I can see on iNat website that many animals which are seemingly different being clubbed together as one like “also known as” or “alternate names”. Like the site says that Javan Tiger, Sumatran Tiger are the same as Sunda tiger, but Google says they are clearly different. Same goes for Bengal Tiger and South China Tiger. Is this a known issue?
That is correct. They all belong to one species of tiger. They are different subspecies of this species.
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If we start going that way, then all tigers will have to be clubbed into one single category, right? Since they are all tigers?
There are three currently accepted subspecies of tiger on iNaturalist.
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Panthera tigris ssp. sondaica Sunda Tiger synonyms: Javan Tiger, Sumatran Tiger, Bali Tiger
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Panthera tigris ssp. tigris Bengal Tiger synonyms: South China Tiger,…
Other subspecies were variously proposed in the literature but are not currently accepted as different subspecies. They may be varieties or other forms.
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Do not just blindly trust to what a chatbot writes you. It is not a very reliable source of information.
If you look into wikipedia, you will find: The South China tiger is a population of the Panthera tigris tigris subspecies that is native to southern China.
So it belongs to the main subspecies of tiger in the current clasification, although somewhat different.
Also: In 2017, the Cat Classification Taskforce of the Cat Specialist Group subsumed all mainland Asian tiger populations to P. t. tigris.[2] However, a genetic study published in 2018 supported six monophyletic groups, with the South Chinese tiger being distinct from other mainland Asian populations, thus supporting the traditional concept of six subspecies.[9
So other studies see it as a separate subspecies. It is not a closed chapter.
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What kind of literature are you talking about? I was looking here, it clearly says that they are different species.
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Different scientists accept different number of separate subspecies. It is not a closed chapter.
The linked 2019 paper prefers six subspecies:
Current tiger taxonomy, informed by molecular genetic evidence, recognizes six living subspecies [3–5, 9, 10], including the Bengal tiger Panthera tigris tigris (Linnaeus, 1758), Amur tiger P.t. altaica (Temminck, 1844), South China tiger P.t. amoyensis (Hilzheimer, 1905), Sumatran tiger P.t. sumatrae (Pocock, 1929), Indochinese tiger P.t. corbetti (Mazak 1968), and Malayan tiger P.t. jacksoni proposed in 2004 [5], as well as three extinct subspecies: the Javan tiger P.t. sondaica (Temminck, 1844), Bali tiger P.t. balica (Schwarz, 1912), and Caspian tiger P.t. virgata (Illiger, 1815). In contrast, morphological and ecological analyses have invariably revealed little distinction among most putative subspecies [6, 11–13], leading to a proposed reclassification in 2015 to recognize only two subspecies, namely, P.t. tigris in continental Asia and P.t. sondaica in the Sunda Islands [6, 14]. Such discordance between genetic and morphological evidence for distinctiveness is not unusual and likely reflects the increased precision afforded by cumulative DNA evidence [15]. It may be that intraspecific taxonomic debates should be resolved at the genomic level, where genetic divergence can be quantitatively measured.
However, the taxonomy used by iNaturalists recognizes only three subspecies. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/32616/A_revised_Felidae_Taxonomy_CatNews.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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Hmm okay, so apparently there is no consensus. Got it.
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AI overview is often wrong. Bots still can be stupid.
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Your link in your previous comment is from the chatbot.
Your second link is Seaworld - which seems an odd source for info about tigers?
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Saludos, I see you are not just new to the Forum but also just registered for iNaturalist yesterday, so you likely have not had time to navigate around very much.
It may be more beneficial when considering what “we” ought or ought not to do, to perhaps look at the info on the iNaturalist site rather than SeaWorld. When you go to the page for the Javan Tiger for example, not only will you see taxonomic information, you will also see links to the right where you can read further.
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It says clearly here that they are different subspecies, not different species. For conservation, management and policy this can make a big difference (ability to hybridise, population connectivity and size etc.) to how they are approached and is why you might see them grouped on iNat. The discourse around subspecies is well documented in Giraffes for another example which was originally thought to be one species with 9 subspecies but upon more recent genetic analysis have been found to be several distinct species. When you go to look at a name for an animal if the latin name is in 3 parts instead of 2 then you’re likely looking at a subspecies. Hope this helps!
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That taxonomic information highlighted in your screenshot is automatically displayed from Wikipedia. There’s no guarantee Wikipedia and iNaturalist will agree on taxonomy (e.g. for birds, they follow different authorities), and when they don’t agree, iNat may not even show the correct Wikipedia page unless a curator has manually fixed it.
In fact, it’s wrong in your screenshot! Wikipedia no longer has a separate page for Panthera tigris sondaica (it just redirects to Tiger#Subspecies), so iNat is mistakenly displaying that page about the extinct Javan tiger “population.” I think all of iNat’s verifiable observations of Panthera tigris sondaica are actually the Sumatran tiger “population,” because they aren’t extinct.
Despite OP’s use of the term “species,” it looks like the real question here is about whether some subspecies are synonyms or not.
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Not my point. My point is that when discussing what iNat out to do, one ought to reference what iNat is currently doing.
I also wished to point a new user to the links to the right, which are not part of the Wikipedia page but actually inserted by iNaturalist.
Point of order that your Wikipedia mileage may vary by location.
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Thanks a lot. That is very helpful. Does the “More Info” information - specifically the external links, show up in any API response for a given subject like tax/species, etc.? I was looking at API response, cannot seem to find it.
I am not familiar with the phrase API response, but the taxon you indicated has links on its page:
Not all taxa have such pages, though.
Hmm thanks. While we are at it, I chanced upon a similar website - GBIF, with very comprehensive data. Even if I accept that taxonomic data has no consensus, the difference in data between GBIF and iNatiralist seems to be massive. Like for animalia family, the number of direct children on GBIF (https://www.gbif.org/species/1) seems to be an order of magnitude more than what we see here - https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1-Animalia. Is this expected? Or is at an anomaly?
the number of direct children of Animalia (in this case, rank = phylum) on GBIF is almost identical to iNaturalist, 34 to 33.
the only differences are:
iNat has Gnathifera as a phylum, which GBIF does not
GBIF has Micrognathozoa as a phylum, which iNat does not (iNat has it as a class under Gnathifera)
GBIF has Sipuncula as a phylum, which iNat does not (iNat has it has an order under Annelida)
the other ‘children’ you’re seeing at https://www.gbif.org/species/1 are random families which are not grafted under phyla for whatever reason
also just to clarify in case you aren’t familiar with it: GBIF and iNat do different things. iNat is a primary data platform, ie users directly upload occurrence records to it. Conversely, GBIF is a data aggregator, ie it collates data from other primary data platforms, including iNat
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Not every species known to exist is on iNaturalist. If they haven’t been (known to be) observed, they might not have been added to the database, or if they are newly named. Additionally, there are a lot of synonymous names for taxa, especially if there’s been a taxon merge where two species have been determined as not that different after all.
Certain taxa are messy in that regard. I imagine arthropods are particularly snarly with such things; the various ones requiring DNA analysis to identify in particular might never go on iNaturalist if no one ever puts the DNA analysis up so it can be identified that finely.
Edit: Ah whoops, misunderstood the question. Probably still half-relevant