Splits, lumps, taxonomies, check-lists, whatever.

[Frank O'Connor <>]

Bob Inglis asked the obvious question about species.

"
Would someone be so kind as to tell me what that definition
is."

I gave a winter class for Birds Australia WA (now BirdLife WA) last
June on an introduction to taxonomy.  So I looked up the definition
of species, family, order, etc.

The only reasonable definition I could find for a Family for example was
that it was "the taxonomic level below Order and above
Genus".  The definitions for Order, Genus, etc were
recursive.

It was almost impossible to get a good definition for species.  I
ended up going with :

"Species ? This is a low level taxonomic rank.  There
are many definitions of what constitutes a species.  Simplistically,
a species is a group of organisms capable of producing fertile
young, and in theory if two different species interbreed then their
hybrid offspring is infertile.  But the situation is far more
complex than this, and there are several methods used to determine one
species from another.  This is too hard to explain in this
forum.  You sometimes see the term full species.  e.g.
Lemon-bellied Flycatcher is a full species, whereas Kimberley
Flycatcher is not because it is a sub species of the Lemon-bellied
Flycatcher."

_________________________________________________________________
Frank O'Connor           Birding WA http://birdingwa.iinet.net.au
Phone : (08) 9386 5694              Email :

===============================

To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
send the message:
unsubscribe
(in the body of the message, with no Subject line)
to: 

http://birding-aus.org
===============================