An ever-rarer species of scientist, taxonomists, can look at a strange species, examining its coloration, its inward and outward anatomy, perhaps its habitat and habits, and come uup with a species identification. These often msuem-based experts probably resist the Start-Trek notion that an amateur can come along, pluck a hair or a flake from an unknown species, have a vacuum sucker draw it into a handheld machine that displays the species and subspecies ID with an accuracy better than any taxonomist, at a snap of a finger.

But it has been discovered that a specific 650 base-pair strand of DNA known as the CYTOCHROME C OXIDASE SUBUNIT ONE is uniques to even finer divisions of natural classification than the coarse dsignation of species. Six Hundred and Fifty base pairs allows for essentially infinite library, if you do the math of how many variations of four bases are possible.

These so-called DNA barcodes are a fascinating tool for species identification for researchers in the field who might not be taxonomists as much as environmental activists or people answering to them.

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