I don’t know anyone, taxonomist or otherwise, who “wants” or “tries” to have cryptic taxa. If they exist in nature and are “findable” by humans, they will probably be found eventually.
The lineages (species, subspecies, whatever we call them) were already there. We got better at detecting them.
Ignoring the sweeping generalization for the moment, and granting that hybridization between plant lineages (in particular) has turned out to be much more widespread than suspected early on, I wouldn’t recommend hanging your hat on that as a reason to dismiss “split species” out of hand. I suspect most field ecologists would not find that a single lumped species in the oaks (Quercus), or in the sagebrushes (shrubby Artemisia), would be a particularly helpful or friendly taxonomy for their work either.
Nothing prevents a field ecologist from designating a 1975 flora, for example, as their taxonomic standard for a vegetation assessment. Other than newly described species since then (which can be inserted as needed), the taxonomy will still be mappable to other treatments, either forward or backward. It is one of the primary jobs of taxonomists to ensure that is always possible.
But don’t expect taxonomists to ignore new knowledge and preserve a snapshot of 1975 taxonomy (much less of 1905, or 1842, or 1753 taxonomy) for the convenience of any particular field of study, however vitally important it may be.
If it makes taxonomic sense to create a new taxon at Sectional or other rank, most taxonomists will not hesitate to do so. Likewise, if it makes ecological sense to do so, a field ecologist should not hesitate to define their own taxonomic groupings when writing up a study. As long as they cross-reference it to existing nomenclature, taxonomists should have no issue with that. Taxonomy is not a panacea or an edict from on high. It is a classification and communication tool that attempts to reflect our current state of knowledge. Treating it as anything more, or especially as the only tool that can address a particular problem instead of creating additional tools where needed, will definitely be an impediment in any context.
This sounds much like the area of heritable epigenetics, if I read you properly. We have a few researchers at my university who’ve studied this in the context of cancers (and it’s crazy awesome in terms of application). I really can’t think of much going into this in terms of other traits, though. I’m not even sure if we’d have a proper name for populations sharing epigenetic markers as they could well be more genetically similar than most of what we would call subspecies.
(As an aside, I’d really be interested if anyone’s even tried looking at epigenetic markers within those populations of Geodorcus…)
Doesn’t there have to be a species between a genus and a subspecies? If not, why not? And if not, why aren’t the subspecies really species?
Are taxon changes from a species to a subspecies made universally by iNaturalist more special than subspecies IDs that are just made by iNat users? More official? More consensus? Any other differences?
paloma, that taxon change is clearly an error. The curator probably meant to do something else and didn’t realize the mistake. You CANNOT have a subspecies without a species.
I have just downloaded the current Clements Checklist (the cited source for the change) and used [ctrl] F to verify that Diomedea exulans still exists there as a species, with D. e. exulans as one of the 5 subspecies.
The Diomedea exulans was just one example. Here’s another, of an inactive species (Ramphocelus passerinii) that became a subspecies (Ramphocelus passerinii ssp, passerinii): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/3747503
The former Diomedea exulans did not include any of the other subspecies, and so was a different “concept” of that name than the “new” Diomedea exulans, which now includes the other formerly separate species (including the old Diomedea exulans) as subspecies. So the two Diomedea exulans are different species taxa, even though they keep the same name. The old species concept is therefore inactivated, and the new species concept becomes active.
As to why the several former species are now considered subspecies, I can only guess that it has something to do with new breeding and/or genetics evidence, but the iNaturalist bird curator(s) would have to answer that definitively.
iNat users can only identify subspecies that are already available in the iNat taxonomic database. The related taxon changes in this instance made new subspecies taxa available, which iNat users can now apply to their IDs. When the database changes were made, all the existing species IDs were automatically changed to their new corresponding subspecies IDs.
And yes, taxonomic changes like this usually are based on a degree of consensus among the taxonomic experts and/or references for a particular group of organisms.
These are all great questions, and don’t hesitate to ask more if anything remains unclear!
Hmmm, it seems to work for me. On the web site, when I type “Diomedea exulans” into the “Suggest an Identification” or “Add an Identification” box, the species “Diomedea exulans” is listed as the first choice, followed by all the subspecies. Are you trying it in a different context?
You’re right. I tried it and it worked https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2488091. So if I wanted to stay at species level when the taxon change was made, I guess I could have done the same thing then. But it still seems strange to me that if my ID wasn’t wrong at species level, because the species still exists, then my ID should not have been changed.
When a taxon change is applied in the system, curators try to preserve the finest-level IDs that currently exist on each observation. Your former Diomedea exulans ID was for a finer (narrower) concept whose equivalent is now Diomedea exulans subsp. exulans, so it made the direct translation from one to the other.
If you now want to go back and apply the broader Diomedea exulans concept (which now includes all the other subspecies) to the same observation, that is certainly your choice, but I’m not sure why you would if you were happy with your previous, narrower ID. If you still think that narrower Diomedea exulans ID was correct, then you would be disagreeing with yourself to now change it to the broader Diomedea exulans concept. The new name for the former, narrower Diomedea exulans is now Diomedea exulans subsp. exulans.
The confusion in this case likely comes from the fact that one of those former species names (usually the oldest under rules of taxonomic nomenclature) has to be retained as the name of the new, broader taxon. In this case the oldest name among all the species was apparently Diomedea exulans. This creates different concepts for the same name, both of which include the original type specimen to which that name is attached, but which then may or may not include the type specimens of additional names.
In their love for Latin, you will sometimes see taxonomists refer to these different concepts as, for example, Diomedea exulans s. str. (sensu stricto = in the narrow sense) or Diomedea exulans s. lat. (sensu lato = in the broad sense).
My previous ID was at species level. I didn’t choose it because I thought it was narrower than something else or because I knew anything about potential subspecies/species changes. I chose it because I was told it was a Wandering Albatross, I looked it up and it looked right to me, and species level was all I ever had to go to in the past to be eligible for Research Grade. And then I read all these conversations that with my limited knowledge make it sound like a lot of the subspecies changes are contentious, and I don’t know how to tell which ones are and which are not. So just because I would rather spend my time learning other new species and above, I don’t really want to be involved in going below species myself.
When you chose the former Diomedea exulans as your ID, you were implying at the time (maybe not intentionally) that the observation was that species and notDiomedea amsterdamensis (Amsterdam Albatross), Diomedea antipodensis (Antipodean Albatross), Diomedea dabbenena (Tristan Albatross), or Diomedea gibsoni (Gibson’s Albatross).
But now, the new species Diomedea exulans includes all those five taxa above (as subspecies). So now if you say Diomedea exulans without also naming a subspecies, you are saying that the observation could be any one of the five taxa listed above (but now in their subspecies formats).
Again that is fine, as long as that is what you want to do. But if you still want to say that this is not Amsterdam Albatross, Antipodean Albatross, Tristan Albatross, or Gibson’s Albatross, then you would want to say that it is subsp. exulans (Snowy Albatross, = the former Wandering Albatross).
Hope that makes some sense? There’s no right or wrong move here, it’s just a matter of what you want to express with your ID, given the new taxonomy of these birds. BTW, you can get Research Grade on the species ID or the subspecies ID.
[EDIT: some folks like to make subspecies out to be scarier than they really are ]
So, I think I’m clear on almost everything you and @NancyinSunnyvale have said. Thank you both! Just to be clear, though, when it’s not a taxon change that’s automatically made, but just a user suggesting a subspecies, the subspecies clearly exists according to iNat because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to enter it?
Yes, that’s correct, unless they “search external sources” and try to add it to iNat themselves. But birds are a closed taxon, so that should not be possible for birds, as it might be with plants for example. iNat curators do their best to stay on top of things like that…
They are, when they aren’t super broad or cryptic themselves. But i haven’t found that these are being consistently described by the splitters when they do their thing. I think when people update taxa on iNat they need to be sure to add the compexes too.
so imagine life not as split into magical ‘species’ units but instead a phylogenetic tree from the level of kingdom to the level of genet or even individual. You can draw all kinds of lines in there, all of which would be ‘real’. I know you understand that ‘species’ is a human construct and that we choose where to draw those lines, so i’m not sure why you are stuck at the lines needing to be so far down in the twigs? It’s pretty simple, really. Push things too far down to the trunk and it becomes useless (Quercus maximus or Salix lumpensis are just as useless to field ecologists, like you said). Pushing it too far into the twigs is just as problematic though ( as 36 species split off of black oak based on which side of a hill an acorn fell) I guess because we can see the smaller branches of the tree of life people want to draw them out more? which i kinda get, when it comes to mapping wetlands, we can find the smaller ones on LIDAR, when it comes to defining natural communities we can use statistics and field plots to define those in more detail… etc etc. but one can do that by making some of these non genetically distinct entities into subspecies, not species.
i don’t know why you think i want them to ignore it. I want them to save the supersplitting for subspecies. They can describe as many as they want. Alternatively i want them to define reasonable sections and species complexes if they are going to split things ad infinitum.
definitely.
I’m sure you are aware of stuff like this : https://plants.usda.gov/wetinfo.html if you think i’m resistant to cryptic species, wait until you try to get developers and politicians to use them. I don’t even know how we are going to deal with it and again, it’s another unnecessary problem we don’t need. But i guess that’s just what our species is about.
I don’t know when they turned into that. If you’re going to claim that a lot of species are now fictions created by taxonomists, can you point to a few examples? You’re describing a widespread decline in my science without providing any specific examples to back up your claims. I’m not sure how to engage with that productively.
Can’t get what, exactly? If you have a specific example where modern taxonomy has made it impossible for you to identify a plant, tell us about it. I’m happy to provide taxonomic perspective, and to suggest appropriate alternative names should we need something for use in this venue. But if you just want to complain about those darned taxonomists and make vague generalizations, I’ll leave you to it.
It’s not that i think the species are fictions, i just don’t think they should be at species level. They probably make good subspecies or varieties. For instance, splitting caulophyllum gigantea off of thalictroidies… I guess that is a good example, they intergrade wildly, they don’t seem to have any meaningfully different niche, and they can’t be differentiated most of the year. it isn’t really clear if some individuals can be differentiated at all. What added value do we get from having early blue cohosh as a species not a subspecies? At least that genus isn’t a huge one but basically, you can’t differentiate cohosh in the summer here at all. You can look at carex trisperma vs billingsii, in truth i can tell those apart in the field but billingsii is just a narrow-leaved variety presumably because it grows in full sun instead of shade. Why is this a different species? Why are Lonicera morrowii vs tartarica different species? They also hybridize very freely and look nearly identical and no trait is consistently usable. The newly split off Phragmites in north america: We have some excellent botanists here, way beyond my level, who can’t consistently tell those apart and basically concede it usually isn’t possible. What about Toxicodendron rydbergii vs radicans or Parthenocissus quinquefoloa vs its look alikes. Are those consistently different enough to warrant species vs subspecies? Why? What does it gain us? Isn’t that what subspecies are for? I will concede Brassica nigra and Hirshfeldtia incana are different species, but different GENUS? That also makes no sense. Some of the scrub oaks like dumosa in California are split into varying species and freely intergrade with each other. Like not in the ‘sometimes i find a weird oak…’ way but literally, as you travel, they slowly intergrade into each other, totally clines within a species or something. They seem to be mostly parsed out based on location. I could come up with plenty more but there is probably no point. But please remember: i am not saying these are different nor that there is no value in describing the differences. I am simply asking what value it has to differentiate them at this higher taxonomic level (higher on the ‘tree’)… and please don’t drag out the well worn taxonomist argument that basically comes down to 'who cares, they are objectively different species, deal with it, [implication that i am lazy or something because i can’t tell something apart in summer]"… that’s minimizing and doesn’t solve the problem. And there is a problem. And a lot of why it makes me so frustrated is i don’t see any attempt by taxonomists to take it into account? They just do their thing, publish more papers, create more species, without any apparent awareness that there are also costs to splitting.
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