Editor's Summary

23 March 2006

The case for plant species

Some botanists think that plant species don't really exist: they are a product of the human imagination. Claims of extensive hybridization among the likes of oaks, blackberries and dandelions have encouraged the idea that individual, discrete species are a nonsense. Zoologists in the main seem content with the concept of animal species. The idea of a species has now been tested by measuring phenotypic and reproductive distinctness of over 400 genera of plants and animals. The results show that difficulty in pinning species names to vague clusters of individuals, when it does occur, is more likely to result from asexual reproduction, polyploidy (multiple chromosomes) and over-differentiation by taxonomists than it is to be due to hybridization between distinct, sexual species. In fact, plant species are more likely than animal species to represent reproductively independent lines.

Letter: The nature of plant species

Loren H. Rieseberg, Troy E. Wood and Eric J. Baack

doi:10.1038/nature04402

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (227K) | Supplementary information