Seriously, did no one think to break Diospyros into separate Genera, Subgenera or Sections? How do you even approaching Identifying all these species? Perhaps many of them are synonyms (Or species Complex)?
There’s no way all of these are Cross Compatible or a hybrid swarm right?
Here’s the study it’s from :
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790313002777
That is a lot of species. However, if you look closely, you will see that not every branch on that tree is a different species. There are, for example, multiple instances of viellardii, veillonii, anisandra, olen, and others. These represent different individual specimens, as seen in Table 1. Looking at multiple specimens of a species allows researchers to get an idea of genetic diversity within a species. (Or decide that they are all different species, if they are splitters 
) When different individuals of a species come out in unconnected branches, such as parviflora in this study, it suggests that the species as currently delineated may not reflect the biological reality.
The takeaway here is that these branches represent genetic lineages, not necessarily species per se.
Exactly, that means those repeat species are Polyphyletic or Paraphyletic as currently circumscribed.
or in other words, some of these species are in the wrong place and could be combined/separated into different species.
Makes me wonder how many of these form a species complex?
oh yea… splitters vs lumpers. Makes me wonder why subspecies aren’t used more often, especially with a species complex.
I wonder if there is any study currently working on sorting these Diospyros spp.. Maybe they could at the very least be sorted into Subgenera & Sections? Or maybe these clades could be named? But I haven’t found any study that does so far or proposes names for them.
Not necessarily. If they come out as, say, three branches of the same clade, with no other species in that clade, that may just indicate genetic variation. D. veillonii in the diagram does this – probably one species given how short the branches are. No species is completely genetically uniform unless it is either apomictic or experiencing severe inbreeding depression.
Very much like what happens to heirlooms when “True to type” is applied?
Like with Heirloom tomatoes, the only way they give you the same traits back is if there’s barely any new reshufflying of genetics in the next generation.
Could something like this be happening in wild species too, especially with Diospyros spp.?
Also what about a species complex? Lines between species are blurred so much, how many species complexes are happening in this tree? and how would we know? very short branches or just by which species hybridizes naturally in the wild (Or both + other things)?
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