Why does a taxon split do this?

Hi, all,

Recently, someone alerted me about a taxon split performed on the genus Eurema and i noticed that in this observation:https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/16253414 that IDs of Eurema were all replaced with a lower level subfamily ID due to the split.

Why does this happen?

I’m not too familiar with taxon splits as i’ve never done one myself but shouldn’t the generic level IDs be kept? Why is there a need to downgrade it to subfamily?

My only guess is that the system doesn’t know which one of the newly split genera the “old” Eurema ID was referring to so it played safe by choosing a subfamily-level ID containing both.

Thanks

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This is correct.


The user who drafted the split did not atlas the other genus, which means the system has no way of knowing where to replace Eurema with Abaeis and where to replace it with Eurema. This means that every ID of Eurema got replaced with Coliadinae which is a bit of annoying and should be avoided. Not the best curation job, but maybe it was unavoidable—I know nothing about butterfly taxonomy.

You can read about the details of taxon changes here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#changes

6 Likes

Thanks, i thought so. Also, thanks for showing the screenshot, i couldn’t find this message.

This is rather annoying. Personally, i think it would have been a lot better to manually swap out every species that is in Abaeis instead. Normally i prefer to make swaps, and only make them when i come across an observation that needs this swap rather than attempting to change everything

Yes, but I think this was for the observations only at genus that needed to be transferred. But I agree this was not set up super well.

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