Taxonomic Merge 30032
(Committed on 2024-10-06)
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Comments
I'm not intending to curate spp as part of my mammal taxon curator responsibilities. My understanding is that IUCN is inconsistent in its treatment of ssp and probably not a good source. I see now that the taxon curator rules we implemented are preventing you from making this swap. But I'd prefer you own this one as I don't want to take responsibility for these spp changes or any controversy they might cause. Let me see if I can make it so that normal curators can make taxon changes when the output rank is the lowest rank of a complete taxon (in this case species) and all the inputs are descendants of that node as here.
Hi Scott, I wouldn't go with the IUCN Red List for subspecies if it weren't for the paper linked above - hippos are pretty much panmictic across Africa, and there's no point in IDing them to subspecies.
yeah not disagreeing just saying I don't want to take responsibility for committing this split. I'm working on the functionality change I described
@loarie: Jakob, among a few other mammal-savvy users (such as johnnybirder and sea-kangaroo), could be appointed Taxon Curators. That way you would not have to take responsibility for taxon changes you feel uncomfortable with implementing. In addition, you'd be able to share the responsibility of responding to taxon swaps that contain complete mammal taxa overall.
@jakob: H. a. amphibius and H. a. kiboko were introduced into iNat's taxonomy based on a genetic study on hippo mtDNA by Okello et al. (https://www.nature.com/articles/6800711), but I agree that it may be better to consolidate unnecessary taxa than expand upon them.
Thanks, Bobby, the study by Okello et al. has been vastly expanded here https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.13179. Hippos are nearly panmictic across Africa, which I find both surprising and fascinating.
Hi Bobby, any alterations to the 'complete clade' ie all nodes from class mammalia down to species should be discussed here https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/11949-mammal-taxonomy-help-wanted so far the bottleneck is not been the taxon-curator work of making these changes, its the community work of articulating them/agreeing on them on that thread that I posted (e.g. still waiting on Jakob to chime in on bats). As mentioned above, the mammal complete clade does not cover ssp and it was not the intention of the complete taxon functionality to prevent instances of curators swapping ranks finer than the complete clade (ie spp) into their parent within the complete clade (ie sp) we're working on making changes to the software to accommodate that now.
I think that there should be a cooling off period, especially for these rushed DNA jobs.
The plant experience is that within about 5 years when more data becomes available, the old morphological studies are all resurfacing. (not only at subspecies - mainly at higher levels).
The fact is that when data are surprising they are usually wrong: its just that science works slowly and rebuttals to quick and dirty studies take time.
Getting papers published that support the status quo with no changes is very difficult. The more radical the more likely to get publications and citations.
Just so long as in 5 years time these old classifications are available to be restored, rather than having to be re-identified from scratch.
It also bothers me that we cannot make an ID if we disagree with the current situation.
Say I wanted to continue to post Hippopotamus amphibius capensis:
then I cannot do so at present (if this is effected) iNat only allows me to post Hippopotamus amphibius
that is wrong. What should happen is that I should be allowed to post Hippopotamus amphibius capensis, but the system should then automotically update it to Hippopotamus amphibius
i..e. there should be a trail of my dissent!
This is a very real issue in the Cape were several good species have been sunk. Whereas the status quo should previal, identifiers should be able to post their alternative IDs for the record.
This flag was brought up: https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/637895
In general, I'm in agreeance with lumping the Hippo subspecies due to the data presented in Stoffel et. al. (2015). Hippos is a generally an "old" species (approx. 1-1.5 million years old), and the fact there is absolutely no biographical structure after all that time shows how little hippos are evolving, and additionally, how much gene flow is occurring between the purported populations. I don't know if there is any physical differences between the populations, but I would be scared to identify even then due to how arbitrary the distributions are.
I tagged the top 5 identifier for hippo subspecies in the linked flag, and 3 of them would not be opposed to lumping the subspecies. I think we can probably move forward with this.
@loarie