New proposal for a subspecies definition triggered by a new longhorn beetle subspecies

(Pensoft Publishers) The discovery of a new Scandinavian longhorn beetle subspecies triggered a discussion on the vague classification rank. As a result, a newly proposed subspecies definition has been published along with the description of the taxon in the open access journal ZooKeys. To the authors, before being determined as a subspecies, a population needs to be deemed a potentially incipient new species, diagnosed by a minimum of one heritable trait and, at least, partially isolated geographically.

Source: EurekAlert! - Biology - August 17, 2017 Category: Biology Source Type: news