https://www.yahoo.com/news/tall-tale-study-reveals-giraffes-four-species-not-194024390.html
Interesting article on the split of the Giraffe. Nice to add new species without going anywhere:-)
Andrew
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tall-tale-study-reveals-giraffes-four-species-not-194024390.html
Interesting article on the split of the Giraffe. Nice to add new species without going anywhere:-)
Andrew
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Genetically Welsh, spiritually Australian, currently in New York City. I've also lived and worked in London, Canberra, Paris and Lusaka, and visited over 100 countries. There's more here.
This is not the first such paper, and it has the same problem as all previous ones: not all subspecies have been sampled. I don’t know why they didn’t sample them all; the missing subspecies are available in captivity. It’s been clear for decades that the 3 subspecies present in Kenya behave like full species; I also suspect that the extreme difference between Maasai and reticulated giraffes is due to character displacement. So it is still unclear how many species are there, and how many subspecies. I think it’s pretty safe to split giraffes into four species at this point, but it remains to be seen if there’s more.
for others, the paper is here: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30787-4
It clearly says “Our nuclear dataset includes all currently recognized giraffe subspecies… and, importantly, the elusive Nubian giraffe (Giraffa c. camelopardalis).”
Since my previous comments have disappeared, here’s a summary.
1. Sorry, I first looked at a wrong paper. The new one provides sufficient evidence for a 4-way split. I already updated my checklist 🙂
2. But I don’t think they provide sufficient evidence for lumping of some subspecies, and I find the idea of “killing” subspecies that are clearly separate morphologically based on genetic data to be fundamentally flawed and dangerous.