I dunno. WSC accepted the 2019 revision for Hypoblemum in very short timeframe, it probably took longer for iNat to reflect the change! I would have tackled it as soon as I encountered it, but wanted to be “walked through” my first taxon swap. The lead up to CNC meant I was not wanting to burden busy people.
If there is urgent need to get that publication (Mecodema) into iNat, then surely it can be brought to the attention of iNat staff and have a deviation for it to allow the iNat taxa to reflect those changes sooner. But we do have to be realistic about what is urgent and what is not. It wouldn’t have hurt to wait another year to have Hypoblemum updated, and in fact it might have been beneficial in some ways!
WSC may well have indexed the changes, but you don’t know if they critically accepted the changes. In the case of Mecodema, it makes no sense not to adopt the changes asap (and in this case, I can make the changes here anyway). Users of iNat data aren’t going to appreciate outdated taxonomy.
IPNI mostly reports the described taxa without any reference to trhe taxonomic status. Anyway it is an essential source of info.
Other online databases provide useful info on the taxonomic status of the various taxa. To cite few beside the one one already cited: http://ww2.bgbm.org/EuroPlusMed/query.asp https://www.tropicos.org/
Euro+Med has a specific author for each group of plants
Of course taxonomy changes rapidly as well as some choices (usually few) may seem not to well agreeable so it is recommended to develop a critical attitude.
Botany is relatively well-served by critics! However, the same cannot be said for that vast expanse of taxon space which is invertebrates. Spiders are a small exception, because annual global taxonomic output on them is manageable.
I’ve read that there are two types of taxonomists - the lumpers and the splitters. I tend to be a lumper myself, so the idea of sub species is suspect to me.
Both approaches can be (and have been) taken to unhelpful extremes. Most modern taxonomists I know are doing their best to discern what actual evolutionary lineages exist in nature, and to provide the documentation and nomenclature to communicate about them. It’s good to know what genetically significant populations, or taxa, we have, and stand to lose.
Taxonomists started out with patterns of morphology (outward appearance) as a proxy for genetic significance – and a very convenient one to be sure. But always wanting more robust and repeatable results, they kept adding more tools to the toolbox – microscopic structures, chromosome studies, secondary metabolites, DNA markers, DNA sequences, etc. – things not so easy to observe.
As these research tools have become more powerful, taxonomists have found (no surprise) that not all genetically significant lineages show their significance by their outward appearance. Most times some subtle morphologic markers can still be found, but sometimes they can’t. Then the taxonomist faces a tough decision – do they still describe and name what they have discovered, and risk being “lumped in” with the egregious splitters of yore – even though they are still looking for the exact same units of nature that their “middle-of-the-road” predecessors were a century ago? Or do they not name and describe it, and risk the obscurity and potential loss of genetically significant populations?
Maybe not surprisingly, I come down on the side of the first option – while always doing my utmost to find practical field markers for identification purposes. As dogmatic policies, neither lumping nor splitting are good ideas. But as Charlie heard me say in another thread some time ago , Linnaeus was the grandfather of all taxonomic splitters.
An interesting case involves the big flightless stag beetles of the genus Geodorcus on the Chatham Islands (N.Z.) The population on the tiny Sisters Islands has males which are as different morphologically to the males from elsewhere as to males of other species from N.Z. Yes, the females are bigger, but otherwise the same and there is apparently no significant genetic difference!
True, hence the “apparently”, but then how often are entire genomes considered? Also, it is unclear to me if very small sequence differences could nevertheless “turn on or off” much larger genes which are present identically across species, just not “turned on”? That would mean small genetic difference => big difference in morphology and/or “biology”.
Exactly, which is why suggestions of genetic insignificance in the the face of significant morphologic differences will always be suspect to me. (I saw your “apparently” in there… )
Definitely an intriguing possibility. Then the question for a taxonomist would be, do the larger activated genes put up an immediate barrier to interbreeding or not?
Maybe not quite this scenario, but a fun case nonetheless, is Amsonia tomentosa in the southwestern U.S. It comes in two forms, densely grayish hairy individuals, and bright green glabrous individuals, completely intermixed throughout their geographic range. They couldn’t look more different at first glance, and the green form had initially been named as a separate species (Amsonia brevifolia) and later a subspecies, but they behave in nature as simple allelic variants. (taxon photos here - ignore a few misidentified ones in need of cleanup)
As a non-scientist I really can’t contribute here. But I’m just wondering if this was the case with the Galapagos finches in The Beak of the Finch? It’s been a long time since I read it. Or maybe it was just morphological variation and different ones died every year as different size seeds varied in quantity?
Darwin definitely leaned more toward that option, but I have no clue about any subsequent genetic research on the Galapagos finches, though surely there must be some? And you absolutely contributed, please continue!
I was thinking of the researchers in the later 20th century (I can’t remember their names offhand) who were the subject of Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch. They were able to show that the beaks of the finches changed every year and I remember that being referred to as evolution you can see happening with your own eyes (or something like that). I just couldn’t remember the genetics part of it. I should just read it again, which I know I intended to do when I finished it the first time.
To some extent it must be true. The larger genes do most of the “work”, and small gene sequences could effectively be a set of instructions (or recipe) for “making something” using the big genes. If so, then small sequence differences can have profound phenotypic effects. More importantly the amount of sequence difference may be independent of the amount of phenotypic difference, depending on the details in any particular case. I think that one still has to look to morphology and behaviour to judge interbreeding barriers regardless, and this opens a whole new can-of-worms. In botany, they seem to have decided by consensus which characters justify splitting into species and which do not. Then they hope for not too much hybridisation!
For those who want cryptic things described as species… do you have ideas on how to keep field ecology going or do you just want to give up on monitoring and inventory? Because that seems like a Really Bad Idea but… it doesn’t really work with what you all are trying to do.
To what extent is being able to identify everything to species important? I’m not suggesting it isn’t; I’m curious. Like I think you can get a good impression of the biodiversity of an area for example without everything identified to that detail.
For birding I am used to being able to identify everything to species with enough information from the field (good views, photos, calls or songs, etc.). But I’ve learned from iNaturalist that many insects and other organisms can’t be identified in the field or from photos and need to be taken inside and dissected with a microscope. This is already enough work to dissuade most amateur naturalists (I think?); how different is having to do a genetic test?
I guess it would be necessary to identify species and sometimes subspecies to conserve threatened ones… But again if a species needs to be dissected it’s also going to be identified way less often.
Plants have some huge genii (carex, for instance) and for those genus level ID isn’t very valuable. I’m ok with the idea of splitting species plus defining subsections or something to lump the cryptic species together but I don’t see people do that much.
First of all, “want” and “trying to do” are a bit presumptive. Just about any taxonomist would love nothing more than for each and every evolutionary lineage to be easily and unambiguously recognizable with human eyes in the field, or from a “good enough for iNat” photo. Nature sometimes has other realities…
Second, as a taxonomist (though I do work in both fields), I would not presume to tell field ecologists what to do with the taxonomic information we provide. If there is a species with a bunch of well-supported but cryptic subspecies (or a Genus with cryptic species), it is up to you whether to attempt to identify the cryptic taxa, or to identify to the next higher level only, depending on your needs and resources.
If you identify to the the next higher level, it would just be with the knowledge that there are several genetically significant lineages encompassed by that level. (That should probably be the starting assumption in any case!) It would be up to you to tailor any conclusions and conservation or management actions accordingly, or to ignore the knowledge if it doesn’t seem to make a difference in what the best actions or recommendations would be.
Why? There are a lot of reason people categorize organisms into groups but having a genetically “correct” taxonomy is certainly not the most widespread one.
Not really. For a lot of species every hilltop or valley has genetically distinct populations but that wasn’t what species used to be. I don’t know why they turned into that. They were supposed to be reproductively isolated too which most of the split species aren’t. Nature doesn’t care what we call them.
I’m not gonna do either of those and I doubt many other ecologists do either of those. The real options are ignore new taxonomy and use the old references (happens often) or create your own holding bins between species and genus because genus doesn’t work, like I was saying before. This latter approach is problematic if you ever want to share data with anyone else.
I don’t know what the disconnect is here and why taxonomists can’t get it. We have maybe 20,000 wetlands no one has done an ecological assessment on in our little state alone. If they have no assessment they are much harder to protect. If we can’t use taxonomy more or less like we’ve had, we can’t effectively describe the vegetation in the wetland. (A meadow with “poaceae” and “Scirpus” tells you next to nothing). Creating cryptic species without defining sections that work with them is a literal impediment to conserving ecosystems. If you’d rather be technically correct about an extinct plant then have an imperfect, usable taxonomy for that species but keep it extant, then I don’t really know how to counter that but it makes me really sad? And if that isn’t what you want, i don’t know why you’d push for something that will cause it.
For what it’s worth this comment isn’t specifically to you, this is the same stuff i hear from all the taxonomy people. I feel like there’s this inherent feeling of magical correctness where taxonomists don’t tend to be willing to really listen to the concerns of the people using the names. I don’t know why it happens but it’s really frustrating. We are facing a huge biodiversity crisis and are already so starved for resources… adding more complications really isn’t good
I am curious why species complex designations are not sufficient to just swap in to indicate organisms you treat as one functional entity in the field but have been split into separate species? I seem to be running into this approach often for beetles… I agree that with the large and diverse plant genuses you’re concerned with, the existing section structure doesn’t quite fulfill the need you’re describing, but I really can’t feel like this is a fault of taxonomists pursuing their field.
I do find it interesting that we use species and subspecies on the one hand, and families, subfamilies, and superfamilies on the other- no “superspecies”? Might that not seem less wishy-washy than “species complexes” in many uses, if that’s the trouble? Evolutionary complexity of plants all considered (with reproductive barrier concepts from animals not directly applicable) I would think we’d need as much granularity surtounding the species level as we have around the family level in order to capture the state of knowledge about relationships.
, Linnaeus was the grandfather of all taxonomic splitters.