It's about who gets to see what, Jody, and what they make of it. Face it, it is not too easy to travel around Africa scooping up savs, WTs, BTs, etc. -- you wanna get the permits, do the travel, catch Ebola, maybe a machete? A lot of stuff is imported into the US without any real assurance of where it came from 'out there', and that makes it pretty useless for the sort of analysis that is needed.

As to albigs/exanthematicus, Africa is a big place, with lots of habitat diversity. Are albigs any more variable than milksnakes? How long has it taken to sort out what is going on with the classification of milksnakes?

Common names are completely unstable. What are albigs called in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Angola, Germany or Japan? Who decided that the common name of an African monitor is in English? Take a trip to 10 countries there, and ask everybody for a white-throated monitor, see how many people know what you're talking about.

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