Why Was Neofinetia Changed to Vanda?

[NYCorchidman]

Anyone knows or has an article on this?

Thanks!

[Subrosa]

Because unlike in the fish world where the splitters currently rule, in the orchid world the lumpers are carrying the day. As far as explaining the specific reasons to lump the two genera together, you'll need to ask someone more knowledgeable about the morphology of orchids.

[hbozeman]

Can't argue with Subrosa, for the most part. However, for the last few centuries, taxonomy was based on visual similarities. Hopefully now, more weight is placed on DNA/chromosamal/gene similarities.

[camille1585]

But the issue is the same in genetics. Where do you draw the line between same and different? I know that there are commonly accepted thresholds, but still.... I have a hard time thinking of neofinetia as a vanda, and Sophronitis as cattleya. I'll see if there are any published papers on this.

[NYCorchidman]

Camille- Exactly!!! and thank you for your time looking things up.


Even by visual inspection, typical vandas and neofinetias are not alike, well, unless you reeeally stretch it. lol

Plus, I was a bit more curious about genetic side of it.
I understand that we humans and chimpanzees are very different on the outside while sharing some similarities. but then our DNA and theirs are about 98% (last read) identical, yet we are not in the same category as primate.

Sooooo, anyone knows???
Who "declared" this neos are now vandas, and who are the authority to do so? I find it ridiculous!!!

[Subrosa]

Look on the bright side. Taxonomy is nothing more than a way of stuffing organisms into discrete boxes. You now have fewer boxes to worry about. We fish people are being given a bunch of new boxes to have to deal with.

[tropterrarium]

As far as I recall, Neofenetia is found within a clade of what usually is called Vanda. So either Vanda is paraphyletic, or you split Vanda up into multiple genera, or you include Neofenetia in Vanda. The latter makes much more sense, particularly with monotypic genera such as Neofenetia.

Has less to do with splitter vs. lumper, but with reciprocal monophyly of supraspecific taxa.

[camille1585]

So, I did find a paper about molecular phylogenetics of Vanda. I don't know if this paper is the reason for the lumping, but it must have contributed to the decision.

The paper is called "Molecular phylogenetics of Vanda and related genera (Orchidaceae)", published in 2013.

Using 3 different plasmid DNA regions they built the phylogenetic tree of the Vanda family. They find that there is very little genetic diversity in the Vanda group. I've attached the figure, and hope it will be large enough to read....

Basically similarity or difference is based on the bootstrap value. I don't do anything like this, but I've seen similar stuff before. In the paper they they this "Nodes with bootstraps of 85% are considered strongly supported here, whereas 75–84% is moderately and 0–74% is weakly supported" I'm not familiar enough with phylogenetics to be able to say if 85% is strong enough, but a quick google search tells me that many scientists often use 90-95% as the cut off for solid support.

So if you look at the figure, Neofinetia falls just outside the main branches were most of the Vandas fall, but it's still similar enough to be also called Vanda.

[camille1585]

hmmm.... that's unreadable. Going to find a different way of sharing it!

---------- Post added at 11:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:14 PM ----------

molecular phylogenetic tree vanda by Camille1585, on Flickr

[NYCorchidman]

Thanks, Camille!

It looks like it is still neo, hahaha