Hi everyone,
I recently curated the Afrotropical Panagaeinae and created the subgenus Craspedophorus (Microschemus). After that, I performed a taxon swap: I swapped the genera Microcosmodes and Microschemus (including children) into this new subgenus Craspedophorus (Microschemus).
The result was that while the taxa were successfully moved into the subgenus, they retained their old genus names instead of being automatically renamed to Craspedophorus.
This is the second time I have encountered this issue. It happened previously when I created subgenera for Charaxes and performed a similar swap.
What is the correct procedure to ensure that names update properly during a taxon swap when a subgenus is involved?
Thank you for your help!
I never rely on the automatic swapping of child taxa and think that feature should probably be removed. Too often there are name differences that don’t map 1:1.
In this case, perhaps it only works if you’re swapping from rank genus to rank genus?
This must be possible though-
BTW: the Charaxes issue was massive, there are 5 subgenera and about 200 species.
“The result was that while the taxa were successfully moved into the subgenus, they retained their old genus names instead of being automatically renamed to Craspedophorus.”
Erm why would the binomial change if you stick it in a new sub-genus? The whole point of the Linnean binomial system is that it is Genus species and then that can be extended to a trinomial system of Genus species infraspecies if you want.
So I’m really not quite sure what you’re expecting to happen to the binomial with it being put into the new subgenus!
The swap described is replacing genera Microcosmodes/Microschemus with Microschemus, a subgenus of Craspedophorus. So the binomials should change from e.g. Microcosmodes whatever to Craspedophorus whatever.
I’m confused though, it seems the taxa in this subgenus have the correct names now:
were these manually added?
Yes, I have fixed it manually
yes, unfortunately from my experience the auto-swapping of children taxa seems to not work properly when a subgenus or similar infrataxon is involved on one side, happened to me recently with a huge genus of 100+ species I was moving
