Joe Farah said:
The subspecies thing is a joke
I mean, I understand the need to have a universally recognizeable name for all these animals, but if you ask me (and any biologist worth his/her salt), the latin nomenclature should stop at the species level. The "species" is the unit of life. The subspecies tries to label an animal as being "separate" from the main group. This leads to an underappreciation of how varied a species is.
When you think of all those lineata subspecies as being different geckos, you fail to recognize how much diversity there is within the species Phelsuma lineata.
Sorry to say I know very little about lineata identification or herp systematics, but I do have a thing or two to say about subspecies in general.
Nomenclature is phylogenetic. A family contains all related genera in one 'tree', a genus contains all the species on its branch on the tree, and a species all the individuals on a given twig, so to speak. So where do subspecies come in? This is the source of some debate in avian systematics.
The strongest argument to me is to keep subspecies phylogenetic as well. Within any species, there are portions of the population that are the beginnings of a new branching, or incipient species. These populations, in addition to morphological differences that originally caused them to be noted as subspecies, also have distinct genetic differences from the main species. Usually, there is still some gene flow with the main species, and they aren't totally different, so they are still incipient species rather than qualifying as full species (although there are still plenty of cases where it is hard to draw the line). These should be called subspecies. They represent a real familial lineage within the species.
So, where does the current taxonomy stand on this? Robert Zink, an avian systematist, published a little while ago his results of testing and a summary of other's work of a wide range of species. He found that birds on average have about 4 or 5 described subspecies, but genetics found an average of 1.9 phylogenetically distinct taxa within a bird species. This means, if you take the strict phylogenetic view of subspecies, that there are far too many described subspecies. The number should be reduced to just those that have genetic distinction.
What are the others? Zink and others make the argument that all the 'extra' subspecies are described merely on the basis of few, arbitrary characteristics such as one plumage trait or size. They represent variability rather than a true lineage.
I don't know whats going on with Phelsuma subspecies, but I thought I would post this view of the topic to let you guys know. This is one of the topics I hope to be able to study in grad school in another 3 semesters.
Cheers,
Nick
