Talk:Triops longicaudatus

Article Grading:
The following comments were left by the quality and importance raters: (edit · refresh)

Most of the information in the article is good, but a few things stand out:

1. Much of the article is unreferenced — ideally every fact should be backed up with a citation, but there should definitely be at least one (inline) reference per paragraph, (one per sentence would not be unreasonable). It's OK to re-use references, but try not to rely too heavily on a very small number of references. Online sources are preferred to otherwise equivalent paper ones for ease of checking; if you can find alternatives to Grzimek (which I guess few other Wikipedians have access to), then so much the better. If not, then not to worry.
2. GA reviewers are likely to pick up on weasel words like "The eggs are said to have to dry out". The obvious question is: by whom? Once you know who says so and where, you can cite that as a source.
3. I didn't see any clear description of what distinguishes T. longicaudatus from other species in the same genus. I assume that most of the morphoplogy section applies equally well to T. cancriformis and others.
4. The lead calls T. longicaudatus "primitive". Biologists hardly use this word any more, because it is related to an outmoded view of evolution that equated complexity with advancement. T. longicaudatus has had 200 million years longer than most species to adapt to its environment, and is almost certainly exquisitely suited to it, so is hardly "primitive". An animal like that would normally be called "simple" instead (although even that captures the situation imperfectly, in my opinion).
5. The article ends by claiming that the two subspecies "have not been officially accepted". Nothing is official in taxonomy, so either the taxa have been properly published or they haven't. It may be that some scientists don't believe that there is a real distinction, but that's a quite different claim. I can find very little information about the subspecies, so unless you've got some good references about them, it may be best simply to ignore the fact that some infrapsecific taxa may have been proposed at some point. It would be amazing if there weren't a fair amount of genetic variation in such a widespread species with so little mobility.

There are also some small minor formatting issues (units, n-dashes for ranges of numbers) and a couple of typos, but they can be dealt with later. For now, referencing the text is the most pressing task. --Stemonitis 16:46, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

All right, I took care of that (or most of it, at least). I also added a vernal pool comparison double-image. --Crustaceanguy 16:40, 16 August 2007 (UTC)