Re: Iris savannarum

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A side note regarding Small.  The comments regarding his Iris species are interesting.  I have been aware of his Iris names but have never really looked closely at the situation myself.  However, Small also named a number of species in lots of other groups of plants, and similar situations are not limited to Iris.  He named a number of new "species" of cactus (nearly all Opuntia), which were largely looked upon as nonsensical by other botanists of his day, and ignored.  This is a very similar situation to the Iris, and added to the tendency for Small's publications to be ignored.  It is interesting to note, that with these species as well, many of them have since turned out to be real entities, at least as subspecies, and the problem was not with Small's attention to detail (perhaps over-attention?), but with other people who didn't care about Opuntia not allowing themselves to see, or often actively ignoring the distinctions that Small was seeing, and rather dismissing the names without even knowing the plants they were given to.  Not all of Small's published Opuntia species are really distinct, some are just local populations or individual variants, and some had names already that Small was apparently unaware of (for instance, some were named from islands in the Antilles before Small named them from Florida).  There is still more to learn about these, since some of these populations are localized to small areas, of little interest to most botanists, and have not been properly studied as living plants (some may even be extinct, and now available for study only as a few old dried herbarium sheets?), and there is still a tendency for most botanists to follow the old "establishment" and to lump everything Opuntia into a relatively few "garbage can" species names where there really should be many.  However, it seems that to a large degree, in retrospect, Small's attention to distinctions is being vindicated.

As for who decides what is a species and what is not, and ignoring the fact that everyone has their own take on what a "species" should be - often it is political - who's opinion is presented in the right place, in the right forum, at the right time to be noticed and accepted, or who presents the best sounding argument.  If one has an established reputation, they are often more likely to be listened to than if not.  It tends to be acceptance by concensus, not a decision by some authority.  Often it has little to do with real population biology [which in itself can be easily interpreted differently by different people in different ways too].  However, every person who looks at a group and presents their observations adds to the knowledge of that group, and the understanding of our wild populations of living things gets better all the time.  For those who think we know all there is to know - - - wrong;  we have barely scratched the surface.  And, just to keep things even more interesting, living populations are always adapting and changing, even as we study them.

Dave Ferguson

Albuquerque

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