This does happen. Rare, but occasionally real.
I have another question regarding this: How is this in zoology?
I do not have any examples I specifically remember, but in my experience cases with exactly 2 described ssp. (nominate and another) don’t seem to be that common. My impression is that if a species has subspecies, it is often multiple that all live in their specific region. In that case the nominate ssp. seems to be just like any of the other except in name.
In both botany and zoology, recognizing a subspecies requires also recognizing the autonym/nominate subspecies.
Example: Setophaga coronata subsp. coronata is a bird of eastern North America. A similar bird of western North America was originally names Setophaga auduboni. Later it was decided that these birds should be treated as one species. The western bird became Setophaga coronata subsp. auduboni. That automatically make the eastern bird Setophaga coronata coronata. Now, when we write Setophaga coronata, we could be writing about any bird of this kind, eastern or western. Or we could be writing about one of them but not care to specify the subspecies. If we want to write about the eastern bird and exclude the western, we write Setophaga coronata coronata.
It is true that often subspecies live in separate areas (though their ranges may overlap). There are some times, though, where not using the autonym/nominate subspecies name creates confusion. We can’t really know if the speaker means just the one subspecies or the whole species. So the autonym/nominante subspecies name is useful and sometimes important.
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As things stand now, we can artificially create the impression on iNaturalist that one subspecies is common and the one with the autonym/nominate subspecies name is rare simply because iNaturalist hasn’t included the autonym/nominate subspecies name as a possibility.
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What harm exactly?
Here is some. Plus, the taxonomy is just not clear when it could be.
- A curator is going to have to go back some day and add the nominate subtaxon for iNaturalist (when it could have been done quickly by the person adding the other variety).
- Because observations will be classified as the species or as subspecies A. x. ssp. y with no possiblity of A. x. ssp. x, we won’t know whether those records are sometimes A. x. ssp. x, which is confusing (and can lead to people saying we don’t need A. x. ssp. x because there are no records of it – circular).
- Sometimes we choose to split one species into two, often separating what were formerly called subspecies. If they’re been labeled as subspecies, the curators can simply transfer the subspecies as a synonym to the new species name. As for the ones not named to subspecies, the curator can check the ones that are called subspecies to determine where the boundaries/overlaps are between what are now species and make many of the changes based on geography. If both subspecies weren’t available as names, this all becomes harder.
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Yes, absolutely those scenarios. Most basically, identifying organisms in iNat works badly when our taxonomy does not include identifiable “leaf” taxa (i.e. the furthest levels on the tree). If works even worse when we have some leaf taxa but not others and compensate for that by using higher-level taxa with ambiguous results. And neither of the two supposed counter arguments makes much sense.
- Adding the nominate subtaxon / autonym when you’re working with other subtaxa takes a matter of a minute.
- The potential additional load on indexing from the additional taxon has to be less than the load from re-indexing if it’s added later and a taxon has to be split to accommodate it. And, really, organizing data related to species people may be expected to observe is kinda the iNat raison d’être.
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This kind of ‘harm’ applies to any taxon not only the nominate one that is missing on iNat.
The nominate subspecies is not more important to have than another subspecies. You argue for complete taxa with all known children added.
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Well, it’s an argument for having a self-consistent taxonomy, which may or may not require including all children that are in use somewhere. Sometimes this means more varieties beyond the nominate are needed, but the argument is that missing the nominate always means the taxonomy isn’t self-consistent (per the standard rules, at least), so the rule is at least a decent way of surfacing taxa that need some kind of curator attention.
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Let’s see if I can propose a workable approach for iNat.
- Both the main taxonomic codes (ICNafp and ICZN) have articles that automatically create a nominate subtaxon / autonym for any species with a subtaxon. (I believe this is true for ICZN; can someone confirm?)
- iNat largely anchors its taxonomy to various external taxonomic authorities.
- These taxonomic authorities generally aspire to a comprehensive treatment of “accepted names” (botany) / “subjectively valid names” (zoology), although they may limit the ranks of intermediate taxa that their hierarchy tracks.
- iNat policy is not to attempt to assemble an comprehensive taxonomy. Some taxa that appear in iNat’s authorities may still be left out if they are not required in order to identify observations added to iNat.
- In many cases (but definitely not all), the nominate subtaxon is more likely to be commonly encountered by iNat users than other subtaxa are.
- As a result of point 4, it’s acceptable for iNat’s taxonomy sometimes not to include any subtaxa accepted by iNat’s authorities, and sometimes only to include a subset of the accepted subtaxa.
- Notwithstanding point 6, a taxonomy that includes some subtaxa but not the nominate subtaxon is confusing to observers (who may wrongly assume the nominate subtaxon is not accepted) and identifiers (who cannot distinguish between IDs intended for the parent species and for the nominate subtaxon).
- Therefore, iNat curators who create or modify subtaxa that are accepted by iNat’s taxonomic authority (or under an agreed taxonomic framework deviation) are encouraged to ensure that the relevant nominate subtaxon / autonym is also added to the iNat hierarchy.
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True. It seems to me that the nominate is the one most often forgotten, but it’s not the only one.
Yes. It’s OK to recognize no subtaxa at all. (Not always wise, but that’s another question.) But if you recognize one, you have to recognize at least two, one of them being the nominate.
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iNat is not about taxonomy and systematics but about documenting wildlife. If there is not an observation, the taxon is not mandatory to have on iNat no matter of being nominate or other child of something.
You do just increase workload of curators by requesting to add empty taxa.
A separate issue is the presence of some taxa which have a nominate subspecies but no others, because no subspecies exist. This happens quite often with species that occur in Australia, which as I understand it was due to some bug that occurred when Bowerbird records were transferred into iNat. So for example there used to be an Eristalis tenax tenax on iNat despite that species having no subspecies. I have found several of these and fixed them piecemeal, but I imagine there are probably more out there. Worth being aware of.
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The problem is, it can appear that the nominate subspecies is not reported on iNaturalist simply because that name is not available on iNaturalist! I have seen several examples of this – that’s why I started this discussion.
Agreed, but also relevant for any other missing subspecies.
True. Finding the other missing subtaxa could take some work. Recognizing the nominate subtaxa only takes knowing what you’re doing.
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