Flag for Taxon: Devil's Stinkhorn (Phallus rubicundus)
| Flagger | Content Author | Content | Reason | Flag Created | Resolved by | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| davidenrique | Devil's Stinkhorn (Phallus rubicundus) |
it comprises two different species: P. rubicundus and P. rugulosus (see comments for elaboration) |
Mar. 20, 2020 14:45:10 +0000 | Not Resolved |
Comments
@jacksonnugent You might want to weigh in on this too.
By 'changing all P. rubicundus' I assume you are suggesting adding your identification of R. rugulosus' to all the relevant records? Or are you suggesting a taxon swap to 'change' all records? I would prefer the former and not the latter.
I should add that we can create a 'taxon split' where P. rubicundus get mapped to rubicundus/rugulosus. That isn't something I have done. I believe it is really only appropriate when taxa are linked to atlases and distinct defined ranges which is not the situation here.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide
I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between those two options. Would the first option literally just add one ID of P. rugulosus under my name to all of the P. rubicundus observations? I guess that would work, although I think it would be a lot messier. A lot of P. rubicundus observations have multiple IDs as such, so adding an ID wouldn't take them out of research grade. We would have tons of RG "P. rubicundus" observations that are actually P. rugulosus.
The nice thing about the second option is that we need to convince far fewer people to change their IDs back to P. rubicundus, so we could achieve a higher quality data set much faster.
Edit: Yeah, the two species don't really have distinct ranges, so I don't think a taxon split would be best. I'm not super sure how that works though.
My reluctance to perform a taxon swap is because I prefer to restrict those to synonymic swaps. That isn't the situation here. This is splitting a misapplied name and that's fine when the taxa involved are geographically separated and so the process can be automatically applied. But, I do understand the issue when there are so many records involved. I'm not sure. @jameskm - your view?
Since (I assume) these two have basically the same range, doing a taxon split here would just cause all identifications of P. rubicundus to be changed to Phallus. They would then have to be manually sorted back into (the new) P. rubicundus and P. rugulosus. There is a tool to see which observations were IDed as P. rubicundus (https://www.inaturalist.org/identifications?current=any&taxon_id=207605), so you wouldn't just get lost searching for these in Phallus. Might be a way to fiddle with that link to get it to show only observations at Phallus, but I am not sure how yet.
The benefit of this over just going through them all and disagreeing is that this provides a clean slate, or as close to one as possible; dissenting IDs as P. rugulosus will stand, and any observations with them will get switched to P. rugulosus, and any switched to just Phallus can be reviewed and reidentified as P. rubicundus. It will require someone to go through them still, and @davidenrique seems the best suited to it. Would you be willing to do that?
I suppose at the end of the process we could delete the incorrect 'synonymic' name resulting from the swap. Having misapplied names appearing under synonymy is misleading.
In a split, you wouldn't end up with the input taxon listed as a synonym of either output taxon, so that shouldn't be a problem. We would just have to create a new Phallus rubicundus, which shouldn't be a problem either.
I would be very reluctant to use a swap to fix this problem as well, since it would put us essentially in a mirrored situation to the existing one; one taxon, with some wrong IDs that will have to be sorted out again, and you still have to get a number of people to change their IDs because even for genuine P. rubicundus, all of their IDs will now dissent and say P. rugulosus. I think that a split is a much better choice here, even without a geographic distinction between the two taxa.
Hmm... if I'm understanding this correctly, I think that's a great solution. I'm certainly willing to go through and ID the P. rubicundus, which shouldn't be too difficult since there are far fewer of them. It'll be a lot easier than what I've been doing up to this point, lol :D
As far as the ranges, It's not entirely true that they have exactly the same range. That doesn't really make much of a difference elsewhere (for example, there's so few observations from Africa that I don't mind just going through them all), but if possible I'd exclude Australia from this. There's a very red Phallus sp. in Australia which has traditionally been called P. rubicundus (along with the P. rugulosus found there), but I'd be willing to bet that it'll eventually be described as a new species. Since I have no better name for it though, I think we're stuck calling it P. rubicundus for now. I could certainly go and ID those back into P. rubicundus, but it would be nice if it's possible to exclude Australia from this change.
Aah ok. I misunderstood the intent. I support the split..
Okay, so I have drafted a split: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/74148. I only atlased the new P. rubicundus to say it is found in Australia. This means that all identifications of the old P. rubicundus in Australia will just get switched over to the new one. Other than that, identifications of P. rubicundus will get swapped to just Phallus. I would feel a little better about this if there were some sources I could cite for the split. Do you have some?
You mean sources for Australia? I included some sources to show that they're different species in the original comment, but I don't have anything specifically about Australia.
I think the draft looks good!
Just sources in general. Ah, I missed those links. Thanks!
Regarding Australian P. rubicundus, I think most are correct.
It seems to occur primarily in garden mulch and I suspect it is introduced in Australia, so is then more likely to be true P. rubicundus. David Enrique do you have any morphological reason to suggest it is different? Or alternatively any ITS or nLSU sewuences of real rubicundus? If donI can share an unpublished Australian one for comparison.
@mattbarrett I don't know of anything published, I just suggested that we leave the Australian ones alone because of what I've seen going through the observations. Here's how I would summarize and generalize the differences (keeping in mind that there's always variation in every population/species, and nature loves to break rules):
P. rubicundus: true rubicundus are pink, with a stipe that is quite cylindrical (sometimes swollen a little in the middle), very porous with small round pores, and usually relatively robust overall. The cap looks relatively thick and solid.
P. rugulosus: this is a quite variable species. Some rare ones are white or almost so (just yellowish), but the bulk of them are yellowish white at the bottom and become a yellowish orange towards the top (sometimes a more reddish orange, but those are rarer). Overall they are very gracile- much skinnier, longer, more tapered towards the top, with very thin receptacles/caps that are often very similar in width to the stipe, sometimes making it difficult to tell that they have a separate cap. The texture of their pseudostipe is also different- sometimes it's wrinkly, like this one, sometimes it's more like stretched out bread dough- but overall it's definitely less porous than P. rubicundus, and the pores that it does have tend to be larger and elongated. Because their internal structure seems to have longer and more squared chambers, they form longitudinal folds along the pseudostipe as they dry up.
Australian Phalluses: There's a reason I didn't want to mess with them, and it's because I can't fully figure them out. They break all the rules. However, I think they're more similar to P. rugulosus than to P. rubicundus. They tend to be a deeper, redder orange than the yellowish orange of rugulosus. Some of them are downright red, and these two observations by the same user are so red that I suspect the photos have been edited, but the rest of the observations look fine and editing a photo to look like that isn't as easy as it might seem. As those examples show, the general morphology is more like P. rugulosus, although their caps are more granulose and the ones I've seen seem to be thicker. The texture is generally more like that of P. rubicundus, it's quite porous with smallish round pores..... but exceptions abound. Here's a more yellowish orange one with a different texture, here is another orange one with a smoother texture, and here are two pink ones next to a little yellow one, and a range stipe textures. This observation is the most similar to P. rubicundus that I've seen in Australia. If it had been made in the southern US or in Africa, I would definitely call it P. rubicundus.
As for squences, I don't have much experience with them, and don't really know how to properly interpret them. Cooperj might be interested in your sequence data though.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_splits/74148 has been reverted
The old P. rubicundus is still marked as an inactive taxon. Is there some way to fix the issue (something like what James suggested), or are we stuck with just going through and trying to fix it manually through individual IDs?
I activated Phallus rubicundus 207605 and inactivated Phallus rubicundus 1062619
There are 5 recent obs on Phallus rubicundus 1062619, to fix this Phallus rubicundus 1062619 should prob be swapped with Phallus rubicundus 207605. I think that will get us back to where we were.
Regarding what to do moving forward, I call the split that was reverted a 'retroactive split' which is needed when iNat has species A (sensus lato) for a while and the community gets comfortable with what that means in terms of distribution etc. Then suppose species B is a part of species A (sensu lato), but instead of splitting species A (sensu lato) into species B and species A (sensu stricto) someone adds species B. Then we're left with a situation where species A (sensu lato) is cooccurring with species B. A retroactive split splits species A (sensu lato) into a new species A (sensu stricto) and the existing species B.
My first question is whether this is more of a situation of identification confusion where people don't really know what species or have the information to make good decisions about what the various choices are. (If thats the case I think this should be handled with IDs, not a retroactive split)
Or is this more a case where the community had a clear sense for what P. rubicundus (sensu lato) meant (ie its distribution, what it was and what it wasn't) and the addition of P. rugulosus threw a ringer into this. (If thats the case I think this should be handled with a retroactive split)
I have to say just looking at the genus https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/54593-Phallus there are species grafted there from the wrong genus (e.g. Dictyophora bicampanulata) so its hard for me to imagine that this branch of the tree is well known enough to warrant a retroactive split (e.g. its not like we're talking about whether there's one moose Alces alces or two moose Alces alces and Alces americana). But I'm not super familiar with Phallus
Second question, are these output species P. rubicundus (sensu stricto) and P. rugulosus easily separated from distribution? If so atlases can reassign IDs to the output species. If not, all the split will do is coarsen a bunch of obs to genus Phallus. If that the goal here, its relatively easy to just go through the offending P. rubicundus obs and roll them back to genus by adding an ID of Phallus
There are very few branches of the kingdom fungi that are 'known' in the sense you use. Perhaps the best known are those associated with biosecurity. We will continue for decades to have changes as a consequence of a universal adoption of a phylogenetic species concept. That change has numerous consequences. It throws into doubt all older names where types (where they exist) cannot be unambiguously interpreted. The morphological variability in fungi is considerable and underestimated by those familiar with other groups (there are many cryptic and spatially overlapping species, not necessarily closely related). Microscopy is a requirement to identify the majority of fungi. The majority of species remain undescribed and misapplications are the normal (especially the incorrect application of names outside their range, e.g. The USA use of names originally described from European taxa). And finally the number of profesional mycologists studying non-biosecurity related fungi is orders of magnitudes less than plants or animals, and yet fungi are the second largest kingdom of life. The situation for mycology is very differnet to botany and many areas of zoology and that needs to understood. Our attemps to record and manage fungal data needs to be viewed in that context. We do the best we can, and that seems the appropriate course of action given the situation. Support for that is appreciated, even if we make occasional mistakes.
Ah... this is getting too complicated. Scott- I can answer the questions if you'd like, but either way I'm going through and reviewing/re-IDing all of the observations anyway ("only" 8 more pages to go).
Edit: Jerry (CooperJ) makes a great point, I agree 100%.
There has been a lot of confusion between P. rugulosus and P. rubicundus, with many people lumping the two species together and just calling everything P. rubicundus. The main differences are that:
P. rubicundus is a pink or red species (although beware- they become orange when dried), and it has a proportionally thicker and more cylindrical stem, sometimes with the middle portion a bit swollen.
P. rugulosus is orange or yellowish (often being lighter/paler near the bottom), has a skinny stem, which is often noticeably tapered towards the tip.
Both Mycobank and Species Fungorum treat P. rugulosus as distinct.
I'm not sure if this is the best strategy, but I propose changing all P. rubicundus observations to P. rugulosus. I've been going through all of the observations, and the overwhelming majority of them are P. rugulosus. I think it would be much easier to go through them and change the ID to P. rubicundus rather than the other way around.