Linnean Society Research Articles

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919): The German Darwin and his impact on modern biology.

The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist, artist, and philosopher of science, who defended and supplemented Charles Darwin's system of theories regarding the mechanisms of biological evolution. We briefly recapitulate Haeckel's remarkable career and reproduce the Laudatio read by the President of the Linnean Society of London (1 July 1908), when Haeckel was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal. Finally, we summarize the importance of Haeckel's original concepts, insights, and theories with reference to our current knowledge in the areas of evolutionary biology, molecular phylogenetics, systematic zoology, and philosophical issues today.

New Red List assessments proposed for the recently described freshwater fish species in Greece

New Red List assessments proposed for the recently described freshwater fish species in Greece

John Hunter's Directions for preserving animals

Directions for preserving animals, an undated anonymous pamphlet, privately published by the famous anatomist John Hunter (1728–1793), has not been a subject of a dedicated study so far in spite of its importance as a set of instructions influencing zoological collecting throughout the nineteenth century. A donation entry in the 1788 edition of Regulations and laws of the Lyceum Medicum Londinense allowed assigning 1788 as the most probable publication year of Hunter's pamphlet. The bibliographic analysis of Hunter's private press publications shows that the pamphlet was likely to have been produced by the same press. The pamphlet was reprinted in an amended form in 1809, and further amendments were done for the 1826 and 1835 editions published by the Royal College of Surgeons in London. In spite of Richard Owen (1804–1892) claiming a (co-)authorship of the 1835 edition, there is no evidence that his role exceeded minor editorial corrections. Since Owen made a reference in his correspondence to Hunter's manuscript instructions that he supposedly used in the preparation of the 1835 edition, an attempt was made to trace published and unpublished manuscript instructions for zoological collecting that could be attributed to Hunter. Manuscripts of the Society for Promoting Natural History preserved at the Linnean Society of London showed involvement of John Hunter and Everard Home (1756–1832) in the preparation of a hitherto undescribed comprehensive set of instructions for natural history collectors that was planned to be published by the Society.

Color vision models: Some simulations, a general n-dimensional model, and the colourvision R package.

The development of color vision models has allowed the appraisal of color vision independent of the human experience. These models are now widely used in ecology and evolution studies. However, in common scenarios of color measurement, color vision models may generate spurious results. Here I present a guide to color vision modeling (Chittka (1992, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 170, 545) color hexagon, Endler & Mielke (2005, Journal Of The Linnean Society, 86, 405) model, and the linear and log‐linear receptor noise limited models (Vorobyev & Osorio 1998, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 265, 351; Vorobyev et al. 1998, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 183, 621)) using a series of simulations, present a unified framework that extends and generalize current models, and provide an R package to facilitate the use of color vision models. When the specific requirements of each model are met, between‐model results are qualitatively and quantitatively similar. However, under many common scenarios of color measurements, models may generate spurious values. For instance, models that log‐transform data and use relative photoreceptor outputs are prone to generate spurious outputs when the stimulus photon catch is smaller than the background photon catch; and models may generate unrealistic predictions when the background is chromatic (e.g. leaf reflectance) and the stimulus is an achromatic low reflectance spectrum. Nonetheless, despite differences, all three models are founded on a similar set of assumptions. Based on that, I provide a new formulation that accommodates and extends models to any number of photoreceptor types, offers flexibility to build user‐defined models, and allows users to easily adjust chromaticity diagram sizes to account for changes when using different number of photoreceptors.

Habitat connectivity and complexity underpin fish community structure across a seascape of tropical macroalgae meadows

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, as well as with funding provided by the Linnean Society of New South Wales. We also wish to thank Kelsey Sanborn for assistance in the field.

Descriptions of new sponge species and genus, including aspiculate Plakinidae, overturn the Homoscleromorpha classification

Among the Porifera, the taxonomy and systematics of Homoscleromorpha is one of the most challenging. Over the last two decades, this class and its single order Homosclerophorida have seen a high rate of new descriptions and phylogenetic investigations which have led to the resurrection of two well-supported families, defined as the `spiculate' Plakinidae and the `aspiculate' Oscarellidae. In recent years, the development of an integrative taxonomic approach and the exploration of new marine ecosystems have revealed an even higher diversity of Homoscleromorpha and highlighted the importance of complementary datasets (cytological, biochemical and molecular) to better explain the phylogenetic classification. Using this integrative approach, we here describe two new species of Plakinidae from submarine caves in the Caribbean Sea: Plakina arletensis sp. nov. and Aspiculophora madinina gen. nov. sp. nov., the latter being aspiculate with an unusually well-developed collagen layer in its mesohyl and an abundant and diverse prokaryote community. The recently described Oscarella nathaliae was reassigned to Plakina on the basis of new molecular data and a careful re-examination of morphological characters. Thus, Plakina nathaliae comb. nov. and A. madinina are the first aspiculate representatives of Plakinidae and indicate the need for a detailed re-examination of Homoscleromorpha using this integrative taxonomic approach. (C) 2017 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2017

Correlation between Oxygen Demand of Nematode Communities with Dissolved Oxygen in the Organic Shrimp Farming Ponds, Ca Mau Province

Correlation between Oxygen Demand of Nematode Communities with Dissolved Oxygen in the Organic Shrimp Farming Ponds, Ca Mau Province

Microhabitat selectivity shapes the seascape ecology of a carnivorous macroalgae-associated tropical fish

L.N.W. was supported by an Honours Scholarship from the Australian National University (ANU). Funding was provided by the Australian Academy of Science (Thomas Davies Research Award to C.J.F.), the Research School of Biology at ANU and a Julian E. Tenison Woods Award to L.N.W. from the Linnean Society of NSW.

Palpares turcicus Kocak, 1976 – new name for Iranian fauna and its place in the P. libelluloides species group (Neuroptera: Myrmeleontidae)

We have determined in the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection collection of two closely related species: Palpares libelluloides (Linnaeus, 1764) and P. turcicus Kocak, 1976 from Iranian provinces of Azarbayjan Sharghi, Kermanshah, Fars, Tehran, Kordestan, Markazi, Zanjan, and Lorestan, which are never recorded together in the same biotopes. New records of P. turcicus and other species of P. libelluloides species group from the countries of Transcaucasia, Asia, and Africa are presented based on the collection of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ZIN). In the P. libelluloides species group, P. libelluloides is characterized by yellow abdomen with brown longitudinal lines. Abdominal pattern of P. hispanus Hagen, 1860, P. aeshnoides (Illiger, 1807) and P. turcicus is represented by brown rings on each segment, but these species can be easily differentiated from each other by size. The widely-allopatric species P. geniculatus Navas, 1912 and P. speciosus (Linnaeus, 1758) are characterized by entirely yellow abdomen without brownish pattern. The latter two species have mainly Afro-subtropical distribution, whereas other species of the group are West Palaearctic, mostly Ancient-Mediterranean species. The traditional name Palpares libelluloides (Linnaeus, 1764) is proposed to include into the List of Available Names in Zoology in accordance with the Article 79 of ICZN. This species is considered as P. libelluloides sensu stricto; its confirmed synonyms are Myrmeleon nordmanni Kolenati, 1846 (an immature form), and var. nigriventris A. Costa, 1855 and var. nigripes Navas, 1912 (melanistic specimens), which do not form natural populations. The neotype of Myrmeleon aeshnoides Illiger in Rossi, 1807 (Jerusalem, Romanov’s collection, ZIN), and the neotype of Hemerobius speciosus Linnaeus, 1758 (the collection of the Linnaean Society of London, № 2352) are designated.

Cardiospermum grandiflorum

Cardiospermum grandiflorum

The palaeontologist William Hellier Baily (1819-1888): new biographical information

A biographical account, previously published in The Geological Curator in 2009, of the palaeontologist William Hellier Baily (1819-1888) has already addressed his struggle for advancement in the Geological Survey of Ireland, and various aspects of his publication of Figures of Characteristic British Fossils ([1867]-1875). Further light, revealed by documents recently discovered in the Geological Society of London archives and the Linnean Society of London library, is now cast on those matters.

Preliminary study on phytogeography of Dipterocarpaceae Blume family in Vietnam

Biogeographically mapping flora of Vietnam requires the studies on the distribution of some important species groups for identifying the typical species composition of each phytochorion. The Dipterocarpaceae family contains taxa originated in tropical Asia and its subfamily of Dipterocarpoideae is proved to have Southeast Asia origin. In Vietnam, this family includes 43 species in 7 genera. In this study, Dipterocarpaceae species from 645 sites in Vietnam are assessed and compared to those in over the world. In Vietnam, this family distributes in tropical and/or slightly passing to subtropical climate but none of its species is naturally found in the Red River and the Mekong River deltas. In the world, the Dipterocarpaceae species found in Vietnam concentrated distributes in Indochina floristic region, corresponding to the originative area of South Myanmar. Statistically, there are 12 endemic species for the Indochinese floristic region and five of them are endemic for four provinces of this region related to Vietnam, respectively as follows: South China - 1, North Indochina - 1, South Indochina - 2 and Annam - 1. Additionally, some species distribute in East Asia floristic region of Holarctic Kingdom because of expanding the distribution area from the Indochinese floristic region. All genera of this family in Vietnam were originated in the Indochinese floristic region. Moreover, the floristic data and phytogeographical phylogeny diagram, based on analyses of phytogeography and DNA, would be better to use for finding out the distributional source or the forming time of species or genus, then the phylogenetic diagram.ReferencesAngiosperm Phylogeny Group, 2009. An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG III. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 161(2), 105-121. Ashton P.S., 1982. Dipterocarpaceae. In: Van Steenis C.G.G.J., 1979-1983, Flora Malesiana. Dipterocarpaceae. Martinus Nijhoff Publisher, The Hague, London, 9(2), 250p. Averyanov L.V., Phan K.L., Nguyen T.H., Harder D.K., 2003. Phytogeographic review of Vietnam and adjacent areas of Eastern Indochina, Komarovia, Saint Petersburg, 3, 1-83. Kress W.J., DeFilipps R.A., Farr E. and Yin D.Y.K., 2003. A checklist of the trees, shrubs, herbs and climbers of Myanmar. National Museum of Nature History, Washington DC, 45, 1-590. Le Tran Chan (Editor), 1999. Some characteristics of the flora of Vietnam. Science and Technique publishing house, Hanoi, 305p (Vietnamese). Li X.W., Li J., Ashton P.S., 2007. Dipterocarpaceae. In: Wu Z.Y., Raven P.H. (Hrsg.). Flora of China. Missouri Botanical Garden Press, St. Louis, 13, 48-54. Nguyen Hoang Nghia, 2005. Dipterocarps of Vietnam. Agriculture Publishing House, Hanoi, 100p. Nguyen Kim Dao, 2003. “Dipterocarpceae Blume, 1825” in Checklist Plant species of Vietnam. Agricultural Publishing House, Hanoi, 2, 328-340 (Vietnamese). Nguyen Nga Phi, 2009. Molecular phylogeny of Southeast-Asian Dipterocarps belonging to tribe Dipterocarpeae (family Dipterocarpaceae) based on non-coding sequence data of chloroplast and nuclear DNA. Department of Forest Genetics and Georest Tree Breeding, Büsgen Institute, Faculty of Forest Science and Forest Ecology, Georg-August University of Göttingen. Göttingen, 142p. Nguyen Nghia Thin, 2004. Methods in Botanical Research. HNU publishing house, Hanoi, 172p (Vietnamese). Pham Hoang Ho, 2001. Illustration Flora of Vietnam, Youth Publishing House. Ho Chi Minh City, 2, 1022p (Vietnamese). Smitinand T., 1969. The distribution of Dipterocarpaceae in Thailand. National History Bull. Siam Soci., 23, 67-75. Smitinand T., J.E. Vidal, P.H. Ho, 1990. Flore du Cambodge, du Laos et du Vietnam, 25, Diptérocarpacées. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 123p (French). Takhtajan A. (Translated by Theodore J. Crovello), 1986. Floristic Regions of the World. University of California Press, 544p. Thai Van Trung, 1978. Tropical Forest Ecology systems of Vietnam. Science and Technique publishing house, Hanoi, 314p (Vietnamese). The Plant List (Version 1.1.), 2013. Dipterocarpaceae. http://www.theplantlist.org.

The Garden Palace: Building an Early Sydney Icon

The Garden Palace: Building an Early Sydney Icon

"Latitudinal Gradients in Species Diversity": Reflections on Pianka's 1966 Article and a Look Forward.

"Latitudinal Gradients in Species Diversity": Reflections on Pianka's 1966 Article and a Look Forward.

A critical comment on the ‘multiple variance Brownian motion’ model of Smaers et al. (2016)

Smaers, Mongle & Kandler (2016) (Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 118: 78-94) introduced a new phylogenetic comparative method, multiple variance Brownian motion (mvBM), for reconstructing ancestral states given a phylogenetic tree and continuous trait data. The authors conducted a simulation study and argued that mvBM outperforms constant variance Brownian motion (BM) when rates of evolution vary across the phylogeny. In this comment, we argue that mvBM is not a viable statistical method because it is fundamentally a circular analysis that overfits phylogenetic branch lengths to the data. We further argue that the comparison of mvBM to BM under conditions where the assumptions of BM are clearly violated is not an informative performance analysis, and that the simulation study of Smaers et al. (2016) exaggerates the performance of mvBM by focusing on a narrow range of simulation conditions and reporting aggregated accuracy metrics that obscure severe inaccuracy and bias in its ancestral state estimates. Our arguments are supported by simulation results. We conclude that mvBM is not a viable phylogenetic comparative method.

Tipificación de <em>Crepis sancta</em> (L.) Babc. (<em>Compositae, Cichorieae</em>)

Se discute la tipificación del nombre Crepis sancta (L.) Babc. in Unif. Calif. Public. Bot. 19: 403 (1941) [≡ Hieracium sanctum L., Cent. Pl. II: 30 (1756), basiónimo] (Compositae, Cichorieae). La designación del correspondiente tipo está basada en la consulta del material original de Linneo y la bibliografía citada en el respectivo protólogo. El material original conservado en LINN (Herbario de Linneo en la Sociedad Linneana de Londres) es designado como el lectótipo.

Sex, Scavengers, and Chaperones: Transcriptome Secrets of Divergent Symbiodinium Thermal Tolerances.

The Centre for Marine Bio-Innovation at The University of New South Wales, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and the Linnean Society of New South Wales contributed financial support for this study.

Global monocot diversification: geography explains variation in species richness better than environment or biology

Monocots account for a quarter of angiosperm species richness and are among the most economically and culturally important plants, including cereals (grasses), palms, orchids and lilies. Previous investigations of correlates of monocot species diversity have varied in scale and usually concentrated on a few drivers of diversification. Here, to disentangle the correlates of monocot diversity, we reconstructed a genus-level phylogenetic tree (1987 of the 2713 genera) and compiled an extensive database of abiotic, biotic and geographical characteristics to assess whether differences in these traits correlate with the vast asymmetrical species richness among genera present in this clade. Our results support several classical biodiversity theories, including species-area relationships, and latitudinal and elevational diversity gradients. Furthermore, interactions among these factors explain an additional 10% of the variation (compared to 36% from the main effects alone). We conclude that higher species richness among monocot genera is associated with geographical variables, especially larger ranges and lower elevations, rather than physical environment or physiology. (C) 2016 The Authors. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2016

No place among the living: phylogenetic considerations place the Palaeozoic fossilT. protuberansin Fungi but not in Dikarya. A comment on M. Smith (2016)

In this commentary, we discuss evidence for the phylogenetic affiliations of Tortotubus protuberans, the subject of Martin Smith's 2016 paper in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society entitled, ‘Cord-forming Palaeozoic fungi in terrestrial assemblages’. We agree that the fossilized, branching, somatic filaments probably represent fungal hyphae. We were not convinced by Smith's proposal that T. protuberans represents Dikarya, the clade of fungi that includes most modern moulds, yeasts and mushrooms. To justify classification, Smith relied on structures that are analogous between T. protuberans and modern fungi, and argued ‘that Dikarya can produce the range of morphologies expressed by T. protuberans’. We review available information about homologies of the characteristics of T. protuberans, including mycelial cords, retrograde growth, septal pores and ornamented hyphae. Retrograde growth in T. protuberans is intriguing from an evolutionary developmental point of view, but it differs sufficiently in fine detail when compared with growth patterns in croziers or clamp connections of Dikarya, so that homologies are unclear. Tortotubus protuberans is an important fossil form, but we suggest taking a step back and relating it to the distribution of character evolution through the fungal phylogeny rather than to derived characters of modern taxa.

Species limits, geographical distribution and genetic diversity inJohannesteijsmannia(Arecaceae)

Four species are recognized in the understorey palm genus Johannesteijsmannia (Arecaceae), all of which occur in close geographical proximity in the Malay Peninsula. We hypothesize that overlapping distributions are maintained by a lack of gene flow among species and that segregation along morphological trait or environmental axes confers ecological divergence and, hence, defines species limits. Although some species have sympatric distributions, differentiation was detected among species in morphological and genetic data, corroborating current species delimitation. Differences in niche breadth were not found to explain the overlapping distribution and coexistence of Johannesteijsmannia spp. Four species formed over the last 3 Mya, showing that diversity accumulated within a short time frame and wide range expansion has not occurred, potentially due to a lack of time for dispersal or the evolution of traits to facilitate movement. An assessment of genetic diversity is presented and, as expected, the widest distribution in the genus harbours the highest genetic diversity. (C) 2016 The Linnean Society of London.