I have read through a lot of threads about the handling of hybrids and natural hybrids here in the forum, but I have not found this exact idea discussed in any of them (just something similar once, but not exactly the same).
My problem is that I am IDing Bromeliaceae and that many Bromeliaceae can only get IDed to species level when there is an inflorescence present (some can’t even get IDed to genus level without one). The result is that there is an ever growing amount of observations with a genus level ID.
Currently those natural hybrids where the parentage is not obvious (often one parent is obvious, but not the other) have to stay at genus level and vanish within the ever growing amount of genus level IDs. It’s also sad because often it might be possible to find out who the second parent is by doing some research, but due to them vanishing withing the ever growing number of genus-level observations they do not get the attention they deserve and the research just does not get done.
To avoid that I would like to propose to add a “natural-hybrids-complex” for each genus that is parent to all nothotaxa. This way it would be possible to avoid having natural hybrids vanish in an ever growing amount of species level IDs.
Would this solution work for your case if it were implemented? Suggestion: Allow hybrids that specify a genus only
From my understanding making a distinction between natural and artificial hybrids doesn’t have direct taxonomic significance but maybe I’m missing something.
I would have thought that these would have to stay at genus level, as putting them under one parent would be incorrect.
Apart from that, adding a hybrids box to the filter might serve your purposes. It would also be handy to be able to tag hybrids in genus level identifications. Syntactically this could be done in a similar manner to tagging observations as cultivated.
Oh sh**. I meant “genus level”, of course. Maybe I can edit this in my original post.
A filter like that would indeed help, although personally I feel that a filter is more difficult to find and less comfortable to use than just adding a complex.
May I add that I would love to see different opinions of as many people as possible in order to give inaturalist a “feeling” on what the best solution for this “issue” is. That’s why I opened this topic.
This thread is the one I had in mind when I wrote that I read something similar once. To me it sounds more complicated that the suggestion I made (also since my solution would not need any additional coding), but maybe I just didn’t understand all the details proposed in that thread. Personally I would not call the “hybrid-bin” just “Genus X” because a lot of users might not understand what that “X” stands for. Better call it “Genus hybrids” (or use some simliar, more self-explaining term). Important to me is that there is some possibility to distinguish between artificial / man-made hybrids and natural hybrids. I would prefer two separate “bins” for these (and name them suitably), but a single “bin” might work, too, by using the “not wild”-button for artificial / man-made hybrids within that bin.
I would recommend using observation fields, and maybe a project as well. You could have something like a “hybrid parent” field for cases where you know one but not the other, and that would allow you to easily filter for those.
I don’t think the complex rank works well for this given that that rank has a specific definition and rules which don’t seem consistent with this use case.
For the other genus-level hybrid proposal, the way I imagine it being implemented is allowing hybrids to be added at the normal hybrid rank but with names like “Rosa ×” (and common name “Hybrid Roses” or something like that) and allowing any unknown combination of rose hybrids to be included.
There are some complications that would need to be figured out though. For example the majority of rose hybrids contain genetics from a handful of wild European and Asian rose species which are all within subgenus Rosa. But there are also hybrids between that mix and Rosa persica of subgenus Hulthemia. So should there be a single catch-all rose hybrid below genus? Or two, with one below genus for subg. Rosa × R. persica and a separate one under subgenus Rosa for just the subg. Rosa combinations (which is where the majority of cultivated roses would fall)?
I’m not sure if feral populations of artificial hybrids happen much with bromeliads but hopefully either the parents could be identified or the population assigned a new hybrid scientific name (not sure what the rules are for doing that) if it has more complex parentage. Otherwise a project/observation field would be the best solution for noting these as a distinct situation.
This does also run into the problem of, who decides which groups get a hybrid complex added? Because surely not every single genus needs one, and that would be a ton of work anyway. Would people just nominate a genus somehow if they feel it needs one?
Acknowledging hybrids at all breaks monophyly, which is appropriate, because actual real populations break monophyly all the time. Every hybrid out there (and there are a lot more than we generally recognize) violates the assumptions of monophyly. We have known for centuries that the tree of life not only branches, but also reticulates, and the more we look the more evidence we have that this is common and important. Why pretend it doesn’t happen?
I don’t agree. The natural-hybrids-complex would be a polyphyletic wastebasket taxon. Also, sometimes hybrids are between species that belong to the same subgenus, not just genus. Tillandsia subg. Tillandsia has 14 hybrids (but should have 17, as 3 of its hybrids are erroneously placed straight in the genus), for example. In such a case, would you propose for the subgenus to have a natural-hybrids-complex? In that case, not every natural hybrid of the genus gets included in the genus’s natural-hybrids-complex. And it gets more complicated when you consider how there are in fact four ranks between genus and species (not including genus or species), namely subgenus, section, subsection and complex!
I would rather disagreements about which natural hybrid an organism is lead to the community taxon being the smallest non-wastebasket taxon that includes both hybrids, not a wastebasket taxon that only includes the natural hybrids.The inclusion of non-hybrids in the non-wastebasket taxon isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. If you aren’t sure which hybrid an organism is, it might not be a hybrid. If one is nonetheless sure that the organism must be a hybrid, putting it in a project for hybrids seems reasonable.