I agree with you that it's terrible to deal with so many botanical
names or pseudonames and that they cause great confusion. But there is
simply no alternative! Plants are being collected in the wild all the time
and until they are established as new species or not, it often takes
years and during that period they very often enter cultivation. In
cultivation people must have some way of reffering to those plants and
since no formal botanical name is yet available, people end up using these
nicknames which may reflect some curious characteristic of the plant
or the name of the place where it was found. You can NOT ask
horticulturist to keep from trading their plants because the taxonomists
haven't decided what it is yet!
As to the pseudoname given, just as with formal botanical names,
it is completely up to the person who is giving the name to chose the name
he or she wants to, independently of wether it may "sound nice" or not to
your German/Czech accustomed ears. New species with ugly names are always
being described, but that's a matter of opinion and is a useless opinion
since once a new species is described with that name, you can't just write
an article entitled:
"Nomenclatural change from _D.magaliesbergensis_ to _D.pretty_
because I think the former is ugly"
And thus in the same way we must respect the nicknames given by
others until the taxonomic situation of that plant is defined. If they
refrain from giving these nicknames, it might make thinks easier for the
taxonomists, but will surely not make things easier for themselves, the
horticulturist who deal with those plants everyday in their greenhouses.
As you and I know well, taxonomy is complicated and most CP hobbyist don't
even want to try their hand at it.
So the horticulturists have all the right in the world to call
the plants however they want until the taxonomists decide what the
taxonomic position of the plants are. The other alternative is to make
publishing new species a whole lot easier so that more people could do it.
This could reduce the amount of invalid nicknames, but would surely
increase the amount of synonyms for your list. We've discussed this in the
past on this listserv. Make it too easy, and you'll be flooded with new
names, most of which are synonyms for other species. So now we have the
other extreme, make it too difficult and you'll be flooded with nicknames.
So there is no way out and we have to accept botanically valid
names and invalid nicknames no matter of our opinion as to their 'alien'
sounds.
As to Allen's new species in the petiolaris-complex and your
opinion that they may all be subsp. of D.petiolaris (even D.falconeri??),
it is obvious that though they are closely related and are a clearly a
natural group, there are also a series of morphologic differences between
the taxa he named. There might not be any geographic correlation for
these differences, or at least none that has been noticed yet, but the
differences are clearly there and must at least reflect some kind of
ecological adaptation. Just because we don't understand them doesn't mean
they don't have a meaning.
For example Allen has discovered that the species with the hairier
leaves are more adapted to the dryer habitats, since the hairs help
accumulate dew. In the same way, different types of hairyness of the
peduncles may reflect some adaptation which we don't understand yet, such
as protection of the flowers from different kinds of crawling insects
which might come climbing up the scape to rob nectar. Or for example
lamina shape, which most likely reflects adaptation to trapping specific
prey. As to chromosome numbers, we still aren't sure how these may have
ecological advantages, though it is suspected that different arrangements
of the genes may have certain advantages.
When you say there are intermediates plants with a random
distribution of characteristics, you are reflecting our ignorance of these
adaptations. First of all, you can't expect every species to have a single
unique characteristic. Often it's the reunion of characteristics which is
unique. Second, the characteristics are spread randomly obviously because
characteristics evolve independently from each other, according to the
necessities of the populations in their specific habitats.
So if you check each characteristic independently, of course
you'll find lots of intermediates. But if you check the plants as a whole,
you won't find a continuous series of differences between any 2 of his
species. If we had such a series of variations between any 2 species, THEN
we could say that it was probably a variable species. Though it could
still be something like the Sarracenia hybrid swarms observed in the US,
where all intermediates between 2 or more species can be found in one
area.
The only TRUE intermediates Allen has found, the ones that show
more or less intermediate differences for ALL the characteristics between
2 of these petiolaris-complex taxa, are the hybrids (for example
D.falconeri X D.brevicornis), which according to his observations are
always spread in a clear area, right between the habitats of the 2
parents. Now isn't that curious? Doesn't that show that these species are
adapted ecologically to specific conditions?
So answering your question, YES Allen has proof of isolation. In
some cases geographic, but at least ALWAYS ecologic. He often says that
the way to find new CPs is to look for new soil types. And these are not
only differences induced ecologically by the different soils in the wild,
since Australian Drosera are cultivated worldwide in hundreds of different
soil mixes and have proved to have clear genetic differences which hold on
in cultivation. These plants are clearly and highly adapted to specific
conditions. Yes they are on their way to differentiation from a common
ancestor, but they are already a LONG way along this path.
Kind Regards ( ;-) ),
Fernando Rivadavia
Tokyo, Japan