Taxonomy, Cladistics, and iNaturalist

Okay this is an example where a non-monophyletic complex would be nice, but it’s not possible.

This genus split is a result of this paper (and others?) which argues pretty strongly that the genus Accipiter (goshawks and sparrowhawks) was paraphyletic with respect to the genus Circus (harriers). Even their lice aren’t each others’ closest relatives!

The problem is that Cooper’s Hawk (now Astur with goshawks) and Sharp-shinned Hawk (still Accipiter) are similar in size and shape and from a poor view are often difficult to separate. Before this any difficult observations would’ve been put to genus, but now they’ll need to go all the up to subfamily, at a level shared with 11 genera and like 73 different species. That’s a very imprecise identification when that there are only actually 2 species options being referred to by it.

However the genetics seems pretty clear, and all of the standard bird taxonomies are following the change that I know of. iNat would be striking out on its own to reject the change now.

Currently it’s logistically impossible in the iNat taxonomy system for there to be a complex that includes both Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned because they can’t be daughter taxa of both their respective genera, and also daughter taxa of a complex taxon including both of them. I’m not sure if anyone would want to create a project or observation field for all these observations either since there must be thousands of them to go through… On the other hand I guess this filter sort of works.

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