Currently, Siphanta acuta has a lot of Australian observations, almost 800 (it was almost 1000 yesterday before I re'IDed a lot of obvious errors). Now many of these probably are genuinely S. acuta simply by virtue of it being one of the more common and widely distributed Siphanta in Australia, however, in almost all cases a species ID is simply not possible from the typical pics/observations uploaded to iNat. There are 40 described Siphanta in Australia, many of them very similar looking, and in fact S. acuta falls into a complex of 5 species that are "somewhat variable in size, shape of tegmen and, to some extent, colour and can only be differentiated by examination of the male genitalia" (see https://idtools.dpi.nsw.gov.au/keys/fulgor/flatid/siphanta/siph06.htm?fbclid=IwAR30q7m2dW1qoALg_2qsB0TwBJl6MbQ7cbgGUr_pCr77SSZQxviLOrQX76c)

So my proposition is that we create an S. acuta complex and populate it with the 5 species:

acuta
hebes
angularis
eberhardi
tropica

we then do an atlased swap where only Australian observations of S. acuta get moved to the complex, as currently only S. acuta s.s. is known to be introduced overseas

@matthew_connors @dustaway @nomolosx @nicklambert @reiner
tagging some of the usual suspects, if everyone is ok with this, I'll do this today/tomorrow

I agree with this too. I started looking at ID'ing these a couple of weeks ago but noticed to much variability and inconsistency that I quickly gave up.

Nice one

Sounds good. There are also a couple of sightings of S. eberhardi and S. hebes that should be reverted back too

not sure how spurious this is, but my potential solution is create a bogus species ('Siphanta X'), atlas it for Australia, swap the Siphanta into it, then directly edit its rank and name back to the complex

What if you atlased S. acuta for everywhere, atlased S. hebes (or another one) for just Australia, and then split S. acuta into S. hebes and S. acuta? If you made the complex taxon beforehand then they should all revert back to complex

yeah you're right, will do it now

There's no such thing as an atlased swap, atlases are only used in splits

you could split
Siphanta acuta
into
Siphanta angularis
Siphanta eberhardi
Siphanta hebes
Siphanta tropica

and if you had atlases for all the outputs you could control which IDs of Siphanta acuta got rolled back to the compex ancestor and which ones stayed as Siphanta acuta or went to one of the other outputs
would that do what you want?

thanks that makes sense. Just to clarify also, do I need to atlas S. acuta too, ie the input? Or only the 4 output taxa?

current draft: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxon_changes/122540

cool, thanks Scott. I don't do enough of these changes that aren't just a basic 1 to 1.

I'll atlas S. acuta, will do some digging to see exactly where it's been introduced to

hmm this is very annoying. Two days ago, I went through all the observations of nymphs and egg masses ID'ed as S. acuta and moved them back to Flatidae. But now after this swap, the new IDs have taken precedence, making all my IDs a waste of time

see eg https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148478204

a lot of them probably do fall within the complex, but there are definitely also ones where it's not possible to differentiate the pics from other flatid genera like eg Colgar, hence why I coarsened them in the first place