Hey guys. I actually liked the K&J paper as I have often wondered what some researchers would propose if their data supported previously named subspecies. I guess I am just used to seeing..."[place whatever subspecies name here] sunk" in manuscript titles. I always get a kick out of that.



I agree with aspidocelis, their analysis is probably as good as it's ever going to get in support of subspecies recognition. However, like any other paper of this type there must be (and are) quite a lot of statistics involved, including Bootstraps and Posterior Probabilities.



Jetzen, trust me, there is a lot more to it to obtain a PhD than just writing a "school report"! I have not read the dissertation you refer to, but I suspect it's very similar to this paper. Keep in mind that dissertations/theses are written to complete a degree. These usually consist of multiple chapters, which are later prepared as papers submitted to peer-reviewed journals. They are not accepted until published. Also, if this Apalachicola entity was simply a color variant it would not appear as a natural clade in both of the molecular and morphological phylogenies. I personally view it as a species.



I specifically enjoyed the comparisons of the different species concepts. It appears that the names "sticticeps" and "goini" do not represent populations, but that's not suprising since they have not been recognized in 30 years. The old name "goini" part interested me as well and makes perfect sense since the holotype is the name bearer, which is veiewed as an intermediate or hybrid, therefore one cannot redefine the old name to include something that is different than it. That's why we have the ICZN, there are specific rules in place for taxonomy! Looks like they actually helped (pers. comm.) on this paper too.



One thing I did not care for in this paper is the continuance of subspecies. Yes, I know, but this is my personal view/preference, and I view natural clades as species, regardless of how closely related they are to each other. If you can distinguish it, they are species. I suspect researchers will simply view these and other named subspecies as species in the near future. Hey, let's talk Phylocode!

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