Could be worse ... They could have named them after Pokemon characters. (Anybody else seen Mayden's lecture on cladistics using evolution of Pokemon as examples? ... it was memorable, I'll give him that).

My personal thought on common names for splitting a group of obviously closely related and nearly identical (appearance) species, would be to keep part of the original common name and add a descriptive (appearance or location) modifier, for example: Cumberland blueside darter, Ozark blueside (or speckled) darter, Duck blueside darter, beaded blueside darter, etc.

Well, I'm glad I could facilitate frank and open discussion. Anyone going to SFC, I'll see you there tonight or tomorrow...

This is exactly right. Other scholars have to actually accept this work, or it does not mean too much. I am sure the genetics are correct, but the names, common, and Latin are laughable.

That's just it -- this paper is based on morphological descriptions, and nothing else. It is very reminiscent of the Powers and Mayden paper on the E. simoterum complex. Like the response to the E. simoterum complex, a thorough study with robust sampling will be needed to delimit these species, and hopefully those authors will reassign these taxa better names that we can all recognize. I hope these names don't take priority since they're the first names assigned. I would need to read too much into Article 31 of the ICZN to know whether the names are acceptable or not. Let us hope the authors did....

I, like others, find the naming of these species completely ridiculous. I have nothing against the political leaders they are named after, nor the darters themselves, but the combination of the two is wacko.

Sadly, these are legit species that need recognition, as I'm stick of calling them E. cf. stigmaeum when they're more closely related to E. jessiae, but I think I prefer for the former over E. gore, E. obama, etc.... One thing is for certain, I will definitely have a lot of fun with these names (I'm sure people will be joking about this for the next 10 years).

The first sentence of the introduction is pretty interesting too.... Did they miss the Systematic Bio paper from Near lab with a concatenated nDNA set with high BPP values that showed the relationships of these species? All I know is the childish polarity is driving prospective ichthyology students away from the field, including myself. I realize it is somewhat bad in other fields too, but it seems horribly divisive in NA ichthyology.

Edited by blakemarkwell, 07 November 2012 - 03:30 PM.

They note that the species epithets are nouns in apposition which is covered and permitted in the ICZN, so they do not need an 'i' as normal patronymes. I've never seen a person's name used as a name in apposition before so don't know if that is a special issue. The sampling for the morphology is pretty comprehensive I'd say, with 3049 specimens. There are scholarly omissions and the names are open to debate, but really the only thing that will settle this is time and more papers. Phylogenies are easy to make and we have the tissues (and sequence data), but the queue is long and priorities won't let us push detailed phylogenies for every darter complex to the front.

There is no doubt that a lot of work went into this publication. I just think that species this closely related will depend on molecular phylogenies to determine if monophyletic. I realize this is a starting point, and a thorough one at that. I certainly appreciate a lot of the range maps and characters included in the work, not to mention the excellent illustrations by Joe Tomelleri. I was just hoping that one treasured aspect of my life (biological diversity) could remain free from the shackles of politics, but now I can't even go sample a speckled darter without mentioning a political figure, as if we don't get enough of that on Facebook... There are many more direct environmentalists that deserve patronyms IMO.

Layman's original common name for E. obama -- proposed in his dissertation, I believe -- was Clown Darter. I can see why he changed it to Spangled Darter. (A name that reminds me of a NANFA contest we had years ago, wherein we proposed catchy and patriotic common names for fishes hoping that would increase their appeal among politicians. Star-spangled Darter was one of the names. Others were Jordan Jumprock and Lincoln Logperch.)

Calling E. gore the Cumberland Darter is just plain sloppy since E. susane already has that monicker. Layman's original (and much better) name for this species was Longhunt Darter, named for the Long Hunters, master woodsmen and hunters who were the first to explore the Cumberland from the English colonies in the 1760s. I retain "Longhunt" on the NANFA species checklist page.

The lack of the terminal i is not without precedent. Micropterus dolomieu, anyone? Dasyatis say?

Chris Scharpf
Baltimore

Now Obama has a lichen and a speckled darter named after him -- however, they chose 'obamae' for the epithet. It is definitely better than a darter named after Hitler or Beyonce Knowles, which do have legit species named after them.

Edit: Wow, that's weird, I started a new topic and when I posted it it was tacked on to an existing thread. Did I somehow by incredible coincidence, type exactly the same topic name as one that already existed? Weird. Anyway, my post below is somewhat behind the times, even though I just wrote it. Still, I'd like to know the current taxonomy of this group. I'll look over Chris' species checklist to see if that enlightens me. Here's my post before I edited it:

I don't think anyone else has posted this here so I'll fill you in: I got a visit from a NANFA guy and another fish guy this week. Randy, the other fish guy, mentioned something about some new darters named after presidents. This sounded really odd to me, so I asked, and Randy was kind enough to send me a link: http://www.slu.edu/n...ial-fishes-1114

Looks they split Etheostoma stigmaeum (Speckled Darter) into five or six new species. The text is misleading it seems to me, saying that they "discovered" five new darters. I suppose if they made a discovery, it was that one (maybe two with E jessiae) darter was really six (or seven?).

I was taken a little by surprise that they used political figures as the honorees. I've heard of this with insects, where the number of new species is very high. Or maybe the practitioners are a little more eccentric? I've not seen this with ichthyologists. Not criticizing, necessarily. Just taking note of the new practice. I imagine the choice of politicians will raise hackles in some quarters. Will this help conservation? It's hard to guess. Maybe at the least, it will draw public attention to the darters, for maybe 15 minutes or so. Maybe that was the intent.

Anyway, what I really want to know is what is the new taxonomy of this group? Were stigmaeum and jessiae retained? I'm thinking there have been some other relatively new descriptions in this group. How many species do we have in the "speckled darter" group now? Anybody know? We need to track this stuff somewhere on the NANFA site or Forum. Chris Scharpf? Maybe you can send new descriptions to me and I'll post them somewhere. I need the info for myself anyway. I don't subscribe to all the relevant journals.

Edited by itsme, 18 November 2012 - 03:24 PM.

OK, I followed the original link http://tnaci.blogspo...ders-three.html which lists the species and gives a map. Very helpful. Guess I need to pay more attention to the Forum!

Welcome back, Mark!

Thanks, Bruce. Hope to find more time to hang out here!

Gotta love the names, since they're so, um , Correct!

Well, they've made a splash, if a small one (they are darters after all!) in France: http://www.lemonde.f...98315_3244.html

So if the intent was to get attention for darters, it may not have been so foolish. Le Monde, the publication in question, is a major newspaper known worldwide. Here' s an interesting quote from the article: "They are all orange, blue, spotted, striped, but distinguished from each other by subtle variations sometimes invisible to the eyes of the common mortal."

In the reader comments below the article, one person points out the fact that the species names don't conform to the gender of Etheostoma. I know this has already been pointed out here. Just pointing it out since it's in French. I ran it through an online translator.

C'est tres chou!