[Taxacom] OMG! DNA only descriptions! - Round Two

[Carlos Alberto Martínez Muñoz]

Dear Taxacomers,
Going back to the paper by Meierotto et al. (2019). We are still waiting to
know if the paper is published in a Code-compliant way and if the names are
available from the printed edition. I hope that the DEZ EiC will clarify
that soon. As I wrote before, we shouldn't be having discussions over
unpublished names.
The next thing. The paper has seven authors (the first two being
corresponding authors and the first one being the species' author), as
follows: Sarah Meierotto, Michael J. Sharkey, Daniel H. Janzen, Winnie
Hallwachs, Paul D. N. Hebert, Eric G. Chapman and M. Alex Smith. I found
the ResearchGate profiles of six of them, all but Winnie Hallwachs'. Why
did I search for seven profiles? Because I was looking for the original pdf
version of the paper, the one that is not online anymore. Not only I didn't
find the pdf in their RG profiles but even the reference to the paper. The
paper is titled "A revolutionary protocol to describe understudied
hyperdiverse taxa and overcome the taxonomic impediment". I was expecting
that one of the authors would have considered that posting the open access
pdf or at least the reference would help him/her/them to make their
protocol more visible to the broader taxonomic community.
Another thing that greatly called my attention is that Meierotto et al.
(2019) missed the paper by Brower et al. (2010), where the barcode species
concept was proposed and explicitly used to solve problems precisely
derived from Hebert et al. (2004) paper on DNA barcoding and cryptic
species of Astraptes fulgerator (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae) from Área de
Conservación Guanacaste. Three of the authors of the 2004 paper are also
authors of the 2019 Guanacaste paper (Hebert, Janzen and Hallwachs) and the
ten species delineated by them in 2004 and later named by Brower (2010) are
entered in the online ACG biodiversity inventory (
https://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr/biodiversidad/index.php, search by Astraptes
and Hesperiidae). I therefore assume that at some point some of the authors
of Meierotto et al. (2019) did know about Brower (2010) but later forgot
about it.
After almost five months since the start of the debate in Taxacom and after
not seeing the 2019 article in RG, I ask the authors if they still support
their paper, have (re-)read Brower (2010), have less or more arguments in
favor of their protocol and have some constructive thoughts stemming from
the debate that they may like to share with us.

Warm regards,
Charlie

-- 
Carlos A. Martínez Muñoz
Zoological Museum, Biodiversity Unit
FI-20014 University of Turku
Finland
ResearchGate profile
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Martinez-Munoz>
Publons profile
<https://publons.com/author/1324309/carlos-alberto-martinez-munoz#profile>
Myriapod Morphology and Evolution
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/205802113162102/>