28.01.2025: Jean -François Flot (Université libre de Bruxelles): What are species and how to delineate them? A
general solution to a long-standing proble, HS 31.11, Institut für Biologie, Bereich Pflanzenwissenschaften, Schubertstrasse 51, 17:00 Uhr
The "species problem" has long been muddled by terminological, conceptual as well as methodological problems. Do species exist in nature or are they created by taxonomists? Both actually, but these refer to two different meanings of the word "species" that are important to distinguish. Species that exist in nature waiting to be discovered can be more adequately called "specions" (following Dubois' terminology), of which three very different conceptual categories are phenons, simpsons and mayrons - respectively discoverable using distancebased, tree-based and allele-sharing based approaches. In this presentation I will review these distinctions and their practical consequences in terms of species delimitation, using examples from corals, tropical trees, rotifers and vertebrates.
Dienstag, 28.01.2025