Tridacna. This
happens when we can't automatically assign an identification to one of the
output taxa.
Review identifications of Tridacna squamosina 739094
Taxonomic Split 74799
(Committed on 2020-04-13)
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Comments
Marine fauna speciates in predictable patterns in the Western Indian Ocean. The dividing line for species endemic to this region is roughly around Socotra. There's a map approximating this relationship here: https://sci-hub.tw/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jbi.12526
Thus T. elongatissima falls within an area encompassing Somalia to Mauritius to South Africa. The locality data in the Tridacna study is limited by the lack of available specimens and doesn't indicate the true distribution of these species.
[Edit: the entire country of Mauritius should be presumed within this range. There's even a chance Chagos is involved, but that's more conjectural.]
OK but that's not data on Tridacna specifically. I believe that that's probably the correct ranges for Tridacna, but the Tridacna article doesn't give hypothesized ranges. I don't even know if including those would be appropriate.
The Kenyan and South African specimens should be included within T. elongatissima. Those are important (but expected) extensions of the known distribution of this species.
this looks good to me!
thank you, but by not including South Africa in this, we now have these important observations stuck at genus-level until more people update their identifications... the point of doing the taxon swap was to avoid that
There was not sufficient literature to include South Africa.
I did actually provide you with literature on the biogeography in Western Indian Ocean marine life. I could have provided several more relevant studies. It's a well-investigated topic, one which I have a fair bit of expertise in. You instead unilaterally decided what was "sufficient" here. I guess that is a luxury you get being a curator here, but science is collaborative.
FWIW I agree that South Africa should be added to the Tridacna elongatissima (sensu stricto) atlas. I updated the taxon framework relationships
@loarie @joe_fish How does this look? One potential issue I found was that although T. squamosina and T. elongatissima are sister taxa, taxonomically T. elongatissima was never considered a synonym of T. squamosina, which means this isn't technically a split from T. squamosina (sensu lato) to T. squamosina (sensu stricto) and T. elongatissima. I have some hesitation with this, then, because records of T. squamosina in the West Indian Ocean may not have actually been "T. squamosina" and therefore may not be T. elongatissima. However, it looks like @joe_fish was leading the IDs there recently (at least since the taxon was flagged) so I'm assuming this article was used for those IDs too. A note on the atlases: I was only using the localities listed in the article. This means I did not include Sudan or Eritrea for T. squamosina even though it is probably present there. I did include Israel though because that seemed reasonable enough to include seeing it's between Egypt and Jordan. The observations from Kenya and South Africa should be checked because those regions are not included on the atlas for T. elongatissima. I did include Mauritius because it was mentioned on p. 15, but it wasn't on the map and it didn't specify if that was the country or just the island—I put the whole country.