In the past few days I’ve come across two situations where iNat users have misidentified hundreds of records because taxonomists split a species and naturalists in the field have not kept up with the changes: The Blue Metalmark (Lasaia sula) had the subspecies peninsularis elevated to species sta…

When taxonomic changes are committed, some automatic changes of IDs can be done via substitutions/atlasing the split, though depending on the situation, this isn’t always possible and/or may not address all records (eg, in cases where species overlap). I’m not familiar enough with the situation to k…

This should have been addressed during the taxon split using altasing. It may be possible to re-merge and re-split them, but this could be disruptive. My suggestion would be to raise this issue with prominent butterfly curators on iNaturalist. As cthawley mentioned, the usefulness and feasibility of…

Has the taxon split been done in iNat? If not that would be the first step. As you noted though, you will still have the older species being ID’d for a while until the new intel becomes common knowledge. My suggestion would be to start slamming out ID’s in the problem area and post a link to the …

For the metalmark, that revision from subspecies to species was published less than a year ago, I believe and iNat made the switch this summer. So not surprising the records do not yet reflect that taxonomic revision.

Yeah, the description of the new flasher species got published last year too: https://bugguide.net/node/view/2327489 Though the break-up of Astraptes apparently began with a DNA barcoding study published way back in 2004: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.0406166101 BugGuide, which has t…

[image] opihiman: (to which, AFAIK, all records north of the Mexico-USA border belong). [image] zygy: This should have been addressed during the taxon split using altasing. I can envision trouble from this. Picture a range map in which the boundary between two species exactly follows a…

[image] jasonhernandez74: We are often advised not to identify based solely on range I would argue that, whether we’re aware of it or not, a lot, if not most of the species-level IDs of small arthropods on iNat are range-based at some level. For many moth taxa, for example, there is some exte…

I can see using location if the two very similar species are allopatric, or the location is from deep in the range of one but a long way from the other. But in parapatric species where it’s really impossible to say in the zone of contact which one it could be, I’d probably punt it to genus or speci…

Mass corrections needed - butterflies near US-Mexico border - #10 by system - General

Topic		Replies	Views	Activity
Moving common names from one species to another General	10	341	August 29, 2024
Batch transfer of a species Curators	6	670	May 24, 2020
Incorrect RG obs resulting from taxomonic change? General	10	346	March 17, 2025
Flag identifications that are out of agreement with iNat's taxonomic structure? General	21	2230	February 26, 2020
Reversing mass incorrect IDs General	34	1088	August 28, 2025