Flag for Taxon: New World Giant Swallowtails and Allies (Subgenus Heraclides)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| loarie | treichard | New World Giant Swallowtails and Allies (Subgenus Heraclides) |
elevate to Heraclides genus? |
Mar. 12, 2020 16:49:42 +0000 | borisb |
Comments
Same comment as Pterourus.
ok so conclusion is to maintain Heraclides as a subgenus of Papilio as opposed to elevating it to sp. status ? - FYI @birdernaturalist
I think so, much as I'd like not to.
Yes.
Although the Pelham catalogue now elevates it to genus level, I am fine with leaving it as is for the reasons @kwillmott has mentioned.
Daniel Perez-Gelabert on ZOOTAXA: Checklist, Bibliography and cuantitativa data of the arthropods of Hispaniola (2020 © Magnolia Press) has it under Species status.
Heraclides machaonides (Esper, 1796). Coutsis, 1983: 114; Schwartz, 1989: 131 *H, *DR > TL: Port-au-Prince
It should be noted that https://butterfliesofamerica.com/US-Can-Cat-1-30-2011.htm brings information from 2011-2012, while https://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/L/Neotropical.htm brings updated information from 2017. Also, the System of Information About Brazilian Biodiversity (SiBBR) show Heraclides as a valid genus https://ala-bie.sibbr.gov.br/ala-bie/species/256425
Coupled with the article mentioned by @pedrogenarorodriguez and other works from 2017 to present, I think it is safe to elevate Heraclides to genus level in the database.
I agree, Heraclides should be treated as a genus.
I've reactivated the old Heraclides genus and began the taxon swap with the subgenus. I'll probably wait until this one is complete to tackle the similar issues with the other genera listed in the Pterourus thread, as it seems that recent papers and databases also corroborate their classifications as valid without conflicting with the monophyletic status of Papilio.
I am glad to see Heraclides as a genus, but large numbers (perhaps in the thousands) of previously Research Grade observations have lost that status. The problem is that if previously an observation had one id of Papilio and two ids of Papilio cresphontes it was Research Grade at the species level. But now Papilio is considered a conflicting id, so it gets bumped up to Tribe Papilionini. Is there a fix for this? @loarie
@salmanabdulali yes there is! I'm working right now on moving the species and subspecies to Heraclides (apparently that didn't happened automatically, as it should) so probably until the end of the day this should be resolved.
To fix the issue mentioned by @salmanabdulali, Papilio needs to be split (with Papilio and Heraclides as outputs). This would automatically shift all old Papilio IDs (or, if the genera are atlased, which I'd recommend, all Papilio IDs only in regions of overlap) up to Papilionini, addressing the widespread problem of genus-level Papilio IDs now conflicting with species-level IDs of species now in Heraclides.
Are Pterourus and Chilasa (and other genera?) also going to be removed from Papilio very soon? If so (especially since there are a large number of genus-level IDs of Papilio), I'd recommend holding off on splitting Papilio until the other genus transfers are taken care of and then doing a single Papilio split with all the output genera in question. If there might be some time before Pterourus etc. are resurrected as genera on iNaturalist, though, I'd recommend just going ahead with a two-way split of Papilio into Papilio and Heraclides (and splitting Papilio again later once the other genera are removed).
Yes - someone needs to split Papilio into Heraclides, Papilio and any other genera you want to elevate like Pterourus
please follow
https://help.inaturalist.org/support/solutions/articles/151000015337-section-d-how-to-respond-to-a-flag-requesting-to-split-a-taxon
happy to review any draft changes or answer any questions
Also all of these Papilo species that now descend from Genus Heraclides need to be swapped with new Heraclides taxa https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/883401-Heraclides
@edgar_crispino will you be able to take responsibility for all the many steps involved in this decision to elevate Papilo subgenera? Thank you
@loarie working on it right now! I actually re-activated Heraclides (as genus) and swapped Heraclides (subgenus) with it. That's why I think all the species belonging to the subgenus didn't actually automatically updated to Heraclides. As of the time I'm writing this message the iNaturalist database is updating Heraclides cresphontes, having transferred around 1/18 of all records here in the database. I'm working on the other taxa in Heraclides as well and monitoring the any other changes that still need to be done, but given how many species are involved I believe it will take maybe until tomorrow to to iNaturalist process all the changes once I am done. Then I could work on the other genera mentioned @maxkirsch but using the taxon split tool to makes things faster.
thanks! I think the issue is that you selected 'move children' when you swapped subgenus Heraclides into genus Heraclides. Move children only works properly in certain cases so generally its better to leave it unchecked which requires dealing with children (ie swapping Papilio sp into Heraclides species) before making the swap. Fine to do it in the order you're doing it as long as all the loose ends get sorted and there's no Papilo sp left descending from genus Heraclides etc. -
if you want to elevate other subgenera like Pterourus, it would be best to do that all now so Papilio only has to be split once
To deal with other subgenera like Pterourus, I'd recommend these steps:
1) create all output taxa e.g. Pterourus multicaudata descending from Pterourus etc
2) swap all descendants of subgenus Pterourus e.g. Papilio multicaudata into Pterourus multicaudata
3) swap subgenus Pterourus into genus Pterourus
4) once all the subgenera are elevated, split
Papilio -> Papilio, Pterourus, Heraclides
as you say this decision involves many many taxon changes that need to be made involving many tens of thousands of IDs so it will take alot of work and a lot of processing time. Thanks for doing all of it, if I had to do the work I probably would have argued for us to leave these as subgenera. But as long as you're willing to do all the work and tie up all the loose ends, I support it
thanks for all the work.
It would be good to have a consensus on which subgenera are to be elevated. Heraclides and Pterourus appear to be widely used. Chilasa seems to go back and forth. I can’t recall seeing Menelaides or Achillides used at the genus level. The rest I know nothing of.
There’s widespread consensus in using Heraclides, Pterourus etc in the Americas as genera. However, in Africa and Asia, it seems there is less widespread use of names such as Chilasa, even though, eventually, I think use of those names will gain acceptance.
Now that Heraclides is elevated (only a few records being processed) should I do the same with Pterourus?
I am in favor of elevating Pterourus.
The catch is that If Pterourus is elevated to genus, then Chilasa may also need to be elevated; otherwise Papilio becomes non-monophyletic. See
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4617649/figure/pone.0140933.g002/
Papilio may be paraphyletic for a while, until the remaining genera are figured out. Still think that's better than retaining Papilio s. l.
I created a separate flag for Chilasa at
https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/607412
but I agree with @kwillmott that it would be a good idea to move forward with Pterourus.
Thanks to all for the discussion and work.
I wanted to point out an unintended consequence of the steps that were taken around Heraclides because it'll have implications for other (sub)genera under discussion.
There are about 3,300 observations that got pushed up to tribe level because they have one or more genus-level IDs of Papilio s.l. and one or more observations of Heraclides or Heraclides species after the swaps described above were made. The result is that the swapped IDs are now in conflict with the older genus-level IDs, even though those IDs were "correct" (i.e., "leading" or "improving") at the time they were made.
Here's a link to view these observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lrank=tribe&place_id=66741&taxon_id=207785&ident_taxon_id=883401. (Note: A small number of these are disagreements between species-level IDs, but the vast majority appear to be the situation I described above—one or more older genus-level IDs of Papilio s.l. conflicting with one or more swapped Heraclides IDs, e.g. this one: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/146977367.)
This obviously creates new/additional work for identifiers, and some of the more active identifiers can't help because their IDs are among those that were already swapped.
If the same approach is taken with Pterourus and others, it'll create thousands more problems like this.
However, I also understand @loarie's point that splitting Papilio s.l. multiple times is not a good situation. I'm not sure what the best solution is—maybe this is already the least of multiple evils—but wanted to elevate the issue. (And FWIW, I'm generally a "splitter" by nature so these comments are not coming from an aversion to change on my part—just an aversion to the difficult-to-correct decay in precision on thousands of iNat records over many years because of how the swaps are made.)
This sounds like a problem that needs a coding solution. Perhaps when a new taxonomic name is suggested, the result whether it conflicts or not with a previous name can be used to decide if previous names are considered in determining the resulting name to display. Eg, id 1 = Papilio, id 2 = Papilio thoas, if 3 = Papilio thoas, then names are changed to H. thoas but the original id 1 is now ignored because we know id 2 was not in conflict. There are several situations where this won’t work, but I think they’re likely less common than the unfortunate outcome described above. I’m sure someone with better logic and coding skills can come up with a much better solution, but I don’t think we should be deterred from updating taxonomies by technical challenges.
The issue raised by dringer should be address by my step 4 above:
4) once all the subgenera are elevated, split Papilio -> Papilio, Pterourus, Heraclides
you can read more here https://help.inaturalist.org/support/solutions/articles/151000015337-section-d-how-to-respond-to-a-flag-requesting-to-split-a-taxon
This will replace IDs of Papilio with the common ancestor (Tribe Papilionini) or specific outputs (e.g. Genus Heraclides) to the extent they are separable based on atlases.
this will coarsen some data and may roll back some IDs with only genus level IDs from genus to tribe. It shouldn't impact most obs (e.g. replacing obs sitting at Papilio machaon with IDs Papilo s.l., Papilio machao with IDs of Papilionini, Papilio machao)
But importantly it will remove clashing genus level IDs in the Papilo s.l., Heraclides anchisiades case.
Its important to make this split because:
a) it takes alot of additional IDs to outweigh these unintended disagreements
b) it implies people added incorrect IDs when that wasn't the case (the taxonomy changed)
but it would be good to wait until any additional Papilo s.l. subgenera (e.g. Subgenus Pterourus) are elevated to genus first before making the split so we only have to do it once
We also have many observations where the community id has failed to update. For example, as of this moment,
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/130282080
there's a bug we're still trying to find that results in a few obs from these large swaps not updating. I manually fixed these but still trying to find the bug.
https://butterfliesofamerica.com/US-Can-Cat-1-30-2011.htm has Heraclides as a subgenus of Papilio but https://www.butterfliesofamerica.com/L/All.htm elevates it to genus status. Which should we do there @maractwin @nlblock @birdernaturalist ? also see https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/472192 and https://www.inaturalist.org/flags/409580