Description of need: Helps one to understand more quickly the type species of a genus. The species of a genus that is regarded as the best example of the generic characters of the genusm. This will help novices easily distinguish species of similar genera.
Feature request details:
I have come up with two ways, please come together to discuss more good ideas.
I know this is a huge amount of work, but as the number of volunteers increases and the platform is improved, I believe we can take it slow and it will be completed one day.
This is not something I am interested in spending volunteer curatorial time on.
Also, this is not necessarily what taxonomists mean by type species. Type species are used to determine what happens to genus names (and species names within the genus) when there are taxonomic changes. I don’t think that info is super helpful for iNat.
“Type species” haven’t been intended as “most typical” of a genus for over a century; their function nowadays is strictly as fixed points for nomenclature. I don’t think this is worthwhile.
I agree with the notion that this is not practically useful. I would certainly love this as a matter of convenience for me as a taxonomist! but really all I have to do is go search a nomenclature database for that information – and iNaturalist is not such a database.
That said, my understanding of what a type species is is what @sedgequeen said above, and I’d be concerned that labeling that would be yet another source of convenient misidentifications.
Except that is not necessarily the case, at least in plants. The type species is often just the earliest described species in the genus. And while ideally the type specimen for a taxon would be chosen to have “typical” features, that’s not guaranteed in any way, especially with species described a long time ago from fragmentary material.
In my view, this info would be moderately interesting, but of less value than showing the authority for each taxon (also a big change in terms of data collection, maintenance and presentation).
ETA: Somehow, I overlooked that plenty of people had already made similar points.
My English is not good, sorry for the time trouble above. Don’t dwell on the Description of need that I thought of. I think there should be more aspects that I can’t think of, and we need everyone to brainstorm. It’s true that not everyone will like this idea. Now I have another idea, such as adding [Type species] to the common name option. In this way, the website does not need to change the code. Just like adding a common name, it is not necessary to add it to all species. People voluntarily add [Type species] to the common name option if they want it to be displayed. In this case, the website will display [Type species]-common name-species name/[Type species]-species name. If it succeeds, I think it will be fantastic.
I do appreciate your interest in trying to improve iNaturalist, but I think there are two major problems with your proposal.
It serves no useful purpose. As several people have pointed out, the type species for a genus really only has significance as a way to fix that naming to a particular taxon and type specimen. It does not in any way indicate “the species of a genus that is regarded as the best example of the generic characters of the genus”. That concept was discarded more than 100 years ago. Someone working on revising the taxonomy of a genus might need to know the type species, but iNaturalist is not the place they’re going to use to find that info.
Your revised proposal to add the text “[Type species]” as an additional name is both incorrect (that’s not a name for the organism) and potentially very disruptive (lots of things in iNat are based on indexing and displaying names; this would break several of them).
I would be interested to know some situations where that you think your proposal would be helpful. Maybe there are ways to address your challenges with existing functionality. In simple terms, what are you doing that prompted you to think it would be helpful to see the type species for a genus?
I don’t believe that’s been true for a long time, at least in botany. It seems to have been one of the provisions of the “American Code”, but see https://www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/pages/main/art_10.html and the phrase “mechanical method of type selection”.
This was during the period of American-European nomenclatural schism. A fairly lucid exposition of the “type concept” by (the American) Hitchcock is given here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2434993?seq=1
I think what happened post-schism is that the use of types, as explained by Hitchcock, was accepted, but the “mechanical” designations of types which the Americans had made during the schism were felt to yield undesirable results in some cases, so provision was made in the Code to allow them to be overturned in the future without a great deal of overhead.
Type specimens/taxa are hardly the best/most typical representation of the taxon. The great white pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus) is the type species of Pelecaniformes, but the most typical pelecaniforms are herons (Ardeidae).
And humans are hardly the most typical members of Hominoidea, gibbons are. Nor are rollers the most typical members of Coraciiformes (kingfishers are), or nightjars the most typical members of Caprimulgiformes, given the broad definition of Caprimulgiformes (hummingbirds are). And given the splitter taxonomy for Strisores, swifts are not the most typical members of Apodiformes (again, hummingbirds are).
And then you have Anseriformes and Anatidae, and Galliformes and Phasianidae/Phasianinae, with junglefowl being formerly classified in the subfamily Pavoninae. How can geese be the typical members of Anseriformes, but ducks be the typical members of Anatidae? Anseriformes has hardly any extant species outside of Anatidae, so obviously its typical members are anatids.
And then there are extant taxa named after an extinct genus, like Raphinae and Coelacanthiformes. Wikipedia’s Raphinae article is about an extinct, and probably inaccurate concept of the subfamily, meanwhile the Columbidae article lists the contents of an extant Raphinae. I consider it inaccurate despite being monophyletic as dodos and Rodrigues solitaires are probably not phylogenetically distinct enough to be their own subfamily when many other pigeons are probably more phylogentically different than them and are classified in the same subfamily. It’s likely that they were incorrectly classified as their own subfamily due to their morphological differences, similar to how they were classified as their own family before, which made Columbidae paraphyletic. I think that rather than dodos and Rodrigues solitaires being their own subfamily Raphinae, they could be their own tribe Raphini.
Although I think it would nice to have various taxonomic annotations added to scientific names on iNat, such as author and year of the original description or even noting the type species as suggested here, that’s a lot of work for curators with no real benefit to most. And the danger is that if you get it wrong, it might get cited incorrectly in some publication. There is already too much incorrect citation in the scientific literature, where mistakes (e.g., wrong type localities) get perpetuated. iNat should not be the go-to reference for many things related to taxonomy. The primary taxonomic literature or databases that focus strictly on taxonomy should be where that information can be found.
