Are There Really Common Names for Subspecies?

I notice more and more plant subspecies on iNat that have common names. Do people in real life (offline) really refer to subspecies by common names other than the common name for the species? It seems like the people likely to recognize that a plant is a subspecies would probably refer to it by its scientific name, so that no common name would actually exist for it. I’m wondering if some of these common names are just being made up for iNaturalist.

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I don’t know anything about plants, but some birds definitely have in-use common names for subspecies.

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Thank you. Yes, I was really referring to plants only.

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Vascan has a lot of common names for plant subspecies, but not all. In some cases a species could be demoted to a subspecies and still keep the common name it had when it was a species.

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Sometimes yes and sometimes no! Quite a few plants that would been seen as distinct by an average person are formally recognized as being “infrataxa” within the same species. The first one that comes to mind is Prunus persica var. persica (Peach) vs. Prunus persica var. nucipersica (Nectarine). Or how about Brassica oleracea, which encompasses Cabbage, Broccoli, Kale, Collards, Brussels Sprouts, Cauliflower, Kohlrabi and other variants?

It’s not just cultivated plants, though. Plenty of plants that were well known enough to get common names turned out to be sister infrataxa under a common species.

In other cases, subspecies were only recently distinguished by botanists and your assumption that the only people who would know or care about the difference would use the scientific name is spot on. However, I’ve seen peer-reviewed papers describing new taxa that provide a suggested common name. And the horticultural trade seems much to prefer using common names to scientific names.

Many field guides do use common names alongside the scientific names, and many people are more comfortable with them, so where they’re actually attested I think it’s fair that we should include them.

One challenge comes with common names for nominate subspecies, e.g. Plantus floribundus ssp. floribundus. iNat prefers that the same common name isn’t just reused in this instance:

Please do not add common names for infraspecies that are identical to the common name of the parent species, e.g. if the species is Cola coke and it has the subspecies Cola coke ssp. classic and Cola coke ssp. zero , don’t add the common name “Coke” for the subspecies. That will just confuse people who are trying to add an ID for the species Cola coke and make it harder for people who actually want to choose the subspecies. Instead, try to choose unique common names like “Coke Classic” and “Coke Zero.”

And yet pretty often the more unusual subspecies have their own variants of the parent common name and the most frequently encountered variant just goes by the species’ common name. One consequence is that an iNat user searching by common name will see all the options except the nominate subspecies, which is the one they’re actually most likely to have seen. I chose to add the common name “Typical Blue Dicks” for Dipterostemon capitatus ssp. capitatus, as it seems like an accurate way to describe this subspecies without inventing a new name. Without it, about 85% of people who upload Blue Dicks observations to iNat would see plants that we don’t list a common name for.

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I guess I don’t really understand what a common name is. I thought it was the name local non-scientific people already used for a plant. It didn’t occur to me that a name first mentioned in a peer-reviewed paper could be considered a common name. In other words, I thought scientific names were names given by scientists and common names were the names that average people have actually been using all along, and that they wouldn’t change for any of the varieties or subspecies because average people would keep using the same common name for all of them.

Lately I’ve been going through observations for the CNC and it just occurred to me that it must be confusing to people who correctly choose the common name they are used to, but an identifier moves it to a subspecies and a different common name appears now. I was hoping that they wouldn’t think they were wrong about the species now just because it’s a subspecies or variety with a different common name.

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Yes and no, it’s dependent. Often times the subspecies with names were former species reduced to subspecies levels.

Common names on subtaxa are not particularly maintained or formally addressed, and in a worse state than species common names. I treat iNat as a resource to work on providing and managing them. It’s the first global database where common names have had to conflict or come together, so iNat is a chance to resolve many of these instances. It’s the main instance where I actively ignore the guideline on not altering or making common names – when you have 3 subtaxa all called the same name, that can have very justifiably unique ones, there is no reason not to fill in the gaps.

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Some do, some don’t. I wish iNaturalist wouldn’t strain so hard to give “common” names to all the subspecies in cases where virtually nobody does that. However, sometimes such names are useful.

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Usually your idea about common names would be correct, but increasingly, as we differentiate species out, there are specific subspecies (and even species) that don’t have common names.

Even among scientists common names can be useful as they’re often faster, easier to say and remember, and, as long as everyone knows what you’re talking about, perfectly clear.

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I have no idea when it comes to plants, but a good example that comes to my mind is a turtle, Trachemys scripta. Yellow-bellied slider = Trachemys scripta scripta, Red-eared slider = Trachemys scripta elegans. Since they are common in pet trade and have visible differences in appearance, most of people simply don’t realize they’re the same species.

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I see common names for subspecies being useful on iNat since the user base is a mix of scientific experts and beginner naturalists who don’t necessarily have an understanding of evolutionary classification. I like to refine IDs to subspecies where I can because it can give us useful information about biogeography, habitats, etc. But this sometimes causes confusion for non-experts when I identify their “Parlin’s pussytoes” as Antennaria parlinii ssp. fallax. It’s much easier for some users to understand that I’m refining their “Parlin’s pussytoes” to “downy Parlin’s pussytoes”.

Summary - some subspecies have common names, others (probably most) don’t. But there’s definitely justification for assigning common names to subspecies, at least on iNat.

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A common name - should be one that is accepted locally and already in common usage.

I wonder what proportion of ‘common’ names on iNat have been invented to fill gaps?

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Only add common names from standard issued list from authoritiets otherwise the confusion will be huge and no benefit if every website has its own common name.

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I prefer not to add extra common names myself.

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I agree that the long scientific subspecies name could be confusing, too. It seems to me that there was an alternative, though, and that would have been to just keep using the species common name for both the species and the various subspecies and varieties.

I had not understood previously that using the same common name for a species and a subspecies had been rejected officially by iNat, so now I know. Thank you for pointing that out.

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In plants, common names for subspecies are extremely, well…common. Part of the reason is that plants just have so many gosh-darn common names. Another is that gardeners and the like tend to care about what a plant looks like rather than its taxonomy, so every single variation of a plant has its own common name (or 10).

I haven’t seen many, if any examples of common names for subspecies being esoteric. When I come across species (or subspecies) that have no common names in the real world, they don’t seem to be assigned common names on iNat either. The only time that common names seem esoteric to me is when iNat users attempt to use different common names for similar species that, in the real world, are often all called the same thing. I’ve never seen this with subspecies, though, only full species.

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There was a thread in the iNaturalist Google Group with a comment from someone working on a North American moth guide who mentioned making up a number of common names for species so that they could be used in the guide. I’ve often wondered how many common names were added to iNaturalist using that guide as a resource despite their ‘commonness’ being artificial.

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Don’t know about English, but in Russian yes, there’re names in use for plant subspecies.

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@rupertclayton, please could you give some examples for this claim: “Plenty of plants that were well known enough to get common names turned out to be sister infrataxa under a common species.” The other examples you gave were all cultivated varieties and from my experience real vernacular names were only given to taxa that were either useful (for anything from medicinal use, culinary use for men and animals, timber etc.), obnoxious (“weeds”) or somehow very conspicuous. “Book names” can of course be coined for any taxon below the rank of species if you take the trouble, but I have my doubts if common people took the trouble for some plant unless it really did interest them.

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If two species become subspecies of a new species the subspecies have a common name and the new species not (yet) in Dutch.
Tragopogon_pratensis has no common name, the subspecies have.

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