Abstract

LAWLEY, Jonathan W. et al. Morphology is not always useful for diagnosis, and that's ok: Species hypotheses should not be bound to a class of data. Reply to Brown and Gibbons (S Afr J Sci. 2022;118(9/10), Art. #12590). S. Afr. j. sci. [online]. 2022, vol.118, n.9-10, pp.1-3. ISSN 1996-7489.  https://doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2022/14495.

SIGNIFICANCE: This paper serves as a reply to the Commentary by Brown and Gibbons (S Afr J Sci. 2022;118(9/10), Art. #12590) on our recently published paper on systematics of the moon jellyfish genus Aurelia (Lawley et al. PeerJ 2021;9, e11954)). We emphasise that we are not advocating for the routine use of molecular data alone in taxonomic diagnoses, rather that it is a valid approach in cases where, after detailed analyses, morphological features are shown to be unreliable

Keywords : taxonomy; systematics; jellyfish; cryptic species; species delimitation.

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