Re: Naming of CP taxa and Allen's new "species"

Michael.Chamberland (23274MJC@MSU.EDU)
Wed, 09 Oct 96 14:36 EDT

>
> Jan,
>
> 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.

I think this situation occurs only with special taxa, ie CP, cacti, orchids,
and a few other taxa where there's a horticultural interest in "true species".
I'd wager the vast number of new species being discovered are of no immediate
interest to horticulture, ie. new species of Juncus, Phytolacca, Psychotria,
etc.

> 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!

Agreed!

> 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.

No, not "whatever" they want! That would do a disservice to horticulture as
well as to botany! I don't follow the argument against using names such as
"Drosera sp. Lake Badgerup" in the horticulture field. It seems that's
a useful name (indicates locality) which cannot be confused with a latin
name, thus shouldn't be even a candidate for a nomen nudum, right?

> 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.

The nicknames sound infinately better than a flood of slapdash new species
publications in obscure unrefereed journals! :-)

When someone discovers something "new" in the field, and they want to
publish it as a new taxon, I think the onus is on them to do a thorough
investigation--both of the variability of this and related taxa, and of
the literature. This new find may have been found before, and published
in an obscure journal somewhere. It's a poor practice to publish any new
variant as a new species or variety without determining if this is just
an extreme end in a range of variation (or even a hybrid). This shouldn't
be left for some future monographer to figure out... while the amateur
species author drives names into every variant like a mad land speculator,
probing for paydirt! This comes from a missunderstanding of what is
valuable to science.

> 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??),

> 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.

This is very intersting. Is there a published account of variability in
the D. petiolaris complex? Some kind of phenetic study? If not, then on
what basis can a claim be made for random intermediates? Or could these
be hybrids? I must admit I'm made uneasy to see a plant seller also
authoring new plant species. It would seem he'd have a vested interest
in splitting--and he HAS described an awful large number of new plants.
Could Allen be one of those species speculators? Is he shooting wild,
hoping to get his name on a lot of plants, and leave it to future
taxonomists to figure out the situation? I don't know Allen or the
state of Australian floristics well enough to make a judgement.

Michael Chamberland