Not really, with Emys another species was discovered, for now Pica pica and Pica hudsonia are definitely live on different contients and magpies being not the best flyers without help of ships they can really move much, maybe on Alaska, but there ppl are got used to everything foreign and more careful about ids.
I made the example of Emys trinacriae since I have been told the following âa poorly motile animal population even if genetically âequalâ to another totally isolated from the first, is considered a different species.â This because being a swamp turtle in no way can mix to the ones in North Africa, Spain and Greece. This should be covered by the other thread, anyway.
I had problems with connection, forgot that itâs the turtle name, well, yes, but theyâre clearly different species base on genetics.
Do those turtles really have no genetic differences? Ah, wiki says different mitochondrial DNA.
Re: Yellow-faced Bumblebees. I talked today to a couple of bee experts. They said the look-alikes for Bombus vosnesenskii are not closely related to it, so there isnât and wonât be a generally accepted complex name for this group. Sigh.
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so sad there is no apparent way to spread this knowledge and use it to make iNat IDs more solid. It usually gets lost in single obs comments or here in the forum. Cannot understand why it is not given some priority given the amount of time taken to debate IDs and the impact on ID accuracy - also considering the push to a stable increase in number of obs collected by the system.
Disappointing. I share your frustration with situations like that where identifying at genus (or even subgenus) level doesnât really seem an adequate solution because we can exclude most species in the genus.
Iâm not a bumblebee expert (or even any good at identifying them), however I know that in the UK there are four species which are difficult/impossible to tell apart visually (for the workers at least). There is Buff-tailed Bumble Bee (Bombus terrestris) plus the White-tailed (Bombus lucorum) complex which includes Bombus lucorum, the Cryptic bumblebee (Bombus cryptarum) and the Northern white-tailed bumblebee (Bombus magnus). This complex is recognised but I donât think itâs monophyletic based on the this phylogenetic tree so I donât think it can be added to iNaturalist.
There are over 5000 observations of B. terrestris, 1500 of B. lucorum, 141 B. cryptarum & 14 B. magnus. Iâm guessing some are incorrectly identified and some are identified at genus/subgenus level when they are clearly one of these 4 species.
Personally I like the idea proposed by silversea_starsong:
I know we can just enter âsubgenus bombusâ with a comment explaining that it could be any of 3 species but doing it this way could allow searches etc.
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The observation and discussion referred to are here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37605019
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To me this is just another example of the unresolved question about how much âfaithâ should be put into a users text comments about an observation.
I dont think either user is wrong here (to be very clear I am colour blind so I am not physically capable of judging relative differences in head feather colours etc - so will not comedown on either side of that argument).
The identifier says the photo does not show the keys needed for a subspecies ID. The observer says (at least that is my reading of it) - I saw it, I know the keys, the photo may not show the tail tips, but they were there.
There does not seem to be any means to resolve this without leading to these kinds of arguments. Iâm not sure what the need to identify an expected subspecies in a region is, but the reality is users are going to do it.
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As an identifier, my approach would be to take the observer at their word, but only leave a (non-disagreeing) ID to the level I am confident or, more likely, just not leave any ID at all.
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"donât see the point of people who go through and change all my royal ferns to the North American subspecies based on the fact that I am in North America when thereâs no other visible difference in photos⌠whatâs the point? "
One reason to ID to subspecies by range is when there is a split of a species into 2 or more species it is often along subspecies lines. When automatic taxon swaps are then performed on iNat, itâs more likely that the affected observations will end up having the correct ânewâ ID.
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Also it helps to build a subspecies page map, it really bothers me when I see 20 obs for nominate subspecies. iNat can do the xeno-canto work.
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Thatâs why Iâm the âtopâ identifier for Red-tailed Hawks in Alaska and Canada, because I want to weed out the Harlanâs before theyâre split.
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While I understand what you are getting at here, this is not really how taxa swaps work technically on the site. For a taxa swap to âintelligentlyâ assign records to a specific new taxa in the swap based on geography requires an atlas to be created for that new taxa that defines its range. Any curator adding such an atlas should ideally being using a more robust source of information other than iNat observations to define that range, for instance the publication which did the swap, the external reference such as Clements etc the site follows for that group etc.
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yeah as cmcheatle said if location is truly the only criteria a taxon split can easily be managed via atlases.
I personally donât really want all my royal ferns identified to subspecies, if others want to add them to my observations, I donât care too much, but i wish i could turn off notifications for it. A minor complaint, I suppose, and it applies to data outside of iNat too.
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Given that the AOS vote against the Harlanâs split was unanimous (9-0) against it, I donât think that one will be happening anytime soon ;)
That was the day I lost all faith in the AOSâŚ
Sorry to disagree with you (and I generally agree), but one of the tenets of iNat is to assume people mean no harm. I donât think this needs to get into a confrontational situation.
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As an example, it is impossible (in North America) to distinguish between two species of moths in the genus Feltia without looking at antennal setae. Occasionally, a photo is able to show that, and an ID can be made. Otherwise, the safest approach is to go to Genus level. Explanations help a lot, too.
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It was more about what OP mean, as I also know quite a lot of examples.)
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