I am reading a paper by C. C. Berg called "Proposals for treating four species complexes in Ficus Subgenus Urostigma Section Americanae (Moraceae)" [Blumea 52:295-312].
The problem with the Neotropical taxa of Ficus is that "The species complexes in Urostigma section Americana comprise a number of partly allopatric entities ('forms') that are morphologically so close that recognition is often very difficult or sometimes even impossible. Moreover, the pollinators of entities within within the complexes can be different, possibly implying genetic isolation" [Experientia 45:605-611].
Hmmm... I think basically what it means is that it is hard to classify these species because they are similar, yet different. So should we treat them as distinct species, or should we see them in a broader sense, as complexes or a common species/subspecies.
What Berg did was to propose a treatment for the four species complexes (F. americana, F. aurea, F. citrifolia & F. pertusa).
What stunned me was that many of the species known to be threatened are now being grouped together with others under one name. What that possibly could mean is that I might have less threatened species than previously thought...
It took me a long time to get used to this shifting and moulding, this plasticity of taxonomic groups. How one day, this species is here, another day, it's there when someone realizes it's been identified or evaluated wrongly. It's so flexible and changing. There are rules, but with new discoveries and knowledge, species are shifted around and sometimes ceased to exist when I suppose identified wrongly.
I feel very raw and new to this. A actually you probably can tell from the way I tried to explain what I know. I still can't grasp it proficiently at the moment. But I am in awed at the complexity and have started loosening up.
I used to think these things were fixed and do not change. But they do, they do!
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