connorjburgin
commented
1 year ago I'll have to consult Bat Names on this one in particular, but I agree with not recognizing the species as well. Not enough data, and the data that does exist is conflicting.
Paper: Ramírez-Chaves, H.E., Alarcón Cifuentes, M., Noguera-Urbano, E.A., Pérez, W.A., Torres-Martínez, M.M., Ossa-López, P.A., Rivera-Páez, F.A. and Morales-Martínez, D.M. 2023-05-30. Systematics, morphometry, and distribution of Eptesicus fuscus miradorensis (H. Allen, 1866) (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae), with notes on baculum morphology and natural history. Therya 14(2):299-311. doi:10.12933/therya-23-2290
Link: https://www.revistas-conacyt.unam.mx/therya/index.php/THERYA/article/view/299
Suggested change: Add Eptesicus miradorensis (H. Allen, 1866) as a species, encompassing some populations (Mexico to northern South America) that are currently in Eptesicus fuscus.
Additional references:
Comments: As we discussed at ASM, GitHub issues could be a good way to bring up new papers or other suggested changes to the MDD. I'll try this out for this paper and maybe some others I come across. If we like this format, we can set up some issue templates to make it easier to open the issue and standardize the format.
Now on to comments on the paper itself. This paper proposes recognizing the subspecies Eptesicus fuscus miradorensis as a species. I am not convinced, and in my database I plan to keep it as a subspecies for now (I'll make it a species if MDD decides to accept it). Ramírez-Chaves et al. (2023) use only mtDNA (Cytb and COI). E. f. miradorensis is sister to all of E. fuscus in the Cytb tree, but sister to just E. f. pallidus (western USA) in the COI tree. Yi & Latch (2022) also studied nuclear DNA and found a complex pattern of isolation and gene flow, but no especially distinctive position for E. f. miradorensis. Possibly more of the subspecies should be recognized as species, but to me the evidence looks more like a single species with a complex pattern of regional divergence.