Pan-species Listing – How to Become a Super-Naturalist

Speaker: Graeme Lyons (professional ecologist and author)

Pan-species listing is a new type of engagement in natural history – it involves maintaining a personal list of all species seen in the wild, including all types of organisms. Our speaker is a leader of this approach, having set up the definitive website and, just a couple of weeks before this talk, having published the definitive handbook: “Pan-species Listing: How to Become a Super-naturalist”. Many birders keep lists of birds they have seen: life lists, year lists and site lists, perhaps, but aiming to record all types of organisms is a different level of challenge altogether! Graeme convinced us of the values of this approach to the world of natural history: 1) it was part of the ethos that pan-species listers submit their records to national databases, so the pool of knowledge about our native biota is boosted; 2) participants become motivated to become all-round naturalists, and also to develop in-depth knowledge of obscure groups: they may become local or national authorities (and indeed some have).

Graeme is one of those fortunate people whose job is also their hobby: he is a professional field ecologist. He has accumulated more than a third of a million biological records and his UK species list is approaching 10000. He has become an authority on spiders: he told us he has probably seen more species in the field in the UK than anyone else: 559!

In the central part of his talk Graeme summarised the major groups of organisms, which included not just the familiar ones, but also cyanobacteria, slime moulds, protists, cnidarians, sea slugs, flatworms, mites, springtails, tunicates and many others. There is so much interest to be had in these that his argument that there’s no need to travel to other countries for stimulation was perfectly credible. There is no shortage of diversity and beauty, and there is still plenty of scope for the discovery of something new.

There is plenty to admire in the ethos of pan-species listing, but it isn’t for everyone. The inherent competitiveness of its “league tables”, though good-natured, might encourage people to regard natural history as a sport, which I’m uneasy about. Also controversial was his passionate argument against AI tools (such as Merlin and Obsidentify), which he thinks will stifle the development of expertise in young naturalists. I think it is more likely to encourage beginners along the way, rather than give up in bewilderment.

Unusually for a talk (and book) on natural history, Graeme discussed mental health: he has been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and argued that these traits, although they made his childhood difficult, have been beneficial to his work, and conversely that pan-species listing is beneficial to such neurodivergent people.

Graeme’s talk was lively and entertaining, with plenty of anecdotes and humour – he couldn’t resist introducing us to the sea slug genus Discodoris! My guess is that his profile will rise: he has already appeared on national TV in connection with his rediscovery of a species of spider on the Isle of Wight. It was a memorable afternoon, and his book is definitely worth having, even if you aren’t tempted to become a pan-species lister.