WILDLIFE JOURNALCitizen Scientists are regarded by Government Scientists as enemies of the State.

What actually happens when a citizen scientist makes a discovery - it gets very dirty!

The dream of every citizen scientist is to assist scientific discovery. Even better still is when a citizen scientist actually makes a discovery.
But what happens after this is not a very pretty sight.
In fact a citizen scientist who makes a major discovery and publishes it, will be declared an enemy of the State by disgruntled government scientists.
This is especially the case in Australia.
And here is why.
Australia has for the past 50 years had socialist wildlife conservation and science.
That is, the government owns and controls it all.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s State and Federal Governments outlawed all private ownership of wildlife. That is, no one could keep native birds, reptiles, frogs or mammals as pets.
The general public were even banned from studying wildlife in the wild!
This was the serious crime of interfering with wildlife.
Yes, that included merely looking at it from a distance.
The desired outcome of these draconian rules was for the government-owned zoos to have an effective monopoly on the wildlife sanctuary business.
It also meant that government employed scientists had complete control of the wildlife space in terms of access to animals and the ability to make discoveries about them.
For those few in control of the government-owned zoos and the government-owned state Museums, this was a socialist utopia.
Big wages, no concerns about performance and outcomes and for the few intent on making a difference, whether it be breeding rare animals or making a genuine scientific discovery, there was absolutely no competition from anyone outside or in the private sector.
After all, anyone outside of the public service who had live wildlife was shut down at gunpoint and/or jailed. Anyone outside of the government departments of wildlife and associated entities (read State Zoos and Museums) was effectively blocked of access to specimens, literature and the like, so there was no way known that anyone outside of government could ever be involved in citizen science.
But in 1993, two words caused this cozy set-up of socialist wildlife and socialist science to come crumbling down.
Raymond Hoser.
Hoser published the best-selling book Smuggled-The Underground Trade in Australias Wildlife.
It laid bare all the scams and rackets in the socialist wildlife conservation business.
Government zoos monopolizing and killing species for their own commercial self-interests, wildlife officers smuggling out of Australia the very animals they were meant to be protecting and so it went on.
The book was banned. A courageous Murdoch Press journalist, Fia Cumming took on the establishment and got the ban lifted.
She lost her job as a result.
But the ultimate outcome was a rewrite in wildlife laws across Australia that for the first time in decades gave the general public access to a lot of their wildlife. Now it hasn’t been all good things since the 1990s.
Government-owned zoos and their kin have been trying to outlaw everyone else in the wildlife space ever since.
They have successfully monopolized dozens of endangered and supposedly endangered species as a great money grabbing scam.
Nothing it better for getting cash handouts from the government and well-meaning members of the public than being the only place on earth in possession of a rare and endangered animal that needs to be bred in captivity to survive.
Think Green and Golden Bell Frogs, Corroboree Frogs, Leadbeaters Possums, Helmeted Honeyeaters and you see a trend coming up.
Only the government-owned zoos have them and so it is physically impossible for any citizen scientist to get in on their gig (and the cash these animals bring the zoos businesses).
For their part the government zoos (think Melbourne, Victoria and Taronga, Sydney) make a point of not breeding their animals (they need to keep them rare) and under absolutely no circumstances do the zoos or the State Wildlife Departments ever let anyone else have access to the animals … not even to photograph them.
And so the cash grants roll in.
Oh and if you need to use a photo of a Leadbeaters Possum for any reason, pay up the cash!
It worked well for a few decades before the Tasmanian Tigers died in the zoos from old age and now they have simply moved on to the next (victim), think Lowlands Leadbeaters Possum, a species on a one-way ticket to extinction, care of Zoos Victoria.
But citizen scientists blocked from one line of research invariably find another to occupy them and so it is with areas of science that does not involve breeding endangered species.
The area of citizen science that has really caused grief to the government (non-citizen scientists) in recent years has been the area of taxonomy, or the classification and naming of new species.
For most of the last century, it had been thought that most species of large land-dwelling animal (think mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian) around the world had been named by the curators at the major museums in the 1800s.
After all, not much was being discovered and most species had been named several times.
So if and when something new turned up, chances were one of the mass namers of the 1800s had already put their moniker on it and stashed the specimen in a jar in a vault in a European Museum.
But in the years following year 2000, things changed almost overnight.
Firstly there was this new technology in the form of molecular biology.
For the first time ever, DNA could settle arguments about taxonomy that could never be solved previously.
Suddenly mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences could be used to separate and identify species previously not known and it turned out that biodiversity was hugely under-estimated.
And so by about 2009 a new gold rush of naming new species commenced.
But molecular methods were not the only part of this revolution.
The cost went from incredibly costly in year 2000 to remarkably cheap in the post 2010 period.
On top of that, you did not need to be employed at a major government facility to have access to the technology.
You could simply post a sample to Taiwan and have your sequence data emailed back within days.
Citizen scientists could now engage in the science of discovering and naming new species.
Now there were other barriers to citizen scientists which the government scientists had for years been able to employ in order to stop citizen scientists from ever being able to discover anything.
Museum collections, while theoretically accessible to all, were in a practical sense, not really accessible.
Their vastness made it difficult for outsiders to have the time and ability to locate relevant specimens to study or name, making citizen scientists discoveries very rare indeed.
Also, if and when a citizen scientist went to a museum and actually discovered anything, the curator would be aware of the fact and rush to publish anything of note in their own in house publications (e.g. Records of the Australian Museum, Records of Museum Victoria, etc).
The internet age changed all this.
Museum collections globally were digitized and databased, meaning a citizen scientist could do a sweep of millions of specimens at the click of a mouse.
All the major biological and taxonomy works from the 1700s to the present date have been digitised and placed online, so a citizen scientist can now, for the first time in history do a sweep of the literature to see if any particular vertebrate has been named in the past in any obscure publication.
And then of course there has been the nasty issue of publication.
Until the 1980’s government scientists literally controlled the printing presses and so there is no way known that a citizen scientist could even afford to publish something like a scientific description of a new species, except in a few carefully controlled publications and then there were the censorship issues involved (see below). Australia was the first place in the world where a pair of citizen scientists did not just make one major discovery that put a few government scientists off side, but where two citizen scientists working together made hundreds of major discoveries in one go, and turned the science of naming species into a war zone.
In 1984 and 1985, Richard Wells and Ross Wellington published a series of major works in a journal they published themselves naming hundreds of new species and genera of Australian reptile and frog.
Government scientists saw their God-given right to name those species snatched out of their grip and so were understandably upset.
Now while scientists have a reputation for being boring farts that stick to the facts, as well as doing the right and honourable thing, when it came to Wells and Wellington, this was definitely not the case.
The response against the pair was literally more venomous than the snakes Wells and Wellington had named.
Several so-called scientists labelled them terrorists and Wells and Wellingtons works, which on the whole were perfectly fine and named valid and previously unnamed species were subjected to the most vicious attacks imaginable.
In short, two exceptional citizen scientists were being pilloried for daring to actually make discoveries that they then published.
So incensed were the taxpayer funded government scientists at losing their right to name over 100 Australian species to the citizen scientists Wells and Wellington, that a cohort of them, led by one Richard Shine (then at Sydney University) hatched a plan to have all the works of Wells and Wellington formally erased from the scientific record so as to allow his cohort to make the discoveries again and to be credited with them.
A petition to the governing body of scientific names known as the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) was launched in 1987.
Signed on were pretty much all the relevant government employed scientists in Australia. There were hundreds against Wells and Wellington.
Only one government employed scientist in Australia sided with the citizen scientists Wells and Wellington.
His name was Dr. Allen Greer, the worlds foremost expert on Australian lizards and at the time curator of reptiles at the Australian Museum in Sydney. He petitioned the ICZN in favour of Wells and Wellington and was in turn pilloried as a result.
What happened to Greer at the Australian Museum as a result of his standout position in favour of the citizen scientists has never been made known.
As employees of the NSW Public Service and the Australian Museum, Greer has had to sign various confidentiality deeds in order to keep his Superannuation.
But more recently Greer published that he quit the Museum.
He said:
By 2007, I had become so disillusioned with the Museums attitude to science that I resigned.
As far as Wells and Wellington and their discoveries was concerned, the ICZN ruled nearly unanimously in favour of Wells and Wellington in 1991.
Their works remained on the public record and the two men are easily the most cited authors in Australian herpetology.
You cannot find a contemporary book on Australian reptiles that does not have the names of Wells and Wellington all though it.
The discoveries of these two citizen scientists exceeded all those of the government scientists combined by orders of magnitude and this in spite of the billions of taxpayer’s dollars spent on the government scientists!
But the campaign against the citizen scientists, Wells and Wellington did succeed.
Both men were effectively destroyed by the campaign against them.
Both lost everything, including their jobs, their homes and their marriages.
The two men while remaining active in herpetology beyond the 1980s, have never again embarked on the excellent acts of citizen science that defined herpetology in Australia.
However, anyone who has studied physics knows that nature does not like a vacuum and so it is with science.
In terms of Citizen Science, and discovering new species, the things I mentioned above as new, such as the internet, molecular biology, databasing of literature and museum collections is all relatively new and in terms of being efficient and all pervasive has really been a big thing in the post year 2000 period.
Thousands of unnamed species have been identified and named in recent years and again the biggest single factor that has underpinned the urgency of the task has been citizen science.
Actually, it can be put down to two words … Raymond Hoser.
Riding the crest of the wave, Raymond Hoser commenced naming species in 1998 and on a larger scale in the post year 2000 period.
For those who don’t know, Raymond Hoser is the Snake Man and is based in Australia and pretty much been there all his life except when on trips elsewhere.
So it made sense that most of what he named was in Australia. As a python expert he also named some Asian forms, but none of this was seen as too unusual in that Hoser had been publishing extensively on these things since the early 1980s.
In 2009, Hoser shocked the government scientists when he published a pair of papers in a journal he created himself and published papers that reclassified the Rattlesnakes (North / Central America) and true Cobras (Africa) naming huge swathes of species.
Hoser created his own journal after a series of incidents involving theft of his works by others.
In one case a government zoo employee stole a Hoser paper being peer reviewed and rushed out an identical paper in the same journal to precede the Hoser one. Hoser was then told by the editor to rewrite his paper to cite the zoo employee's work as a priority publication, effectively making the paper a mee too paper, rather than an original discovery.
By controlling his own journal (The Australasian Journal of Herpetology), Hoser made sure that no one would steal his Rattlesnake and Cobra works before he published them. In 2012, Hoser was placed under house arrest by the Victorian Wildlife department in retaliation for his wildlife display business being too successful.
Their own dysfunctional Zoos Victoria business wanted to shut down the Hoser business so that schools would again send their kids to their zoo instead of Hoser and his staff of ten bringing reptiles to them.
Hoser appealed the closure through the states courts and eventually won the court cases and was sent broke with the legal bills that were never repaid in breach of court order, but that it not what this account is about.
As a citizen scientist and literally under house arrest for months on end, Hoser set to work on a series of major papers reclassifying the world’s snakes.
Hundreds were named and this vast amount of Citizen science was too much for a number of government scientists to bear.
It was back to the ICZN again and this time, by the time the ICZN ruled on a case to erase the Hoser names there were about two thousand scientific names in play.
Once again the government scientists lost the case and the ICZN refused to squash the Hoser names.
Now I use the term scientists loosely when describing the government scientists because they really are not.
Upon losing at the ICZN the government scientists widened their war against Citizen scientists and now have a mantra whereby any discoveries made by citizen scientists will be overwritten by themselves.
Then they will only cite their own works.
These so-called scientists will also suppress any use of works or names discovered by citizen scientists.
This has all been formalised by government scientists here in Australia.
An overpaid pseudo scientist named Kevin Thiele at the Federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, has now commenced a campaign to ELIMINATE all Citizen scientists and has declared them enemies of the state.
He even runs blogs, websites and publishes papers in support of his position.
In this endeavour Kevin Thiele has been strongly supported by other government scientists including for example Jodi Rowley a would-be frog expert at the Australian Museum.
Upset at the lack of frogs left to discover and name in Australia, Rowley has set about renaming those that have been discovered and formally named by citizen scientists (think Wells, Wellington and Hoser). She has made it a thing to rename quite a few in recent years.
And every time Rowley steals the works of Hoser, cuts and pastes his species diagnoses into her own papers and passes them off as original research, she makes a point of refusing to even cite the earlier works (in breach of Copyright laws and the ICZN Code).
Then of course she SPAMS the media with her false claims of having discovered yet another new species of frog. These false claims are all blindly republished by the media who never bother to fact check anything that comes through with Australian Museum at the top.
Disgustingly she even claims to have discovered the species with the aid of citizen scientists, which would only be true to the extent that she has stolen the works of citizen scientists, rather than actually been assisted by them.
There are others in the cohort of government scientists who are at war with the citizen scientists and see them as the enemy of themselves (and the State). Besides Ken Thiele, Rick Shine and Jodi Rowley are the likes of Adam Britton.
His most recent claim to fame was pleading guilty to a Northern Territory Court of multiple counts of stealing peoples pet dogs, having anal sex with them and posting videos of the same online. He also pled guilty to peddling kiddie porn.
Before that he was on a good gig getting government hand outs to fly around in a helicopter pretending to be doing research on crocodiles.
Britton was not charged because he was having sex with peoples dogs.
He had been doing that for years and was a police protected criminal.
But rather because he fell out with another more well connected government scientist and bitter rival for crocodile grants.
So Britton was then grabbed and charged for the easiest crimes he had been getting away with for years.
Other government scientist campaigners against Citizen scientists included Van Wallach, Don Broadley and Bill Branch, best known for procuring small black boys in Zimbabwe for anal sex as part of a cohort known as the Wolfgang Wuster gang.
So yes, you will hear government departments banging on in media releases about how great citizen science is and how they want to encourage it.
But don’t be fooled, in Australia, citizen scientists have been the enemy for decades and in the real world, government scientists are at war with any citizen scientist who actually makes a difference and discovers anything!
And if you see yourself as a citizen scientist and you do discover something and you make it known by way of publication somewhere, then expect to be raided, arrested, charged, unemployed and life as you knew it is likely to end very quickly.

Wolfgang Wuster, taxonomic vandalism, scientifuc fraud, criminal history.

Other alleged "scientists" and their taxonomic vandalism (acts of faking discoveries).

Wulf Schleip.

Jane Melville.

Grant Webster.

James Nankivell.

Taxonomic vandalism on steriods - download from here a near complete list of dozens of illegally coined names by the Wolfgang Wuster gang of thieves dated 2019 and the correct senior synonym ICZN names for each species, genus or family.

Raymond Hoser is the Snakeman. Details of his work here.

14 June 2024 - Snake man Raymond Hoser has now discovered and named over 1,300 species and subspecies including over 1,100 reptiles. Get the full list of his species/genus/family discoveries to date (14 June 2024) here ...

15 May 2018 - Conservation of species: Why discovering and naming them is the critically important first step ...

28 April 2018 - Spectacular new species of large spiky lizard discovered in the Mount Isa area. ...

20 April 2018 - "Dry bite" lie by unsafe law-breaking imitators of the Snakeman Raymond Hoser needs to be junked before it claims more innocent victims. ...

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Taxonomic vandalism Anstisia is a junior synonym of Wellingtondella
Anstisia rosea = Wellingtondella rosea
Anstisia alba = Wellingtondella alba
Anstisia lutea = Wellingtondella lutea
Anstisia vitellina = Wellingtondella vitellina

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