Yet Another Darter-fish Invented to Stop Development
13 hours ago
Kip Hansen
Way down in Bessemer, Alabama, the development of a huge data center is being fought with a time-tried and proven tactic : invent a new species of the darter-fish and declare it at once “endangered”. According to locals and environmental activists the new development would certainly spell doom for the little discovered-just-in-time new darter – this one declared to be the “Birmingham darter” or Etheostoma birminghamense.
A team of biologists headed by Chase D. Brownstein at Yale University determined the new species “using genomic analyses.” and counting “the numbers of scale rows and fin elements from each specimen and performed principal component analysis (PCA) of the meristic traits…” Of course, there were many differences between the individual fish of these “meristic traits” so the authors classified them into “new” species based on average values for those counted traits, in some cases using mean values, in other the modal number.
Yet, the definition of “meristic traits” is generally this:
“Meristic traits are characteristics of organisms that can be counted and are expressed as whole numbers. These traits are discrete, meaning they have distinct, countable categories rather than a continuous range of values. Examples include the number of fins, scales, or vertebrae in an organism.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/06/18/yet-another-darter-fish-invented-to-stop-development/
