How one of the most familiar of African large mammals came to be unrecognised

@paradoxornithidae @capracornelius @tandala @geichhorn

There is a widespread, large, conspicuous, still-numerous, and ecologically important ungulate which I shall call the western wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus mattosi (Blaine, 1925).

Naturalists will not have heard of it, but this is not because these are incorrect or inappropriate names.

Instead, what has happened is that this ungulate has never been given a scientific christening. In turn, it has previously lacked a common name, other than the imprecise 'blue wildebeest'.

Another way of saying this is that subspecies mattosi is a valid and important subspecies of wildebeest that has not previously been recognised and named as such.

This situation seems to have come about by a combination of taxonomic accident and a remarkable slowness for the obvious distinctiveness of the animal to be noticed.

Here is the western wildebeest: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-profile-of-a-blue-wildebeest-pictured-in-etosha-national-park-namibia-77058608.html.

Please compare this with http://www.joelinnphoto.com/africa/xmrwckt8ri8yocv7kwy1dl7ny0ynu1, the eastern counterpart which properly deserves the name blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus taurinus (Burchell, 1824).

Now please compare, on the Web, any dozen photos of wildebeests in Etosha National Park vs Kruger National Park, respectively.

The differences in the mane, beard and brindling (striping, particularly on the cheek) may seem obvious and consistent, once pointed out. However, they have been overlooked by several generations of zoologists and naturalists, almost as if the lack of a label has produced a blind spot.

Here is how this situation seems to have arisen.

In the northward exploration of South Africa by hunters and naturalists, the blue wildebeest was first encountered in what we now call Free State province (see https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-distribution-ranges-of-blue-light-blue-and-black-wildebeest-greyThe_fig3_322539832).

Had a specimen been collected there, sent to Europe, and scientifically described, ensuing events might have been such that there would be nothing to correct today.

However, it was not until a place about 300 km farther northwest, towards the uninviting Kalahari, was reached that the wildebeest was procured for Science (see pages 277-278 in https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AGpdAAAAcAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=Burchell+1824&ots=bil8VyS8OQ&sig=PO0uNuOT2JTmeUjQkCcmCG0AeQw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Burchell%201824&f=false).

And this was not the 'pure' form of the blue wildebeest that survived in Kruger National Park and Zululand, but instead something transitional to another, still unencountered form of the Kalahari.

So, when William John Burchell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_John_Burchell) named his wildebeest, little did he know that he was describing a compromised specimen, a 'subspecific hybrid'. Nor did anyone else ever realise the implications of his error, until now.

For the subsequent century, 1825 to 1925, everyone just called all the wildebeests, from Zululand to Etosha, the blue wildebeest, Connochaetes taurinus, based on Burchell's lectotype specimen from Kuruman-Vryburg. As South West Africa underwent colonisation, nobody heeded the distinctive profile of the western form living there.

Then, based on a specimen from remote Angola, Gilbert Blaine described Connochaetes taurinus mattosi.

He could not have known that, far from discovering some novel northern subspecies, he was belatedly naming a subspecies that Afrikaners had been hunting for a century in what was about to become the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (in what is now Northern Cape province of South Africa).

Blaine coined the name mattosi for what we now know to be an unusually wide-ranging subspecies in terms of latitudes (13 to 27 degrees South, see https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-showing-the-distribution-of-wildebeest-subspecies-in-Africa-including-some-important_fig2_305317918).

It is worth noting that the same Blaine had, eleven years earlier, already contributed in a lasting way by describing Connochaetes taurinus cooksoni from eastern Zambia (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=504448). (For an example of the archival record see e.g. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=DF+ZOO%2F232%2F6%2F6%2F2%2F1.)

The western form of wildebeest now had a name, but everyone ignored it. This included authorities such as Shortridge (https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Mammals-South-West-Africa-Biological-Account-Forms/22535336998/bd), who should have realised its applicability to Ovamboland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovamboland).

The oversight continued, up to and including Groves and Grubb (2011, page 229 in https://zmmu.msu.ru/files/%D0%91%D0%B8%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%20%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0/grubb-groves-2011_taxonomy_ungulates.pdf). These authors assumed, against the odds, that the wildebeest at the edge of the Congo Basin was the same as that in faraway subtropical Zululand.

So, what is ultimately just a series of oversights has brought us to a today in which one of the most familiar subspecies of African large mammals remains unrecognised as a subspecies.

By the rules of taxonomy, what would be the most efficient way of giving this subspecies its long-overdue christening?

Now that we know better, can we begin to label this subspecies what it is and has been for almost a century (1925-2021), namely Connochaetes taurinus mattosi?

And, since common names are not bound by taxonomic precedence, can we start to use the obvious common name, western wildebeest?

Also please see https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/milewski/74421-the-western-wildebeest-a-natural-hybrid-between-the-black-and-blue-wildebeests#.

Posted on 14 de julho de 2021, 08:04 PM by milewski