Taxonomic Merge 92562
(Committed on 2021-08-12)
|
|
merged into |
|
Comments
Thanks for the additonnal research info Thomas. Where is he debate at these days about reconciling morphometrics differences with regards to genetic ones?
Phil
Ideally both would be included, along with other factors like geography, habitat, behavior, etc. It's pretty rare to see all those though, and it's up to personal discretion whether you accept any given taxonomic conclusions regardless of how they're reached.
So are you saying that as one of iNat's taxonomic 'curators' you can just chose not to implement changes if you don't find proposals convincing enough? I was under the impression that once a change was agreed upon by some taxonomic review committee it was a done deal. And as I write this I'm not even sure how that process works. Is there some sort of international committee like that, and how do they reach any consensus?
Ah well I was more talking theoretically in the broad sense. iNat prefers to follow external sources for taxonomy, and so we use MolluscaBase for mollusks. This merge is consistent with MolluscaBase. I just didn't want to start merging a whole bunch of names when there are folks on iNat who know way more about these animals than I do. I've ruffled feathers before and would prefer to avoid that again. :)
I see what you mean. Some folks ruffle at the slightest breeze of change... ; )
@redgarter Here's another from the same paper. It almost appears to support subspecies, but doesn't explicitly say it. Johnson et al. (2018) was a similar study: both looked at shell shape, geography, and DNA. However, Johnson et al. (2018) used nuclear sequencing in addition to 2 types of mitochondrial sequencing (Lopes-Lima et al. [2019] just did the 2 mitochondrial types). Their results would not support subspecies, but also didn't look at much morphology.
Also tagging @srichard89, who brought this up, and top IDer @dbarclay.