The Big Fight Over 403 Very Small Wasps

the bottle held a thin broth, light brown, with some uncertain chunks of dark matter bobbing on top—a soup, maybe, but one that you’d never want to eat. The process “hasn’t changed an awful lot” in the past 200 years, the British hymenopterist Gavin Broad told me—except that nowadays “we’ve got nicer pictures.” I first encountered Sharkey’s name months before I called him up and asked if we could look at bugs together. And then there was the snark among the entomologists in my Twitter feed, some of whom called the work irresponsible or embarrassing or just wrote “Wooooooof.” “Sharkey et al.” is shorthand for a paper that came out in the journal ZooKeys in 2021, along with a series of subsequent publications that used similar methods. “But provoke it did.” The technique that Sharkey and his coauthors used, called DNA barcoding, is a way of quickly sorting and differentiating species. Zhang—who is actually Sharkey’s academic “grandson,” having studied under one of Sharkey’s former students—was so frustrated that ZooKeys continued to publish papers from Sharkey et al.