I brought this up once in the Google Group, but didn’t really get any consensus. Setting aside the issue of whether subspecies are valid or not, I think that if iNat has a particular subspecies, the common name for that subspecies should only be on that subspecies and not on the parent species. Fo…

[image] jwidness: I think the common name Coiba Island Howler Monkey should apply only to Alouatta palliata coibensis and should be removed from A. pallliata. Thoughts? I agree with that for the most part. That species has a mess of common names that appear to only apply to some of the subspe…

My preference for Alouatta palliata is to remove all the common names except Mantled Howler Monkey. I would first make sure that all the subspecies common names are correctly applied to the subspecies listed, e.g. add Coiba Island Howler Monkey and Coiba Island Howling Monkey to A. p. coibensis bef…

For the English and some of the Spanish names, that makes sense to me.

I see this on Oenothera elata, which says Hooker’s Evening Primrose even if ssp. hookeri was not suggested.

It was – and maybe still is – rather common in many taxa for the nominotypical subspecies in a species to have the same common name as the species as a whole. (That’s different than the case of the howler monkey example, which seems to be just wrong.) I think the herpetologists have been moving awa…

[image] jnstuart: rather common in many taxa for the nominotypical subspecies in a species to have the same common name as the species as a whole. This would still be appropriate, I think, in the circumstance where several species are lumped as subspecies. The receiving species (the one with…

I think I understand now. Coiba Island Howler is listed as a possible alternative common name under the species (Mantled Howler) since it is a subspecies of Mantled. But if you look at the subspecies entry on iNat for the subspecies coibensis, there is no common name indicated. The only place that …

Many of the mammal common names on iNat were pulled directly from IUCN. That’s actually the source of the subspecies common name issue: IUCN lists common names for subspecies in the same field as the species common name within the species account.

I ran into this with the Toque Macaque (Macaca sinica), a Sri Lanka species with three subspecies. I went through and added all the subspecies common names to the appropriate subspecies, then deleted those from the common names list for the species. Hopefully they won’t all return when data is impor…

Subspecies common names on species?

Curators

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Are There Really Common Names for Subspecies? General	23	1543	May 12, 2021
Subspecies Having The Same Common Name as the Species General	37	750	September 21, 2025
Common name v Latin name for subspecies General	28	660	December 20, 2024
Inconsistent subspecies name syntax in iNat General	15	653	June 16, 2024
Duplicating common name for nominate subspecies Curators	15	2240	April 16, 2020

Subspecies common names on species?

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