Taxonomic Swap 44473
(Committed on 2018-12-19)
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Comments
Incidentally I believe the name C. coralloides is to be preferred over C. cristata not because Linnaeus published it first and therefore has priority.
Both the epithets appear in the sanctioning work of Fries, in the Elenchus Fungorum. Epithets appearing any any of the sanctioning works of Persoon (for certain groups) or Fries automatically have priority over all prior competing homonyms and synonyms (Art 15 ICN), even those in L's Species Plantarum. I believe the reason that C. coralloides wins is because the epithet appears before cristata in the Elenchus. Might be wrong, but I believe that is the case.
I assume, hope, my comment on this swap was read ...
https://inaturalist.nz/flags/284123#activity_comment_2380469
This is an interesting case. Certainly until recently you could not taxon swap a parent species without also first moving all the child taxa. Clavulina coralloides is, I agree, an older name for C. cristata. However there is Clavulina cristata var. novozeleandica. It is a good taxon. There is no C. coralloides var. novozealandica for this to be swapped to, and neither is the same as the parent (broad taxon concept of) C. coralloides, or the narrower autonym C. coralloides var. coralloides (in fact the autonym at the rank of variety also doesn't exist anyway). It seems the iNat rules have been changed to allow the species swap without blocking it due to orphaned infra-specific taxa. Common sense, and nomenclature, seem to have prevailed.
I should add that the SpeciesFungorum page you refer to is incorrect. It lists all the infra-specific taxa as though they were synonyms of C. coralloides. That is misleading. In most cases those infra-specics will be like the case of C. cristata var. novozealandica. They are listed that way in SF simply so the data can be transferred to the Catalogue of Life, because of a database design limitation in CoL, not because of any truth to the assertions. It is a tricky issue that hinges on the notion that somehow infra-specific taxa are 'contained' within the parent taxon. Sometimes that might be an acceptable approach, although falling out of favour within a phylogenetic species concept. What these kinds of merging taxon swaps do, though, is make it quite difficult to unravel the records relating to the infra-taxa when they are once again recognised independently. iNat seems to have recently adopted an odd, but acceptable compromise to get around that. It now lists C. cristata var zealandica as a child of C. coralloides, even though the specific epithets differ, and not forced into synonym with the parent, like SF. That is odd looking, but works for me. Well done team iNat!