Small Metallic-green Bee
GBIF synonymises this taxon Lasioglossum urbanum Gonzalez, 2006 (sic!). It makes me sad to realise that GBIF's taxonomic professionals don't know or care about taxonomic rules. Even if Gonzalez have synonymised those two taxa, we'd need their names in parenthesis. What a waste for so much effort. Update 17/1/2017: Reading what I wrote a few month ago, makes me want to delete it. It is probably more honest to leave it and admit that I am sometimes misled and my expectations are too high. You would not expect from Uber to be responsible if one of their drivers doesn't have a driver's licence, would you!? GBIF are doing a great job and seem to be struggling more than I had expected. I don't believe in un-curated global biodiversity databases, and I don't believe in adding a self-referencing backbone database to the diversity of taxonomic concepts will help anyone but GBIF themselves. For this taxon, I am staying in the dark who's taxonomic expertise to trust when ALA and GBIF disagree. So, I do the dummest thing naturalists can do, namely mix taxonomic expertise randomly, according to my mood on a particular day. My Green Shimmering Bee is definitely closely related to this Small Metallic-green Bee and should probably be in the same genus. Hence I rename it and finally follow GBIF calling it Lasioglossum urbanum leaving Homalictus a relict. Now, that brings me to the weird situation that my photo is used by ALA under a different taxon - which I just found out - than what it is being called by myself (following GBIF).
Read More1 / 5
- No Comments