Biodiversity research in the US, is the so called American Way always a good basis?

A collegue from the field of entomology recently wrote me his impressions about the situation of scientific fundings in the western world, as he travels around and stays with each of his feet in another country. He said that everybody knows about the importance of the biodiversity on earth and that consequently everybody agrees that research on the biodiversity deserves to be funded. But he continued that this does not mean that the same people would agree that biodiversity research requires experts and that experts would even need to be paid. Thus many of his former students in the US or Germany need to survive with temporary jobs other than their expertises would require.

But also an international unbalance of financial resources, available for fundamental research in entomology or for example acarology (my discipline) can lead to experts being sorted out, although they would be urgently needed. The focus, based on the considered eligibility of research, changed withing the last 25 years. As before Germany was a hotspot for high-quality research in the fields of evolutionary biology, systematics and biodiversity research, that focus of interest is now located in the USA. They invest more money into these sciences than all European countries together.

This can additionally have consequences for the quality of such kinds of research. It is no secret that the general educational level in the US is at least in some areas comparably low, many people don’t speak foreign languages, they often don’t travel abroad, and they live in midst of a mentality, which says „America first“. Biodiversity research would in the old German world of science regularly be connected with many „but consider that…“ conditions. The American way, in some cases, might want to have it easier. They might say: what’s the problem? What do they want to have? Yes, right, they want the numbers of all discovered species. They ask for numbers, thus we do our best to give them numbers, as fast as possible.

Some privileged US-researchers might even misuse their financial power to decide, who in other countries is and who is not. But I say in a rhetoric „you“: Use your fundings to involve as many suffering experts from abroad as possible, instead of center too much work and responsibility on yourself, you won’t have enough time due to too many species, which still need to be discovered and described.  Don’t work too fast and don’t risk to become too superficial. Each species deserves time. Share the work with others and make science benefit from the different kinds of backgrounds in different areas of the world.

 

A mite of the Histiostomatidae, found in Amsterdam in its original substrate as example for the topic „Acarology“

 

All copyrights (also of SEM photo): Dr. rer. nat. Stefan F. Wirth, Berlin July 2020