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
Giraffe is now four species
Related Articles
-
New Trip Report – Senegal
Here’s Cheryl Antonucci’s long-waited report of her trip to Senegal in March, where she saw some great stuff including...
-
New Population of Greater Bamboo Lemurs found
New Population Of Highly Threatened Greater Bamboo Lemur Found In Madagascar (July 23, 2008) — Researchers in Madagascar have...
-
New (old) Trip Report – Southern Africa
Vladimir Dinets took a six month trip through Southern Africa back in 2008, visiting South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique,...
-
The Bioko Drill
A nice article on the Bioko Drill. I’d love to visit Bioko Island. Has anyone been? http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0502-fitzner-bioko-drill.html cheers Jon
-
Safia Reserve and other places in Western Sahara/Morocco
It looks like I’ll have about a week in Morocco and Western Sahara in July. Has anyone been able...
-
New Trip Report: Southern Tanzania
Here’s an interesting report from Keith Millar. Southern Tanzania, 2018: Keith Millar, 2 weeks & 40 species including Honey...
-
Ethiopian wolf in Simien Mountains.
Dear all My wife is very keen to do a family trip to Ethiopia. She is very keen that...
-
Rodents from Ethiopia – request for id help.
Looking at trip reports, the first one of these from the Bale mountains is likely to be Blick’s grassrat,...
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.