I’m trying to take on a project: telling a few hundred Americans that their iNat observations are now misidentified because of a scientific change. The immediate problem is that the scientists elevated a subspecies of a widespread tropical butterfly to full species, and iNaturalist kept the English-language common name with the parent species. This would ordinarily make sense, except that the former subspecies included the entire US population of this butterfly, so the English common name is now linked to a species not found in any country where English is the dominant language.
The butterfly in question is Lasaia, the Blue Metalmark, of which all US records now pertain to L. peninsularis (with no common name). Unfortunately, two bad habits are widespread among nature enthusiasts: (1) obsessing about the species level and paying little or no attention to subspecies, and (2) operating by common names and ignoring scientific names. As a result, all but one of the 500+ US records of this taxon were only identified to the species level, even though only one subspecies has ever been documented here by the people who check on such things. And now that iNaturalist has adapted to the science and boosted the subspecies to full species, all of those 500+ US records (minus one) are now identified as the wrong species. iNat now has basically zero occurrence data on the one species of this genus that occurs in the USA, while its data on distribution of the species with the common name is overwhelmingly wrong.
It’s going to be a monotonous enough task to work through the 500+ misidentified records already on here, but the further problem is that the USA is full of books, pamphlets, websites, and other media telling them that a butterfly in Texas is called the Blue Metalmark. They, at least the vast majority of them who use common names and not scientific ones, are going to submit their observations from Texas by this name, even though iNat uses it for a species that doesn’t occur in the USA. So even if we manage to change the current 500+ records to the right species, wrong ones will keep pouring in, for the sole reason that iNat kept the English-language common name attached to the wrong species.
My point being: is there some way to change this, to transfer the English-language common name to the species that occurs in an English-speaking country, and by doing so save ourselves a lot of work? Yes, it would be better if everybody recognized the importance of scientific names, and the significance of subspecies, and paid attention to these things, but that’s even more of an uphill battle than correcting 500+ iNat errors will be…
I just updated the scientific name on BugGuide, so if iNat uses BugGuide as a source for common names, there’ll be a source for switching it over. Editing a common name for a taxon is a pretty easy/routine task for curators, as long as they have external justification for doing so. Another option would be to just stick the common name “Blue Metalmark” on both taxa, which would be super-confusing, but there are plenty of re-used Lep common names on iNat already (2 related Red Twin-spot Carpets, one for each hemisphere; 2 moths in different families called Alfalfa Looper; 2 Cross-Lined Waves, 1 with (Asian) in parentheses added to the common name to try to prevent confusion, etc.)
iNaturalist doesn’t follow a strict taxonomy for common names, especially with invertebrates and plants. A common name can be used for more than one species and a species can have more than one common name. You can apply a name specifically to a place so that if users in that place search for that name, it will show up first in the search results.
Editing to add: I don’t think you have to be a curator to add common names.
I don’t know the specifics of this situation, but do you think this could be automatically corrected with an atlased taxon split? If a curator set up atlases so the one species is only known from South America and one from the Mexico and Texas (or whatever the correct known ranges are) you should be able to split Lasaia sula [sensu lato] into Lasaia sula [sensu stricto] and Lasaia peninsularis. If it’s set up correctly, L. sula ID’s will all change to L. peninsularis in areas where the atlas indicates L. sula sensu stricto doesn’t live. In places where they both live, they’ll be bumped up to genus, and in places where there’s only L. sula, nothing will happen.
This obviously doesn’t solve the problem of future ID’s and common names but I thought I would throw out my suggestion for this one part of the problem.
On a related note, it doesn’t look like any atlasing was used when the new taxon was formed, which would explain the hundreds of records that weren’t updated. Usually when a taxon is split based on geographic distributions, the two new taxa’s ranges are mapped on inat before the swap is finalized. This way all the observations that are within only one of the taxon’s ranges will automatically have the appropriate name swapped in, and ones in any area of overlap will be kicked back to genus/section/complex pending individual identifications. I’m not a curator, but re-combining the two taxa and then splitting them again with the new names atlased might be the best way to proceed? Hopefully a curator will chime in.
I was looking at this situation just yesterday! I was thinking about starting in on things, but I wasn’t certain about the best way to proceed - it seemed like there was a better route than manually updating all the records. @opihiman, if we wind up needing to do some observation-by-observation grunt work, though, just send me a private message, I’m happy to help.
Agreed, this is an example of incomplete curation - there should be no need to manually re-identify lots of observations after a split. A formal taxon split has not been performed here - the only change that has been done is to raise the subspecies to species level, which is only part of the process. For the common name, it makes sense at this stage to use Blue Metalmark for both species, until someone comes up with new names. I’ve added the name and drafted the split - is there a reference which gives the ranges of each species?
Here is the original paper describing what is now L. peninsularis. As described in a bit more detail in the paper, basically L. peninsularis is South Texas and Eastern Mexico and L. sula is Western Mexico to Costa Rica.
There may be some overlap in southern Mexico (I really don’t know; hopefully somebody can chime in with a specific geographic recommendation), but I suspect we can atlas most observations to species.
Many thanks everyone, this is starting to sound much more hopeful! I’ve never taken the time to fill out the form for becoming an iNat curator, and clearly don’t know how features like atlasing and dropping flags on taxa work. Sounds like it could pay off to do some reading rather than slogging right into one-record-at-a-time reidentification. If this works out, there’s a similar situation waiting to be addressed with the Two-barred/Qian’s Flasher complex…
You don’t have to be a curator to flag a taxon…just go to the taxon page, click the Curation gear button and click “Flag for Curation”. It takes you to a page where you fill in what the issue is and can provide sources, etc. if necessary