Taxonomic Swap 46806 (Committed on 2019-02-01)

Treatment on iNaturalist currently remains as a species complex, not as an individual species. Within the carnea-group, species are impossible to distinguish from photos and require analysis of mating songs.

NOTE that this is essentially a split into no less than 15 species, several of which are yet to be added to iNaturalist.

[!] Species cannot be identified apart from a specialist in this complex. Confidence in online-only IDs is essentially 0%. Morphology is noted in the literature as generally being useless with this group.

[!] Species are either Palearctic or Nearctic, not Holarctic. Individual species ranges overlap and cannot be used to delineate species. All recorded regions have several members of this complex described.

[!] True C. carnea occurs nowhere in the Americas. Various references claiming such are (a) several decades out of date or (b) referring to the complex and not a particular species.

[!] Common names do not properly belong to a single species At best, these refer to the complex if not the genus level.

[!] Further taxonomic issues between Chrysoperla and Chrysopa still need to be addressed on iNaturalist as several duplicate taxa exist.

• Brooks, 1994

• Henry et al., 2002

• Ventura et al., 2002

• Henry & Wells, 2007

• Bozsik et al., 2009

Discovering the True Chrysoperla carn... (Citation)
Added by jonathan142 on February 1, 2019 10:04 AM | Committed by jonathan142 on February 1, 2019
replaced with

Comments

@jonathan142 I understand that the community is frequently misIdentifying observations to Chrysoperla carnea when they should preferably be ID'd to a coarser level. But please don't use taxon changes to change what was intended by identifiers. The correct action here should be (however tedious) to add your own polite comments and identifications to observations (rather than using taxon changes to alter other people's identifications). This is similar to the Scolia dubia issue where you used a taxon change to refine users identifications from the species level to the ssp level. Am I making sense here about how taxon changes should never be used to alter what is meant by other users identifications? Thanks for responding and happy to clarify anything that might still be unclear

Posted by loarie over 3 years ago

I Scott. This was a much more complex taxonomic issue. These were various species that were split off in recent literature that, previously, had been synonymized. This has been the result of a bunch of ongoing research within the genus. This resulted in a major restructuring of the tree including a significant change in the definition of the species along with the addition of a significant number of species resurrected from synonymy. (These changes in definitions have also resulted in further issues, including at least one potential case of a nomen dubium that's still under investigation.)

Posted by jonathan142 over 3 years ago

I understand, and its fine for you to add a complex as you've done. But please don't every swap the nominate species within a complex into the parent complex. Swaps inactivate the input and that would only be the case if Chrysoperla carnea was not a valid species. And complexes must have the nominate species as a member of the complex (e.g. complex Chrysoperla carnea must have species Chrysoperla carnea as a member). Does that make sense?

A secondary issue is the scale of these controversial taxon changes you're making. This change touched 1386 identifications of Chrysoperla carnea (311581) made by 1024 different users such as the 3 IDers of this obs https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/253902. Big taxon changes like this are extremely disruptive both in terms of database processing and community confusion. Please mention me before committing big taxon changes like this if they are at all not standard. In this case I recommend you should have aded the complex (and re-grafted the children) but if a bunch of observations were overly confidently ID'd as species Chrysoperla carnea that you think should be ID'd as compelx Chrysoperla carnea you should sort this out by adding ID's and comments or better yet creating a journal post that explains to the community what the different species in the complex are and how to distinguish them (or why they can't be distinguished) to help the community help you properly ID obs. Here's an example: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/loarie/20740-identifying-cycadians-genus-eumaeus

If you were trying to split Chrysoperla carnea (sensu lato) into Chrysoperla carnea (sensu stricto) and several other taxa, you should have made a taxon split with Chrysoperla carnea as the input and Chrysoperla carnea and the other species carved off as output. But in that case its very important that there's clear information on how the observations can be distributed among the output species. Splits aren't a good choice if there's no way the observations can be assigned to the output species and the intention is just to roll ID's back the common ancestor - rolling IDs back to a common ancestor because they can't be confidently ID'd to species should be done via the ID process, not via taxon changes.

Does that make sense? But please don't use taxon swaps to replace IDs of a species with it's complex parent as in this example or to roll IDs of a species forward to the defendant ssp as in the Scolia dubia example. And please mention me if there are more than a few hundred observations on the input taxon of a taxon change your are planning to commit. Thanks!

Posted by loarie over 3 years ago

That doesn't really make sense for this case (I think we may be speaking of different parts of the taxonomy?) as I'm not sure that addresses the taxonomy. What I mean is that, in the literature, Chrysoperla carna was literally split into a complex, over multiple publications, where the oldest name was temporarily rendered a nomen dubia (I'll have to check back in with my lacewing contacts to see if this has been resolved yet). Over the span of the publications just within the history of iNaturalist, more and more species were removed from synonymy, resulting in very differently defined species. As noted in the swap, this is truly a taxonomic split in the literature (regrettably, it's taken about a year to get a proper listing of species that were split out - and that's with great thanks to Dr. John Oswald - but it's literally all of the members of the complex that were added during 2019 and possibly 2018). This was also before it was possible to include the input taxon as the output of a split. There are still additional species currently being split from the old definition and being described as entirely new species, but the biggest changes to the species involved have been over the past 10 years or so.

I've actually been in the process of getting a journal post up for US species (at least the most commonly encountered species). This would cover all Chrysopidae of the eastern US plus the more readily identifiable ones in the western US. So I'm definitely hoping that ends up being a helpful resource. As far as the complex on a global scale, though, that's really going to be impossible with those species most recently split out. They're literally only separable based on stridulation patterns of their songs or DNA barcoding. A few are more geographically isolated from other members, but most overlap in range with at least another species or two. Probably the best that would be possible on that level would be notes on species ranges, and even that would end up being fairly limited with a few of the most recently removed species from synonymy.

But, yes, if this sort of issue pops up in the future, I can certainly tag you beforehand (the move involved in discussion, the better). I had attempted to communicate with other curators on these sorts of issues to try to figure out what to do that's going to be least disruptive (that's incidentally why the complexes were added - to prevent a split with 10+ newly removed-from-synonymy species from moving them up to genus). Additional notes about their identity were included in the swap beyond the purely taxonomic side to try to prevent confusion (I also try to include notes in my own IDs on both taxonomic standing and identification).

Would it be better, then, if similar swaps are needed, to note the list of species that have recently been removed from synonymy? Since I finally have a good listing of current names (again, with many thanks to John Oswald!), that might better explain the issues here. I'd just need to get my computer to a point where Catalina will cooperate with pulling papers back up if that would be useful.

Posted by jonathan142 over 3 years ago

great thanks

Posted by loarie over 3 years ago

At long last, I have a new computer up and running so can pull up the papers again without killing my machine. Here are those initial ~15 species split in the literature referenced above. A couple were further split (the 'nipponensis' cluster in particular). I've also included a couple of quotes that expressly note the taxonomic splitting of the old C. carnea concept in recent years.

C. affinis stat.rev (may represent Cc4)
C. agilis (represents Cc3 'Malta')
C. bolti sp.nov (2018) (represents 'adamsi-K')
C. calocedrii sp. nov. (2012)
C. carnea temp. nom.dub. (noted as "ambiguous" by Canard & Thierry, 2007; debated primarily between Cc2 and Cc4 as of András et al., 2009, each of which has been split by different authors into a separate species)
C. downesi (in part)
C. duellii sp. nov. (2019) (may represent 'downesi-K')
C. heidarii sp. nov. (2014)
C. lucasina (represents Cc1)
C. nigrocapitata sp. nov. (2015) ('nipponensis-B' = I)
C. plorabunda (in part)
C. pallida sp.nov
(represents Cc2)
C. shahrudensis sp.nov (2018)

'carnea-Kyrgyzstan' nom.prov.
'downesi-Kyrgyzstan' nom.prov.
'nipponensis-II' nom.prov.
'nipponensis-III' (=A1) nom.prov.
'nipponensis-IV' (=A2) nom.prov.
Cc5 'generator' nom.prov.

"What was once considered a single Holarctic species of green lacewing, Chrysoperla carnea (Stephens), has recently been shown to be a complex of many cryptic, sibling species, the carnea species group, whose members are reproductively isolated by their substrate-borne vibrational songs." (Henry et al., 2002)

"We know only very little about the presence, distribution, ecological demands, preferences, habitats of the taxon which formerly was called as Chrysoperla carnea." (András et al., 2009)

Posted by jonathan142 over 3 years ago

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