Nature Drops a Clanger Suggesting Systematics is in Real Trouble. (May 2, 2008)

Systematists are the chaps spend their time ordering the complexities of life animal and vegetable. For several decades they have been shrinking in numbers, and allocation of resources

Queens Univ. Belfast/Photo AFP

is increasingly passing them by. It's all molecular these days and the older members of the trade are beginning to feel that few spend any time looking at the animal or plant.

In yesterday's (May 1, 2008) issue of  Nature under "Snapshot - Rodent round-up" the journal relates: "Zoologists have had the Pied Piper's knack of finding rodents and their ilk this week. This greater white-toothed shrew (Crocidura russula) was discovered in Ireland after biologists were alerted to owl pellets containing large shrew skulls. The large creature — well, larger than its native Irish cousins such as the pygmy shrew — probably arrived on the island as a stowaway on a ship from North Africa or continental Europe, where it is usually found. Several have now been found in Tipperary and Limerick."

That was too much Ian Montgomery who posted this comment, and to Nature's credit they put it immediately into the online edition:

Shrews are insectivores not rodents and it is extremely unlikely that this species noted for its associations with human habitations and recently caught in the heart of rural Ireland stowed away on boats. Has Nature subcontracted its subediting to News Corporation? Perhaps Nature readers should be directed to the online publication in Mammal Review and the serious issue of translocation of species recognised as a major global problem.

Nature has now added to its online edition: "Corrected: The news story ‘Rodent roundup’ (Nature 453, 9; 2008) incorrectly described the greater white-toothed shrew as a rodent, when it in fact belongs to the order Soricomorpha. This has been changed." [Italics, theirs]