Publication Date

9-26-2025

Description

The basic exploratory effort of doing descriptive biology is an avenue by which we can deepen our knowledge about taxa and the natural phenomena that drive their diversification. As Conniff (2011) wrote in The species seekers, “we still live in the great age of discovery”, and much like that historically recognized period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there remains today a distinct need for the sort of work that might have been attributable to the naturalists of that time. The careful observation of how organisms go about their lives, including how they interact with one another and the environments they occur in, can be a means to inspire and inform future work, to generate preliminary data, and to craft testable hypotheses about broad biological patterns. However, paying close attention to species and simply describing what they do is a worthwhile endeavor unto itself. This sort of inquiry has the additional potential to build capacity in fields like botany, where undergraduate and other early-stage students with access to plants in the field or in ex situ collections can easily experience the thrill of uncovering and describing something no one else has seen as clearly as they have. Large and diverse clades such as Solanum can be treasure troves of these sorts of discoveries.

Journal

Taxon

Department

Biology

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.70055

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