A researcher is trying to determine if populations of a butterfly seen on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado a
re actually separate species. The researcher and her graduate students spent a summer capturing the butterflies at several locations, carefully documenting traits such as color, wing span, antennae length, proboscis length, etc. Which species concept could be applied using these data?
The phenetic species concept can be thought of as an c of the way species are recognized in practice. Informally, the phenetic species concept defines a species as a set of organisms that look similar to each other and distinct from other sets. More formally, it would specify some exact degree of phenetic similarity, and similarity would be measured by a phenetic distance statistic. The phenetic concept measures as many characters as possible in as many organisms as possible, and then recognizes phenetic clusters by multivariate statistics. These clusters approximate to a level of similarity sufficient to be called a species. Phenotypic similarity is all that matters in recognizing separate species. As evident from the passage, the the researcher and students documented different traits of butherfly which clearly Phenetic species concept.
