Giraffe is now four species
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tall-tale-study-reveals-giraffes-four-species-not-194024390.html
Interesting article on the split of the Giraffe. Â Nice to add new species without going anywhere:-)
Andrew
3 Comments
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Israel
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).”
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Vladimir Dinets
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.
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Vladimir Dinets
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.