Coliadinae)
Taxonomic Split 92975
(Draft)
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split into |
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Comments
I'm not sure of the cause, but a small number of African observations were incorrectly changed to Abaeis along with this change. (it looks like some Asian observations were affected as well)
There are also African observations that went from Eurema to Coliadinae that should have remained as Eurema.
happy to take a look - can you add links with some of these specific issues?
I'm confused by how this taxon change was set up - would it not require Eurema (old) split into Eurema (new) and Abaeis?
Here's a couple of instances of the issue:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/66190180
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39891305
Its ok, and usually preferable, to use a split input as an output - read https://www.inaturalist.org/blog/40417-using-a-taxon-split-input-as-an-output
but I'm not totally sure what the point would be / how it would be have if only 1 of the two outputs was atlased as in this scenario
What I think this split would do is replace all ID's of Eurema and replace them with IDs of the common ancestor of Eurema and Abaeis. If thats not what's happening, definitely a bug we need to investigate
Whether or not this split was a good idea is a different question. Given that its not using atlases to replace ID's of Eurema with Abaeis, it definitely has large costs of replacing Id's with Eurema with the common ancestor of Eurema and Abaeis. To get a sense for whether the costs of existing ID's of Eurema that imply too broad a taxon hanging around warrants a split, I would have checked to better understand how many existing IDs of Eurema we're talking about and whether they could be manually addressed. I'm not sure if that was done
Obviously I'm struggling to keep up with iNat's development!
This seems like a messy outcome, even though it's not typically "approved" to do so, I'd have much rather made the new genus heading and just manually shuffled all the relevant species independently. That's if atlases were not possible to allow the system to continue applying genus IDs rather than subfamily ones.
@silversea_starsong, I would have
1) created new Abaeis species
2) swapped the relevant Eurema species into the new Abaeis species
3) probably stopped there, and let the community manually replace/outvote existing Eurema IDs that meant sensu lato
can you explain what you mean by "made the new genus heading and just manually shuffled all the relevant species independently"? Why would you even bother making a new genus?
@loarie
You just explained what I meant by that. I would have:
1) created Abaeis if it had not already existed
2) swapped each relevant Eurema independently (or all at once, can iNat do that these days?) into Abaeis
3) as you described for step 3
@loarie The genus Abaeis is restricted to the Americas. Large (to the order of hundreds at least) numbers of Eurema from Asia and Africa have now been converted to Coliadinae. Since the genus Abaeis already existed (example: Abaeis nicippe), it is not clear what has been achieved by this change. Can it be undone?
The added trouble is that, down the road, the African Eurema would likely need to be swapped to Terias.
@salmanabdulali, yes if Abaeis had an atlas before committing then Old World IDs of Eurema would have been left in place rather than being replaced with IDs of Coliadinae.
@aleturkmen do the issues associated with this swap make sense to you? Committing big splits like this with thousands of IDs is very distructive and alot can go wrong so its best to mention some other curators before committing to make sure things are looking good. I'm always happy to take a look.
I'll go ahead and revert this now.
ok this is reverted
Thanks.
Should this be deleted?
No: do not delete. This discussion is useful.
If you delete this, then it will just have to be repeated when the next keen enthusiast suggests this same swap again.
Just park this.
I agree with @tonyrebelo. People are already working on 'counterblasts'. Truth be told the world of lepidopteran taxonomy has been set on its ear by Messrs. Grishin, Zhang, Cong et al and all the people who disagree with them. Accusations of taxonomic vandalism are everywhere and at least one Aussie Uni has allowed papers to be published that ignore their (ICZN registered) taxa. Makes an iNat curator's life interesting I would imagine. I would leave well alone until the dust has settled!
@loarie please look into this taxon change - it seems Eurema old has been split into Abaeis and the old Eurema. It might have gone wrong....