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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yernagates" data-source="post: 896830" data-attributes="member: 11473">Personally I doubt whether most taxonomists or conservationists are motivated by economics.I'm really more concerned about the dangers of lumping, rather than splitting.I well remember the UK fish identification book I had as a child -- it had been my father's, so was probably published in the 1930s.  It showed six or eight "species" of brown trout, each with variations in size, spotting, fin colour and so on.  Over the next few decades, these were regraded to subspecies, then as local types of the single species Salmo trutta.No conservation effort was put into protecting the habitat or genetic integrity of these trout -- indeed, trout "conservation" often consisted (and still does) of stocking rivers and lakes with bigger and "better" farm-bred trout of who-knows-what provenance.Many of those local trout types are now gone or diluted.  Even some single lakes had two or more types, ecologically separated and breeding in different inlet or outlet streams --many of these too are gone, or under serious threat.  I think this is a real unsung tragedy, and a serious conservation failure.There are plenty of other examples.  The pond frogs of Norfolk, like other green frogs elsewhere in the UK, were assumed until recently to have been introduced from southern Europe.  Only after their bones were found in (I think) Saxon archaeological deposits was it realised that they were in fact a native population from a different subspecies, and that there was only one elderly male still alive.  I believe he died soon afterwards.To my mind it does not matter what rank taxa happen to be given -- in fact I suspect that all those trout probably were correctly assigned to the single species.  The important thing is whether they have any "real" biological significance.  If they do, they should be protected and safeguarded, whether species, subspecies, ecotypes or whatever.I think the problem comes particularly where species rank is given a legal "reality" -- this will inevitably lead to "bean-counting" of the type hinted at in the Economist article.  The UK species-protection legislation does avoid this fairly well, talking of "kinds" rather than species, and protecting a range of ranks of taxa from family down to genus, species and even subspecies.  (As it happens Loxia is on Schedule 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act as a genus, so splitting is irrelevant -- it would take some really serious lumping to threaten crossbills' legal status...).  EU legislation is worded similarly.Richard</blockquote>

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