Stelis Swartz (1799: 239)

Karremans, Adam P., Rojas-Alvarado, Gustavo, Bezerra-Silva, Luiz Eduardo, Flores-Rojas, Jeffrey, Murillo-Murillo, Jose Martín, Romero-Ceciliano, Marysol & Segura-Bermúdez, Oscar A., 2021, Nomenclatural notes in the Pleurothallidinae (Orchidaceae): miscellaneous part II, Phytotaxa 496 (2), pp. 134-146 : 135-136

5. Stelis Swartz (1799: 239) .

New taxa proposed under Crocodeilanthe Reichenbach & Warszewicz in Reichenbach (1854: 113–114), despite the overwhelming evidence that the group is embedded in Stelis s.l. (see Karremans 2019 for a review), are here transferred to Stelis . Once an unsuspected result of the initial phylogenetic studies of Pleurothallidinae ( Pridgeon et al. 2001, Karremans et al. 2013), today genome-wide studies have definitively established that Crocodeilanthe cannot be separated from Stelis in the strict sense without the recognition of several additional new genera and an overall recircumscription of all genera currently included in Stelis s.l. ( Karremans 2016, 2019). Floral differences are obvious, but recognizing Crocodeilanthe on its own without proposing an integral classification for its relatives is unreasonable.

Forty species described from Colombia by Kolanowska & Szlachetko (2020) as Crocodeilanthe are transferred to Stelis . The authors recognized that the genera are “closely related and hardly distinguishable by vegetative characters” and provided a series of general floral differences between the two, for which there are many exceptions. They retain Crocodeilanthe based on the recognizable morphological differences between the two genera. However, at least one of the species proposed by the authors is definitively not a member of this group, instead belonging to a different clade within Stelis s.l., whereas another is a species of Pleurothallis , which demonstrates how challenging it is to adequately define and infer phylogenetic relationships within Stelis s.l. merely on morphology. In practice, the expert failure to correctly recognize the members within their concept of Crocodeilanthe strongly supports the logic of recognizing a broadly circumscribed circumscription of Stelis .