I am not having the greatest of days, but as far as I can think, legal classification and biological classification of organisms do not need to have anything to do with each other to answer the question if someone has the legal right to classify an organism as protected, by law.
ETA:
Everyone is a scientists, just like everyone is an artist.
Both require some learning, and creative thinking.
OK then how about “most people don’t have the full family background on every finned critter that they pull out of the water on a hook so it’s useful to have a catch-all term like ‘fish’.”
Like many others have already opined; I don’t give a damn what people choose to call them, just as long as they get protected.
If the bees ever go extinct then so does everything else that’s living on the land masses of the planet, like a chain of dominoes:
SAVE THE BEES = SAVE OURSELVES
I hope things get better.
Jessica Simpson is vindicated
It really bugs me how many people spin this as “there’s no such thing as a fish” instead of “there’s more to evolution than just cladistic descent”. That some vertebrates kept gills and fins and some abandoned them is kind of important to how they live, even if on rare occasion one that kept them also breathes air.
Just one thing for casual readers: the common domesticated honey bee you are all familiar with, Apis mellifera, is not in need of protection, and many things people do to ‘protect the bees’ are actually even detrimental to protecting those which need protection.
Please go down that rabbit hole, I hope I got you interested.
@snigs: thank you.
“There are no fish” doesn’t bug me, but my take home from it is “evolution and biological diversity is really surprising and interesting” and a side order of “It’s good to challenge our assumptions, and my individual assumptions, and that of science at large, change regularly and that’s a good thing”
Agree on Apis mellifera, some entomologists describe them as “livestock”, another counterintuitive rabbit hole, but important for people to understand.
An acquaintance of mine was drinking a soda and was unaware that a yellow jacket or bee or something had crawled inside the can and it stung the inside of his mouth. As luck bad) would have it, he was allergic to bee stings, but fortunately we were at a post-race event so there were paramedics right there to help. He still had to be airlifted to the hospital.
I guess our experience with it is different. To me that sort of cladistic purism has usually gone with a lack of curiosity beyond evolutionary position…paraphyly is bad, this is paraphyletic, moving on. Whereas to me the diversity of vertebrates, the extra similarities among Sarcopterygii like lungfish and Tetrapoda, and the fact that Tetrapoda have undergone a great radiation based on a change to a very different ancestral ecology than the fishy vertebrates are all interesting. Trying to take away words for not being cladistic enough doesn’t help express that.
My mother is a fish.
I thought that too, turns out I just misheard something that sounded like “son of a fish”.
/pedant Swarming bees are on their way to establish a hive somewhere else, and are taking provisions for the trip and when they get where they’re going, like emptying your pantry when you move house.
[CW: don’t read the comments.]
We need all our pollinators, at this point, because most food production systems and most ecosystems have been so thoroughly impacted by pollinator loss.
Even Apis millifera has a hard time here in Texas. We’ve been keeping bees for almost 20 years. Our hives often get Africanized and re-queening to get a more docile workable hive is a time-consuming, uncheap, not always reliable process.
So here’s my plug for saving all pollinators: the Lepidoptera and Hymenoptera and Coleoptera and vertebrates too. All of 'em. We need everybody.
ETA:
Clearly a thinly disguised effort by Catholics to eat bees on Fridays.
Bingo. Taxonomy helps us understand the biology. When the taxonomy takes over and supersedes the biology, then it’s lost it’s purpose and is best ignored.
No, but lice taste lousy.
Precisely. Category is a tool, and like any tool its affordances should derive from the needs it is meant to address in its context. Having an argument over whether a mushroom is a vegetable is a stupid and pointless endeavor if one person is arguing a position from plant biology and the other is debating from the perspective of culinary arts. Context is everything.
