Citation Breadcrumbs, part 1
Playing detective
A convenient index of this detective series.
Many apologies, but I quoted the wrong species (A. achillea instead of A. sumatrana) at the very bottom of this article. Luckily, it doesn’t change much because the same taxonomist worked on both plants! This has now been amended.
In this series, I decided to show the process of tracking down the description and image of rarely talked about plant species. You’ll have no trouble in learning about the modern apple (Malus domestica), but if you, say, randomly pick a Silverweed from the Kew Garden’s list, you’ll be stuck in first gear. Hopefully this series will help with your own research.
As we go on, you’ll feel increasingly like a detective, solving an old case by piecing together clues that are scattered all over the internet.
Let’s begin by choosing a random species from the 71 Silverweeds on the Kew Garden’s page.
Let’s choose Argentina sumatrana, which will throw up the following paltry description:
The native range of this species is Sumatera. It is a perennial and grows primarily in the montane tropical biome.
Not very helpful. Sumatera is an alternative spelling for Sumatra, the sixth largest island in the world. A montane biome is found on the slopes of mountains, so basically a jungle mountain slope. If you want (and you might be wondering this already), you can try and jump ahead and start searching for the name of that plant on your favourite search engine. You might get lucky and find a photo, but I didn’t. Let’s continue down this bread crumb trail instead.
Above the terse description, you’ll need to decipher a couple of cryptic lines:
Argentina sumatrana (Soják) Soják
If you have access to a knowledgeable friend (like I did), and also get lucky with your key term searches, you might arrive at the Author citation (botany) Wikipedia page. Digest this page at your leisure, and you’ll end up with the following interpretation
A. sumatrana was originally put in a different genus by a man called Soják, and then later put into the Argentina genus by the same author
OR it was always in the Argentina genus (by Soják), but had some other taxonomic rank changed (like being recognised as a species instead of a subspecies) by Soják also.
Dig around on your favourite search engine and you’ll find that Jiří Soják passed away in 2012, and that he was a botanist from the Czech Republic.
So far so good. The second cryptic line proceeds as follows:
First published in Thaiszia 20: 95 (2010)
I’m lucky because I have a background in academia (not botany, but physics) so I’ve come to know instinctively what this means. If you’re not so fortunate, then I’ll point you to the ACS style page (which I think the Kew Gardens is using, but I could be wrong). It’s worth noting that there are many ways of citing an article. Probably too many. I’ll break it down:
Find a journal known in an abbreviated way as “Thaiszia”
Find the 20th volume of this journal
Find page 95 of the journal
You’ll note that everything is given from the reference point of the journal, which has its own logical sense.
We need to track down the “Thaiszia” journal. I’ve looked in a few lists of journals and not found this particular abbreviation though I admit I first searched for “thaiszia journal”. This brought me to the Thaiszia Journal of Botany which is run by Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, specifically their Botanical Garden.
Let’s find the article. Click through to the contents page and look for volume 20. Page 95, as it turns out, is not the start of the article but the specific page where our plant appears. Hopefully you’ve found the entry titled
SOJÁK J. (2010): Argentina Hill, a genus distinct from Potentilla (Rosaceae). – Thaiszia – J. Bot. 20: 91-97. – ISSN 1210-0420.
This bodes well, the author and year are right as well.
Click through to the full text which is annoyingly a PDF - good luck if you’re on your phone, I hope you like squinting! At least this particular reference is open access, sometimes you’ll hit a paywall. I find this hilarious sometimes, I’m the proud author of one article and I can’t even access my own paper on the official website without paying.
Lets have a look at this PDF. Go to page 95, or search for “sumatrana”. We should be getting close now, the photos and descriptions should be in this article. Can you feel it in the digital aether?
A. sumatrana (Soják) Soják, comb. nova bas.
Potentilla sumatrana Soják, Preslia 64: 221. 1993 (“1992“).
It turns out we have another cryptic reference, and this one has some abbreviated Latin to boot.
Feeling like a detective yet?
We already figured out that the first section is from the Kew Garden’s page, but what does “comb. nova bas.” mean?
Combinatio nova - is the first part, which is Latin for “new combination” and refers to when a new name is given based on a pre-existing name.
basionym - is the second part. Quoting this Wikipedia link,
The term "basionym" is used in botany only for the circumstances where a previous name exists with a useful description, and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants does not require a full description with the new name.
So it seems like Jiří Soják is telling us that he assigned Potentilla sumatrana into a new Argentina genus. The introduction of the article gives us some more clues, and is quite amusing once we penetrate the typical dense scientific writing style:
The genus Argentina was separated from Potentilla already by HILL in 1756, but a proper justification for it was brought about as late as 1898 and 1908 by RYDBERG. RYDBERG (1908) based his generic classification of the tribe Potentileae mainly on differences in the insertion of styles. Potentilla s. str. has subterminal styles, whereas Argentina has lateral ones. Later authors rarely accepted Rydberg’s concept. The present author initially regarded the separation of Argentina as doubtful (SOJÁK 1989), later rejected it (SOJÁK 1994), accepted it (SOJÁK 2004) and finally raised the question once again (SOJÁK 2008). The reason is that the insertion of styles, the sole differential character between Potentilla s. str. and Argentina, can be difficult to observe in some species. Besides, over ten Asian species of the Argentina group have more or less subterminal styles. Recently, the situation has changed. Any doubts were removed by the discovery of an until recently unused differential character as well as results of molecular studies.
Let’s translate this to plain speak.
A person called Hill carved out part of the Potentilla genus and called it Argentina in mid 1700s but he didn’t have the best justifications for doing so. A person called Rydberg around the 1900s came up with a reason based on how the style of the flowers in the Argentina genus were different (the stalk that connects the ovary and the stigma). Scientists after Rydberg disagreed with him.
Almost 90 years on, Jiří Soják rejected, accepted and then rejected the classification in a series of papers that lasted over 20 years! These multiple rebounds happened because it’s often hard to see these flower styles.
In this paper, he finally(?) lays the issue to bed because he cites other distinguishable characteristics other than the flower style and analysis of the evolutionary tree (this is what he means by “molecular studies”).
Not finished yet
What you’ve likely concluded already is that Taxonomy is hard work. Poor Jiří Soják pursued the reclassification of some plants in the Potentilla genus to the Argentina genus for some 20 years, nearly until the end of his life. I guess this is no surprise, scientists don’t even agree on how many ways they’ve developed to classify the species of something. It’s not like Nature cares, she’ll do whatever she wants.
And it also turns out that finding out what other people have already found (nice tongue-twister there!) is not as easy as it should be. Much like the observation stroll, this type of detective work requires persistence, patience and creativity.
Luckily (so far!) I’ve not encountered any evidence of scientific fraud, but it does happen much more than you might be comfortable with.
For now, we’ll pause our digital detective work. I’ll continue this puzzle in the next article of this series.