Fellow iNatters, I regret to inform you that not so long ago, despite our best efforts, we had collectively failed in our noble task to bring the full glory of identification to the world of dandelions. Just days ago, within the realm of the so-called United States, over 80,000 purported dandelion …

Ages from now, when we are long gone but your mutant dandelions have developed culture, their vague memories of your foot will result in a fascinating religion.

Let’s call that religion “fascism” hmmm oh wait already taken

Stompism. The dandelions can only attain their true glorious form through pain and suffering. Or something. Now i feel bad and also i might squish a bee so maybe my nefarious project will not occur after all.

[image] eyekosaeder: Why not define a new taxonomic rank or something for cases like dandelions, if there really isn’t an optimal way to fit them into the current framework? A currently proposed compromise is to interpret the existing infraspecific rank of ‘infrahybrid’ to mean ‘microspecies’…

i actually think the microspecies are kinda cool, i just don’t think it works to have them at species level since they often can’t be parsed out. If there’s sufficient evidence to get to micro(sub)species level that’s great.

[image] chugbug111: I’m not sure but I would think it is europeans who are deciding things Let us decide something sometimes… ;-)

[image] eyekosaeder: It seems to me different branches of the taxonomic tree have different rules As a practical matter, yes, people studying different organisms have different standards of how to apply species concepts. We try to be consistent with a genus or family or other unit of closely…

Genus level seems to my non-taxonomically trained eye to be extremely inconsistent between zoology and botany. In zoology, species that look slightly different will be in different genera whereas plants have massive megagenera with species that look nothing alike that are easily dividable into small…

It is not really consistent even within plants; for example the family asteraceae (which includes taraxacum) seems to have basically everything shifted by one level compared to other plant families; what elsewhere would be called a ‘genus’ is a ‘subtribe’ or even ‘tribe’ in asteraceae, as noted here…

[image] Italopithecus: The taxonomic position of T. officinale is clear. It is a name that should not be used as its type in ambiguous. If this is implemented, what name will replace it? It is currently the type species of the genus; so what will the new type species be?

My Dandelion Manifesto

General

Italopithecus April 2, 2024, 6:28pm 94

Let us decide something sometimes… ;-)

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My Dandelion Manifesto

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