ITIS - should Sus domesticus Erxleben, 1777 be an accepted species?

[ManonGros]

Describe the problem: This was a message that originally came to GBIF helpdesk. Currently Sus domesticus Erxleben, 1777 is provided as a synonym of Sus scrofa Linnaeus, 1758 in CoL. However, it seems that it should now be an accepted species (see the reference).

Link to effected CoL webpages: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/data/taxon/53HGR

Literature references: in "The naming of wild animal species and their domestic derivatives" in A. Gentry et al. / Journal of Archaeological Science 31 (2004) 645–651 :

"A recent ruling (Opinion 2027, March 2003) by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has fixed the first available specific name based on a wild population for 17 wild progenitor species (15 mammals, a fish and a moth). It is now recommended that names based on domestic forms be adopted for the corresponding domestic derivatives." With, in the list, "Sus domesticus Erxleben, 1777 [20, p. 179], Domestic pig".

It has been accepted as well by the French INPN according to TAXREF : https://inpn.mnhn.fr/espece/cd_nom/199770 Edit: The American society of mammalogists accepted Sus domesticus as well : https://mammalsociety.org/image-library/sus-domesticus-5963

[DaveNicolson]

The pig question is not connected to Opinion 2027 (which focused on cases where the domesticated form's name is senior to the name based on the wild form, not the case here), but the group does need to be updated based on current taxonomic views. Time to update them, in any case, so we will start that. Sus scrofa has a fair number of subspecies (derived from the overall species), but domesticated forms can have a very complicated genetic relationship to the overall wild species from which they derived. Treating domesticated pigs as a separate full species would definitely be the easiest solution, and what Gentry et al. (2004) recommended. We'll dig in.

[TonyRees]

I recall several cases where there are (or have been) differences of opinion as to whether domesticated forms represent subspecies of presumed wild progenitors, or are accepted as full species - for example the domesticated horse (Equus ferus caballus or Equus caballus), the dog (Canis lupus familiaris or Canis familiaris) and quite possibly more. I think some of the confusion stems from Wilson & Reeder's MSW3 (never updated) which favours (favoured) treating most/all of these as subspecies, while some others do not. Maybe it is worth trying at least for some consistency across equivalent cases, or maybe each is different, I don't know...

IN the case of the horse, I tried (unsuccessfully) to argue that Wikipedia should move to the binomial form for the domesticated form a year or so back, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Horse/Archive_9#Equus_caballus . Note also that Wikipedia is (now) inconsistent in its lead paragraph for these two taxa (not so good), which currently read:

Horse: The horse (Equus ferus caballus)[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse#cite_note-MSW3-2[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse#cite_note-3 is a domesticated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication, one-toed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd-toed_ungulate, hoofed mammal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungulate.

Dog: The dog (Canis familiaris[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#cite_note-Alvares2019-4[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWangTedford20081-5 or Canis lupus familiaris[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#cite_note-FOOTNOTEWangTedford20081-5) is a domesticated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated descendant of the wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf.

As you can see, it would be better to aim for consistency - at least across CoL and ITIS, if the latter is the source presently used for CoL mammals - across these and similar cases.

Regards - Tony Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia https://about.me/TonyRees www.irmng.org (which gets or got most of its mammal species names from CoL, but not a recent version).

On Tue, 9 Apr 2024 at 01:14, DaveNicolson @.***> wrote:

The pig question is not connected to Opinion 2027 (which focused on cases where the domesticated form's name is senior to the name based on the wild form, not the case here), but the group does need to be updated based on current taxonomic views. Time to update them, in any case, so we will start that. Sus scrofa has a fair number of subspecies (derived from the overall species), but domesticated forms can have a very complicated genetic relationship to the overall wild species from which they derived. Treating domesticated pigs as a separate full species would definitely be the easiest solution, and what Gentry et al. (2004) recommended. We'll dig in.

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