I am hopeful @pisum or one of the other wildly capable people here might have worked out an easy way to figure out how many endemic species one has observed?
Please feel free to share if you have observed a bunch, because as far as I can tell, I have only observed one.
(It feels like a few other species I have observed might be endemic - ish but maybe just aren’t labelled as such? Unsure. But I noticed the small E today, same green as N which is also a little confusing, and so wondered if perhaps there are others.)
for any given country, probably less than 1% of all its (known) endemic species won’t have been explicitly marked as such on iNat (it’s something that has to be done manually by someone on an individual basis). So any search would not be reflective of what you’ve actually seen, which would almost certainly be more than just that one
I have no association with this app and am not trying to sell anything.
That said - the iNaturalist Achievement app will show you the number of endemics you have seen. If you click on that ‘badge’ it will actually show you which species are being counted in this category. I don’t know how they pull data, but it is interesting to check on.
I use the https://glauberramos.github.io/inat/achievements tool. But at the moment I have three, and I’m reasonably sure two more of my species are endemic to Korea and Borneo so I count it as 5. I guess they just aren’t marked as such, or their range extends a little outside the political national border…
I have not been able to find the answer to this question: can ssp be considered endemics? I ask because I have seen a number of ssp that end in “yucateca/o/us” (etc) so I wondered if that meant they were endemic to the peninsula. Or can something only be endemic at the species level?
yes; endemism can occur at any taxonomic rank, including subspecies, and including higher ranks above species (well, maybe not Kingdom etc., but most ranks)
Species epithets are not reliable indications of endemicity or even nativeness. For example Erigeron sumatrensis is probably South American (POWO says Yucatan to Uruguay), though it is naturalised across swathes of the Old World. Scilla peruviana has nothing to do with Peru (or Cuba, even though Cuban lily is a vernacular name); it’s believed to reference a ship call the Peru. Malva brasiliensis represents introductions of Malva multiflora in Brasil.
Even if a species was thought to be endemic to an area when named, it might subsequently have been found to be more widely distributed.
(IPNI records no epithets with the root yucatec - botanical names use yucatan as the root, with -a, -um, -ense, -ensis. Zoology has -icus.)
If you were referring to vernacular names, the same hazards apply. The British English names for a variety of introduced plants refer to where they were first established in Britain, and not to where they are native. For example the aforementioned Erigeron sumatrensis goes by Guernsey fleabane in Britain.
Also, at least on iNat, endemics can occur at various levels of geography. Endemic to a continent, a country, a state/province, or a mountain range. It’s not a very precise term.
If you would not mind, can you please put this a little more simply? Do you mean zoology only uses -icus? Because I have seen so many other variations, among animals like the -anica above and another example.
I think I understand you to mean there are no plants for which the species or ssp end in yucat-anything but I still see them, for example.
Do you mean Yucat- is less favored? Or do you mean place based names are less favored?
edit to add: Sorry, obviously I am extremely confused. I ought to wait until you clarify first, I think.
Because my first example (in this post) has the “yucat–” in the ssp location and the examples here have it in the species location, so at this point I feel twirled around by what epithets are, I think, and why IPNI might have no examples.
second edit: OK, this is a language thing. I just typed yucatec because my brain went Spanish. Sorry. So there are epithets under IPNI but they begin with Yucata (not e),
Ok, that’s simple enough. But what about ssp? I have a Pongo pygmaeusssp. morio which isn’t labelled endemic, but Pongo mygmaeus is - and the subspecies doesn’t appear in the Borneo section.
Epithets for plant species relating to an geographical region commonly combine a geographical noun with the suffix -ense/-ensis, i.e. in this case yucatanense, yucatanensis. There are a few yucatana and yucantanum, 1 yucatanus, 1 yucatanica (no yucatanicum or yucatanicus) and 1 yucatanaea. There might be a few more - IPNI’s coverage of infraspecific taxa isn’t complete. Botany also used to use the suffices -ana/-anum/-anus, but in newer species descriptions they are used with the names of people, more or less to the exclusion of name of places.
You wrote yucateca/o/us. yucatec is a Spanish root, not a Latin one, and has not been used by botanists in creation of epithets.
There isn’t as far as a I know a zoological equivalent to IPNI. (Botanists have a smaller task as there’s only around 500,000 species of plants, compared to perhaps 10 million species of animals.) I meant to indicate that zoology uses -icus in addition to the suffices used by botanists.
Botany does use -ica/-icum/-icus, as well as -ensis/-ense. The paucity of the former forms in respect to Yucatan may be just a matter of chance. Alternatively, -ensis/-ense is used when there is no traditional Latin adjective based on the place name. So italic-a/um/-us, but brasili-ensis/-ense. I have an impression that zoology leans more to the -ica/-icum/-icus side.
Roughly
-ica/-icum/-icus: pertaining to
-ana/-anum/-anus: belonging to
-ensis/-ense: originating from
But all this is just about a parenthetical aside resulting from my confusion over your use of the Spanish root. The rest of the post was the important bit - epithets are not a reliable guide to endemicity.
This I think I understand, especially since what has triggered this all was the mention of a species here on the forum that I had not heard of before that at least by iNat observation incidence mapping would seem not to be actually observed here. I can neither recall what exactly it was (nor find where it was mentioned, likely because it was by English common name), but best I recall someone mentioned something in SE Texas with “yucat-something” as the species, and from there my mind rolled forward, as it is wont to do. (Whee!)
Thank you for bearing with me. :)
edit to add: I think whatever it was did occur into NL also.
Most of the time when a location is used in the species or subspecies epithet, that is simply where the type specimen was collected. It’s not necessarily (and often is not) an indicator that the form is endemic to that location or area. And sometimes it’s incorrect (as noted above). The White-winged Dove, Zenaida asiatica, doesn’t occur in Asia.
Err, why was it named this, do you know? Was it an example of one collected there?
Do “they” (Powers That Be) ever correct these startlingly incorrect names based on geography? Is this ever why revisions, I mean? (I have seen the effects of taxonomic revisions on iNat only.)