We tend to focus conservation actions on named taxa 3, with the tacit assumption that their members can be unambiguously tallied as present or absent, their abundance estimated and monitored, and their status as native or introduced known. When we delineate a species and give it a name, we facilitate communication about its relation to its environment and to other species (ecology), its patterns of survival and activity (demography and life history), and its evolutionary history and distribution (phylogenetics and phylogeography) 2. Often, however, the most fundamental characteristic of an organism from a human perspective is its name 1. It has been argued 1 that species constitute the only level of the classification of life-systematics and taxonomy-that has objective reality.
Overall, single-locus species delimitation was an effective first step toward understanding the diversity and distribution of species in Physinae and to guiding future investigation sampling and analyses of species hypotheses. Hypotheses regarding certain local endemics were confirmed, as were widespread introductions, including of an undescribed taxon likely belonging to a separate genus in southeastern Idaho for which the closest relatives are in southeast Asia. A total-evidence approach delineated 18 candidate species, revealing cryptic diversity within recognized taxa and a lack of support for other named taxa.
To resolve uncertainty about species diversity in North America, we targeted an array of single-locus species delimitation methods at publically available specimens and new specimens collected from the Snake River basin, USA to generate species hypotheses, corroborated using nuclear analyses of the newly collected specimens.
Gastropods in the subfamily Physinae have been especially troublesome to identify because morphological variation can be unrelated to interspecific differences and there have been widespread introductions of an unknown number of species, which has led to a speculative taxonomy. Being able to associate an organism with a scientific name is fundamental to our understanding of its conservation status, ecology, and evolutionary history.
0 kommentar(er)
