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Post by Adam Cotton on Feb 24, 2014 13:16:22 GMT -8
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Post by fromindonesia on Feb 25, 2014 5:19:28 GMT -8
very interesting, thanks for bringing this abstract to our attention Adam. The authors have done some good work. Important information for collectors in Java in particular and Indonesia in general.I will now look at the diagnostic characters of "sarpedon" in my backyard with more interest now that I know they are adonarensis.
Cheers
Chris
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Post by nomihoudai on Feb 25, 2014 5:37:39 GMT -8
To be honest, I find the article utter bulls*it. Sorry for my French but these are the nicest words I can come up with right now.
First of all the question is why? What in the world is this article good for in the way it was written? Isn't it information enough that you have caught Graphium sarpedon and that it is a species which is variable to some degree? Do we really need a bazillion names to describe the same thing over and over again? You can see what journal they published in, you can feel how far down the ladder they had to go until someone was silly enough to bing it on paper. Using this method you can always find someone printing your stuff.
Second point they have shown nowhere in the article if the species that they put out are really separated in any way other than taking a superficial metric. With this logic I can just split butterflies that fly in the morning and those in the afternoon, they will never meet and plotting time versus number of specimen will give two clusters.
Third point they use highly subjective and imprecise language. They say "the two species are separated somewhat as much as other species in this tribe". "Somewhat"? What has "somewhat" lost in an article that claims itself to be scientific reasoning?
Just check at the end, received and accepted within a month. I bet the "reviewers" haven't even read the thing, they just saw DNA in the abstract and accepted it was.
The only good thing is that they point out the transition from a MET-MET bond to a VAL-LEU bond which does indeed change the binding energy at that spot of the protein as S-S bonds in MET-MET are really strong (-5.46 to -0.04 on a scale from -7.37 to 0.77 RT), but then on the other hand we see such changes in many alleles. Also the counting in DNA base substitutions is superficial at that point as they claim this to be a change in 2 bases, but as both nucleotides are linked together they can just mutate together so only one significant event.
Just as the editor of NEVA once said, Journals just publish new names to attract the buyer and sell more copies. The sillier your article the better.
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Post by africaone on Feb 25, 2014 6:19:56 GMT -8
To be honest, I find the article utter bulls*it. Sorry for my French but these are the nicest words I can come up with right now. First of all the question is why? What in the world is this article good for in the way it was written? Isn't it information enough that you have caught Graphium sarpedon and that it is a species which is variable to some degree? Do we really need a bazillion names to describe the same thing over and over again? You can see what journal they published in, you can feel how far down the ladder they had to go until someone was silly enough to bing it on paper. Using this method you can always find someone printing your stuff. Second point they have shown nowhere in the article if the species that they put out are really separated in any way other than taking a superficial metric. With this logic I can just split butterflies that fly in the morning and those in the afternoon, they will never meet and plotting time versus number of specimen will give two clusters. Third point they use highly subjective and imprecise language. They say "the two species are separated somewhat as much as other species in this tribe". "Somewhat"? What has "somewhat" lost in an article that claims itself to be scientific reasoning? Just check at the end, received and accepted within a month. I bet the "reviewers" haven't even read the thing, they just saw DNA in the abstract and accepted it was. Claude, in french" "les bras m'en tombent" que tu oses écrire cela ! It has been better to criticise the paper itself point by point ! For me, a non specialist of the group, it sounds a good paper with good argments. If there are really many species involved, why to not accept that ? If Adam or another specialist can give us his opinion, it will be helpful ! |
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Post by Adam Cotton on Feb 25, 2014 13:09:03 GMT -8
Well, there are some thought provoking aspects to this paper. Firstly what appears to be a phylogenetic tree of the sort commonly seen in DNA analysis papers is actually a morphometric analysis of male genitalia, and strangely lacks an outgroup anchor.
Next the occurrence of a new subspecies of the insular Graphium adonarensis in separate localities across continental eastern Asia without as yet known records from other areas seems rather strange.
It is also a pity that a distribution map showing the ranges of each species was not included in the paper. Page & Treadaway have previously included such maps in other papers, and it would have helped to visualise the new arrangement.
Having pointed out these issues, I should also mention that the traditional arrangements (either an improbable single Graphium sarpedon as D'Abrera, 1971 suggested; or two species, Graphium sarpedon & Graphium milon as per Tsukada & Nishiyama) cannot be correct. The main problem with the latter was the disjunct distribution of sarpedon s. l. with milon inbetween, and a less than satisfactory placement of monticolus and textrix (spelt 'tetrix' by Page & Treadaway for some reason).
The placement of Graphium teredon outside of the rest of the sarpedon complex is actually mirrored in several other species of Papilionidae from the S. India/Sri Lanka area, particularly Papilio crino, which is not part of the palinurus group as traditionally assumed, but split from the rest of the Asian "Achillides" species after the ulysses group. Probably Pachliopta pandiyana & jophon and Troides darsius will prove to be similarly less closely related to the species that they appear to belong with.
I was asked by David Lohman some years ago for advice as to suitable Papilionidae species for DNA analysis to look for cryptic species, and my immediate suggestion was to look at Graphium sarpedon. I'm not sure if he ever made an analysis, but the group is crying out for one to compare with the results of Page & Treadaway.
In reality whether all 8 species actually deserve separate species status remains to be seen, but this arrangement is certainly more logical than the traditional ones.
Adam.
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Post by nomihoudai on Feb 25, 2014 18:54:52 GMT -8
@ Thierry, I am more after the bad methodology and presentation. Adam also presented some other negative points that I fully agree on. What about the base substitutions, not a valid point raised by me?
Sorry but I had to deal the whole day with photographing "subspecies" by "specialists" like Fruhstorfer and Forster, then you can definitely lose your temper.
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Post by bobw on Feb 25, 2014 23:14:57 GMT -8
It does sound a bit like Astraptes fulgerator!
Bob
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Post by nomihoudai on Feb 26, 2014 1:52:57 GMT -8
...with the subtle difference that that paper was based on biology (host plants and caterpillars) and made it into PNAS Journal !!  I really enjoyed that paper back then as the methodology is fine and well presented. I am sorry but a paper claiming "yeah we checked 5 specimens and by using this self invented metric employed on the genitalia we are sure in 998 of 1000 cases that this is a distinct species. Also the DNA does change in one or two bases depending in which direction of the sky you hold the vial when sequencing so we are fairly confident on that." doesn't really get me (Exaggeration intended on purpose  ). www.pnas.org/content/101/41/14812 |
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tome
Junior Member
Posts: 24
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Post by tome on Mar 11, 2014 4:13:34 GMT -8
In this paper the taxon monticolus has been placed as a subspecies of anthedon, while milon is treated as a species (while Vane-Wright & de jong opted for the opposite arrangement). From my experience anthedon in north Maluku occurs down to sea level, while monticolus on Sulawesi is only found at higher elevations. In central Sulawesi milon occurred at lower altitudes and monticolus from about 1400m (if memory serves me right), but I never saw them fly together.
Could Adam, or someone else, enlighten me on how the speciation process is believed to have worked here? Could monticolus have occurred on Sulawesi first, and then been "pushed up" by the later arrival milon? It is interesting that milon has the "sulawesian" elongated wings and large size, while monticolus does not.
Tom
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Post by Adam Cotton on Mar 11, 2014 7:14:05 GMT -8
Tom is correct about the altitudinal separation of milon and monticolus and the differing wingshape.
Previous classifications treated monticolus as a subspecies of sarpedon and milon from Sulawesi as conspecific with anthedon from the Moluccas. Most people used the name milon as the species name, but in fact anthedon has priority as milon Felder & Felder in their 1864 publication was a nomen nudum (see Moonen, 1998 for details) and was only validly published in 1865, after anthedon.
However, Page & Treadaway (2013) used genitalic characters to split the sarpedon complex into 8 species, and found that milon and anthedon have different genitalia, with the genitalia of monticolus matching those of anthedon. They also found that sulaensis is conspecific with milon rather than anthedon. Thus they separated the species quite differently from previous classifications.
It will be interesting to do detailed DNA analysis on the sarpedon complex, and that may shed further light on Tom's question as to which taxon was there first. Logically it is more likely that monticolus was there first based on current altitudinal distribution, but this may have been different long ago, and sometimes what seems logical based on current knowledge turns out to be incorrect.
Adam.
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I really enjoyed that paper back then as the methodology is fine and well presented. 
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