Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!emory!mephisto!prism!sun13!sandee
From: sandee@sun13.scri.fsu.edu (Daan Sandee)
Newsgroups: rec.birds
Subject: Re: MacGillivray's Warbler variant song query
Keywords: taxonomy
Message-ID: <154@sun13.scri.fsu.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 90 13:15:47 GMT
References: <29148@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <306@spam.ua.oz> <151@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> <310@spam.ua.oz>
Organization: SCRI, Florida State University
Lines: 41

In article <310@spam.ua.oz> wvenable@spam.ua.oz (Bill Venables) writes:
>In article <151@sun13.scri.fsu.edu> sandee@sun13.scri.fsu.edu (Daan Sandee) writes:
>>Interesting. The A.O.U. (that's American, not Australian) treats two
>>populations as distinct species if they, under normal circumstances,
>>do not significantly interbreed. 
>
>If you add "in the wild", that was my understanding of the official
>RAOU position also.  However this is clearly not the full story. There
>are many examples in Australia of sedentary birds which have a range
>consisting of several discrete areas, sometimes hundreds of kilometers
>apart, between which migration, and hence interbreeding, does not
>occur, and yet they are still regarded as a single species.  To name

The exact definition does include the words "in the wild" but my wording
"under normal circumstances" also indicates "in the wild". I would not
regard captive breeding as "under normal circumstances".
North America also has species with disjunct sedentary populations which
do not interbreed and yet are regarded as one species. The Florida subspecies
of the Scrub Jay is isolated from its Western relatives by about a thousand
miles. So the AOU does not follow its own definition ; yet it is the
definition that is deficient here, for nobody is really suggesting that
the Florida Scrub Jay should be a separate species purely on the basis
of geographically disjunct populations (allopatry). 
>
>The determination of sepcies status is a strangely contentious issue
>in Australia, and some rather iconoclastic revisions have recently
>been suggested which are generating a good deal of heated debate. Is
>this an antipodean peculiarity or is it the case everywhere?-- 

You're telling me! Speciation has always been a hot topic both among
professional taxonomists and among hard-core birders who are interested
in the length of their life lists. And recently, DNA research has come up
with suggestions of dramatic changes in taxonomy - mostly at higher levels,
though ; the changes at the species level, though interesting enough to
us amateurs, will be relatively minor. But it will take another ten years
at least before the scientists have even decided how to handle the factor of
DNA research in taxonomy.

Daan Sandee                                           sandee@sun16.scri.fsu.edu
Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052  (904) 644-7045