How Pan is Your List?

There's been quite a bit of chitchat on the Pan-species Listing Facebook Group this week. One popular topic of debate was prompted by the Mighty Mark Skevington who posted the following yesterday: 

As soon as I finished reading that I became a man enthused! I do consider myself an all-round naturalist and, being a competitive so-and-so, I immediately wanted to know how I stacked up against everyone else. I already knew I had 'numbers' against all 37 of the 37 groups (Sea Spiders was the last group to fall). I also knew I was inside the Top 50 highest ranked listers in every single one of those groups apart from Hymenoptera, which I dropped out of just last week. But I didn't know how many of them held 50 or more species for me. Some groups don't even have fifty species on the British List (bristletails, reptiles, amphibians, sea spiders plus a few more) so it's not possible to have recorded 50+ species in all 37 groups. I had a check, turns out I have seen fifty or more species in 19 of the 37 groups. 

Now would probably be a good time to introduce you to the 37 groups as defined on the Pan-species Listing website. Here's a screenshot of part of the Group Rankings Page

You can click on each group heading and it will take you to another page with the Top 50 Ranked listers shown, alongside their tallies for that particular group. I know what you're thinking, what the heck is a proturan, what are the remaining small orders? It's fine, if you join up and start working out your own list, the categories are explained more fully. Like this (a screenshot from my own page - lots of screenshots so far!)

If you're unsure of which category your species belongs to, this should help sort you out where to place it. Ok, so far so good and I even appear to be "more Pan" than some of the folks with a larger list than my own. But what happens when, like Skev, I subtract my top three categories to derive a remainder percentage?

My top three categories are Plants (1363 species), Moths (1132 species) and Beetles (556 species). That accounts for  a whopping 3051 species! Wow, that's a huge 49.2% of the 6201 species on my PSL with just 50.8% being other stuff, that's a huge surprise for me, I had no clue. In a nutshell, half of everything I've ever seen is a plant, moth or beetle. Wow.

I feel a bit disappointed with that, particularly when I break those three groups down into shown/self-found categories. I used to do a lot of moth trapping some 25 years ago, entirely self-found and identified. Then I got caught up in square-bashing for microleps for a forthcoming Surrey Invertebrate Atlas and, thanks to spending hundreds of hours in the field with Jim Porter and Graham Collins, I was shown many species. Shown, not self-found. However, I did go on to self-find a lot of what I was initially shown, so I don't feel too awful about that now. 

Up until about five or six years back, I'd also self-found the vast majority of the plants on my PSL. Then I started hanging out with Tony Davis in Hampshire before moving to Skye and meeting the local BSBI Recorder. Both of these guys have shown me A LOT of plants! I'm not sure how many, I could work it out by scrolling through my spreadsheet, but I expect that somewhere in the region of 200 plant species have been shown to me by various folks over the years, many of which I've never self-found since.

Beetles are just as embarrassing, if not more so. Mark Telfer alone has probably shown me half the species on my list! Well ok, maybe that's a slight over-exaggeration, but he's shown me a hell of a lot! Without a doubt, there are many beetles on my list that I would not have managed to identify for myself, and they come so thick and fast when you're out with Mark that it really does become a bit of a name-writing activity, followed by struggling to match beetle with name afterwards... 

For several years now I've been meaning to split my PSL into some sort of self-found/self-identified/shown-only categories. It will be a big undertaking, but I think it's something I need to do, if only to appease my own conscience. Plus I quite like the idea of having an all time PSL and a self-found PSL. The higher the percentage of self-founds in the all time PSL, the better a naturalist it will show me to be? The big grey area being the "shown but have since self-found and identified" category. I think it's fine to be shown stuff by other naturalists and to then go and find the species again for yourself at a later date. Within reason obviously - returning to 'self-find' a tree that you were shown the previous year would be cheating! 

The utterly brilliant BUBO Listing already have a Self-found category for your bird lists. Here's a screenshot (yes, another screenshot!) of part of my lists.You can see I have an overall total for various places/countries plus self-found totals for some of them too. 

I don't think the PSL website will see many new features added anytime soon, not due to a lack of interest, it's more from a lack of funding than anything else. So if we guys and gals on the PSL Facebook group want to do this, we're going to have to do it for ourselves. Which means complicated stuff, like adding in algorithms and clever formulae to equal out comparisons between numerically speciose groups (plants, diptera, fungi for example) with species poor groups (comb-jellies, platyhelminthes, odonata etc). Is the most pan person the one who has seen the highest percentage of all groups, or the one who has self-found the highest percentage of all groups? Or something else entirely? And how do we go about levelling the field to make it fair to all?

Alternatively, is there even a need to do this at all? 

For me, I'd like to be able to prove to myself that I'm a proper naturalist with an interest in everything, and not someone who obsessively scribbles down the names of what's being shown to them because they're more interested in seeing a big number next to their name rather than seeing the species that make that number. Actually, I don't need to prove that to myself at all, I already know I'm not the name scribbler! 

Somewhere between those two lies the 'pan-species tourist', a phrase generally bandied about as a mild slur. Personally, I think all naturalists are 'pan-species tourists' at some point in their life. As an example, you're a birder and another birder points at and then identifies a butterfly that goes by, or a moth sat on a fence panel, or an orchid by your feet. You see it but you may not care, you're a birder not a botanist! Or you may show a little interest, maybe try to remember the name of that orchid or moth, maybe even make a note of it in your notebook. You're not a botanist or an entomologist, but you're kind of interested enough to maybe look it up online that evening. Dabbling, just dabbling, not the real deal. Bit like a tourist... It's where you take it afterwards that matters. 

Ok, well this post certainly meandered somewhat off topic! I didn't have anything in particular to share with you, I just wanted to tap out a few thoughts about my desire to tidy up my PSL into self-found and shown-only categories in order to prove to myself that I'm a competent naturalist in my own right and not just sponging lifers off of better naturalists. And I also want to see where I stand amongst my fellow PSLers on the website. Of course, that relies on all of us going through the same processes to figure out the various percentages required to make sense of it all. 

Will it happen? I dunno, I hope so. I'm going to attempt to clean up my own PSL regardless. Ideally well before the invert season kicks off and I'm too busy again. 

For now I shall leave you with the first non-screenshot of the post. This is possibly one of the greatest rock songs of all time. I think it's meant to be set in ancient Egypt, or maybe just somewhere completely fictitious. Hope you enjoy it, this truly is a monster track!

In fact, I think a second monster track is required. The video is one person's take on the lyrics, it has nothing to do with Black Sabbath and in fact was produced several decades after the song was written, though it certainly is a very poignant piece of work in it's own right.

Sod it, may as well try for the hat-trick. Monster track number three is....

Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple? You lucky, lucky bastards (they only hung me the right way up yesterday...)