For most people around the world August 16, 1977 memorable because it was the day Elvis Presley died.
“We turned on the radio when we got back in the car and it was the headline: Elvis was dead,” recalls Dr. Mark Harvey.
But that day was pivotal for the then 18-year-old Harvey for another reason.
It was the first time he had caught a pseudoscorpion, a tiny and ancient relative of the spider he had found under a rock to the west. Victoria and put it in a jar with ethanol for preservation.
This year, Harvey became one of the few people on the planet to describe more than 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids such as spiders, pseudoscorpions and scorpions, as well as other invertebrates such as centipedes and velvet worms.
When Harvey spoke to the Guardian earlier this week, the number of new species he had described in scientific journals stood at 1,015.
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But by Friday there were two more – Enigmachern disagreed And Enigmahernes parnabia – pseudoscorpions were found attached to the fur of two different bats and published in the Australian Journal Zoology.
Its thousandth appearance was achieved in October when it and colleagues described 24 new wishbone spiders in the journal Invertebrate Systematics..
Harvey spent most of his career as a curator of arachnids and millipedes (such as centipedes and centipedes) at the Western Australian Museum in Perth, but his field work took him around the world.
He remembers his very first new species – a pseudoscorpion. Geogaripus ranthus, which he described from a specimen at the Queensland Museum in 1981.
“I was really excited about describing a completely new species. I thought I was king of the world,” he laughs. His memory for dates and details is as accurate as his work.
“I can't tell you what I had for dinner last night, but I can tell you about a specimen I found on a hilltop in 1986. But it took me a long time—perhaps the 1990s—before I realized that I had a gift for taxonomy.”
Taxonomy is the scientific field of discovering, identifying, cataloging, and naming species.
This discipline is labor intensive, but considered vital to conservation.
“If you don't know what it is and where it occurs, you can't preserve it,” Harvey says.
“A huge achievement”
“I've always been very interested in animals and insects. When I was a child, I would go to the local creek in Melbourne – it's no longer there, I think it's a car park – and bring things home. It would horrify my mother.”
Colleagues have honored Harvey over the years, naming 45 species after him.
Dr Mike Rix, curator of arachnology at the Queensland Museum, worked with Harvey for three decades and is just one of many scientists to emerge from his tutelage.
“Describing more than 1,000 species is a huge achievement,” says Ricks.
“Mark is one of very few taxonomists in Australian history to achieve this milestone. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest taxonomists of his generation and one of the world's foremost arachnologists.
“There is a scientific legacy for the vast number of species he described, but his legacy as a mentor and scientific leader in the field of taxonomy is virtually unquantifiable.”
Ask Harvey what helps him describe species well, and his answer is more modest.
“I'm good at drawing and have a good eye for detail. I can remember all the shapes,” he says.
He generally sticks to simple Latin names taken from the Latin dictionary, but, like many taxonomists, he sometimes names a species after another scientist, place, or characteristic.
Take the short-tailed whip scorpion, for example. Draculoides bramstockeriso named because “it was first found in a cave, and in my fertile imagination its claws looked a little like Dracula's fangs.”
His fascination with pseudoscorpions, on which he is a world authority, comes down to their complexity, their ancient origins (their fossils are hundreds of millions of years old) and the fact that “they can run backwards faster than forwards, which, as an avid basketball player, I think is a useful skill.”
“The Legacy We Leave”
Harvey officially retired earlier this year and says he is saddened that the animals he loves have disappeared during his career, blaming habitat loss, climate change and bushfires.
“They are suffering and the population is declining here, there and everywhere. I am concerned about the legacy we are leaving for our children and grandchildren.”
Harvey still has a backlog of work and usually has about 10 manuscripts in the works, including one he's been working on for years, 400 pages long, that he hopes will describe about 60 new species.
“I feel like I have 10 more years left in me,” he says. “Maybe I can describe a few hundred more?
“I would have to live another 50 years to describe everything I collected. I probably collected a couple of thousand new species that have not yet been described.”
Let's return to the pseudoscorpion that Harvey picked up in 1977.
The specimen is still in a jar at the Washington State Museum, he said.
“It hasn’t been described yet,” he said. “But it's probably a new species.”
