Taxonomic Swap 27273
(Committed on 2017-12-19)
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Comments
Yup. There has never been a lot of consistency in the botanical community as to whether this epithet should be "caerulea" or "coerulea". E. James, author of "Aquilegia coerulea", even used "coerulea" and "caerulea" in different editions of the same publication.
Treating orthographic variants as separate names, one correct and the other not, is a mistake, but perhaps one that cannot be avoided in the iNaturalist taxonomy database. The proper treatment of them is as variants of the same name.
True that there is no way in iNat to treat the two names equally (make them both pop up on the screen etc.). The situation that existed with these names is the one I think we really want to avoid: that both had their own taxon page with different observations logged under each name, so that it was treated as two completely different species. This had been flagged for review, and when I made the change as a curator, I went with the name that appeared to have the greatest acceptance, by checking www.itis.gov, USDA, BONAP, and the number of google hits. BONAP is an outlier - it is using caerulea. The others favored coerulea. Technically, I believe the "correct" name defaults to the spelling used by the first person to describe the species, who gave it its name. If anyone is interested in doing that research, we could always update the name to either spelling in the future. At least now it is treated as a single species, and it can be searched for using either spelling.
For what it's worth, Aquilegia coerulea is the first-published form:
http://www.ipni.org/ipni/idPlantNameSearch.do?id=60438279-2
The full rules on this issue for plants are here:
www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/main.php?page=art60
Short version: stick with the name as published except for a complicated list of exceptions where the name as published contains an error that should be corrected.
@aspidoscelis, thanks for looking into that!
It's an orthographic variant