UWM’s Academic Adventurers Talk: The Geography of Taxonomy, or What is a Type Locality, Anyway?

Presented by Dr. Michael Pauers, UWM College of General Studies.

Modern taxonomic practice demands that precise information about the location where a new species was found (the “type locality”) be included in the description of new species. Unfortunately, especially for many taxa described in the previous century, this information is often presented as a single and often imprecise location in published descriptions of these organisms, leaving the exact geographical range of the species unknown.

In this talk, Michael Pauers, an ichthyologist in UMW’s College of General Studies and the Milwaukee Public Museum, will detail how such imprecise information in the descriptions of cichlid fishes from Lake Malawi (Nyasa) led him to retrace the steps of the explorers and ichthyologists who found and described these species in order to better understand the geographical distributions of these cichlids.  This information, in turn, will make it easier to delimit and describe new species.

UWM’s Academic Adventurers is a continuing series of informal Friday afternoon programs held in the American Geographical Society Library, that give members of the UWM community the opportunity to hear of their colleagues’ adventures abroad and afield.