradigm shifts in the past half century, including the rise of cladistics and more recently the adoption of molecular DNA applications to taxonomy and phylogeny and the assembly and manipulation of large data sets in an era of major development of bioinformatics. The richness of African biodiversity is a magnet to the global systematic community that, to a degree, offsets the disadvantage of an impoverished indigenous scientific capacity. Conservation biology, however, is rooted more closely to the local situation and therefore requires indigenous taxonomic services that are inevitably scarce. Balancing this network of tensions between scientific knowledge generation and application is like walking a tightrope for existing African scientific resources, and to cope it is essential to embrace modern innovative approaches such as barcoding to identify organisms. This paper considers the historical development of African freshwater ichthyology, presents a suite of recent examples illustrating trends in systematic ichthyology in Africa and draws conclusions to suggest that both traditional and new-age approaches to taxonomy are necessary for a complete understanding and appreciation of African freshwater fish diversity and its conservation. The chosen examples also suggest that the tensions between the approaches can be effectively managed provided exponents work collaboratively. The emerging evidence indicates that the combined skills and insight of complex scientific teams including systematists, ecologists, molecular biologists and earth scientists are needed to resolve the deep complexity of evolution in terms of space, time and form.