I’ve spent the last couple days reading the forum topics on subspecies with hopes of being able To actually elaborate on the opinions of users regarding subtaxon, particularly field-identifiable subspecific forms. Of course, scientists across different taxa have different views; herpetologists, bota…

I think that the definition here for subspecies applies well for birds. However, it does not work for many other taxa. [Screenshot 2026-09-23 at 3.22.57 pm] Part of a conversation with another person and here I noted that the line is drawn by people, not by reality. Here is the thing: I think t…

[image] insectilluminatigetshrekt: Basically conceptually meaningless for arthropods other than some butterflies. I identify butterflies for Ontario, Canada. Here, most of our species only have a single subspecies (there may be some obscure and not-widely-accepted subspecies defined - it’s h…

[image] aaravmishra: Part of a conversation with another person and here I noted that the line is drawn by people, not by reality. Here is the thing: I think that a subspecies is suitable for taxa like Amphibians, Reptiles including birds and Mammals. There is also the related issue we see …

I complained to my congresswoman about taxonomic inflation but I doubt Congress will do anything. Yeah, the pendulum has swung a little too far towards the splitters in a number of taxa, in my opinion. Some correction is likely needed in the near future.

I feel like if subspecies hadn’t been overly split in the past then people would be more likely to use them, and then there would be less appeal to splitting species because we would be more familiar with the subspecies and how to apply them.

I wonder if you could do a bit of a reframing - instead of covering subspecies as discrete, identifiable units in your book, cover them as ranges of variation within a species, the extremes of which have been named. Trying to comprehensively cover subspecies identification is a fraught task - subspe…

A fun example to illustrate this: one of my labmates from grad school did a study on Hercules beetles where he basically showed that if you apply a consistent objective metric (both DNA or morphology worked) then the variation across Neotropical Dynastes should either all be called species or all be…

[image] Nature Questions in Trivia Game Shows Like (probably) many iNatters, I can clean up any Jeopardy! category about nature or science [image] tristanmcknight: US-based scientists were ok with splitting) but the southern variants are all called subspecies (because the South American ta…

Whew it certainly is a can of worms. Coming from Plantae: I personally like ssp. for plants, but not all ssp. have the same naming patterns, and that is what truly irks me. Also, when considering or classifying a ssp. is it really a subspecies, or a new hybrid or a mutation of an existing species?…

I was looking into asters and goldenrods recently and there were a couple species with descriptions like “the nominate variety is fuzzy but there’s a less common variety without hairs”. I like that both varieties have formal names, and assuming it’s actually a binary trait it’s useful for learning t…

Subspecies: Views are changing, what about you?

Nature Talk

AdamWargon September 23, 2026, 7:13pm 22

This could be a trick question on one of those Jeopardy-style gameshows for nature lovers. The question seems to be asking about biodiversity (subspecies radiation), but the correct answer is actually about the culture of taxonomists in that country!

Topic		Replies	Views
Question Regarding Subspecies Identification General question	25	2238	February 6, 2023
Thoughts on Subspecies? General question	46	5084	May 23, 2021
Identifying birds to subspecies without field marks Nature Talk	25	2186	May 9, 2019
Choosing not to identify subspecies General	44	5437	March 26, 2019
Who establishes a new subspecies? Nature Talk taxonomy	61	4935	May 7, 2019

Subspecies: Views are changing, what about you?

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