-
Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.
Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
Larry Sweetland
Formerly 'Larry Wheatland'
American Royal Tern
đThanks Larry.
Sangahyando
Well-known member
Why the prefix "American", is there another split in the works?
It's already happened with IOC- split to American Royal Tern & the Old World bird now known as Western African Crested Tern
So "American" redundant then...
That's not a global truth... Just 'royal tern' could be taken to refer to the whole complex - so the 'American' avoids ambiguity. Splitting's an awful business.
That's not how these things work. It would indeed be valuable if new combinations took new English names but they often don't: there're no rules or consistency in this respect. Then you have exactly that possible confusion with the old taxon.
Given this, there's no particular reason to include "American" here. (Confusion between different definitions of a taxon is always possible and indeed likely if using scientific names.)
If we concentrate on current taxonomy there's only the one royal tern.
Given this, there's no particular reason to include "American" here. (Confusion between different definitions of a taxon is always possible and indeed likely if using scientific names.)
If we concentrate on current taxonomy there's only the one royal tern.
Demonstrably, in this case, it is. Unless you're going to say IOC is 'wrong'.
That explicitly ignores my point, viz. that common names are or should be chosen to minimize ambiguity/confusion with the old taxonomy. But n'mind... Things are what they are (until they're changed again).
Agree, American Royal Tern is simple, can't be confused with the West African bird, whether referring to pre-split or today. Royal Tern for many still includes the entire block.
In this case yes, the name does distinguish. But not in general (my point). IOC frequently recycles pre-existing names to refer to different taxon definitions: Clements does too.
I agree that distinctive English names could serve a useful purpose by being unique. The counter argument is that English names aren't standardisedâeven between the various "major" taxonomies. These are reasons to move away from names altogether and adopt numerical IDs as the official "monikers"âI note that's what Avibase "taxon concept" IDs are.
That has to be the worst ever suggestion, how utterly totally boring it would be đ¨
Sangahyando
Well-known member
The IOC currently uses "Royal Tern" for Thalasseus maximus though.
Well it takes away the ambiguity for now as some people are unaware of the split.
No. They don't replace the use of names any more than people in Quintana Roo actually say "there's an American Royal Tern" [i.e. rather than "there's a Royal Tern"], or any more than scientific names replace common ones.
However, whenever there's a chance of misunderstanding IDs/taxon conceptsâwith clear scopesâhelp. Scientific names don't because there's no guarantee that 2 people are using the same taxonomic conceptâeven if they're using the same scientific name. You could invent unique names for each concept but it would quickly become very taxing as so many are possible. That leaves us with IDs.
The same scientific name can be applied to taxa with very different scopes. There's the "formal" approach to helping to clarify which taxon you're talking about which cites the author, as in Thalasseus maximus (Boddaert, 1783). This only slightly helpful because it doesn't tell you what Boddaert, 1783 called it (the brackets show it wasn't Thalasseus at least), and neither does it tell you what the scope of his concept was. He probably described the species based on W African birds but then the concept expanded (without any change to the name) to include American birds. And now it's contracted again. So your correspondent might be using the older expanded concept with exactly the same name and attribution (but including American birds). Usually these attributions are left out so you have little idea [even] which original author was involved !
(And names as old as 1783 often lack adequate diagnoses: those only come with later authors. Without those you have to try to work it out yourself, probably with reference to the types.)
...Tracing the history of a taxonomic concept is a painful thing. It seems Avibase is only going back through the recent major taxonomies (i.e. not back to publication in many cases). That's a shame. It's often difficult to figure out what Wallace and other early explorers are talking about
Edit: and IDs are how Avibase works...
Disagree with all - uninteresting, basically a replication of scientific names without any of the meaning of scientific names. Scientific names can do all what you mention. Yes, they rely on all using the same name and same taxonomy, but so would any number system. You can have your numbers, I'll have birds thanks.
Anyhow, way off topic now, so let's leave it there.
If you think that you've not understood how the system works. Nor why there have been various efforts to change it.
