Taxacom: expanding the concept of nomen dubium

[Leslie Watling]

I would like to have a discussion of the concept of nomen dubium, which is
only mentioned inArticle 75.5 of the Zoological Code. I have no idea what
the Botanical Code thinks on the subject.

So, here is the issue from my point of view. Much has been written lately
about changing names based on new social criteria etc., and how much that
would detract from the actual work that taxonomists need to do to just get
species described.

Well, another issue that takes up a huge amount of time is figuring out the
features of some old species whose descriptions were vague (by the
standards of today) and whose type specimens are so degraded as to be
nearly useless, for example, by not possessing the essential character(s)
for discriminating the species from others in the genus. Or are lost
altogether.

Article 75.5 states: "the author may request the Commission to set aside
under its plenary power [Art. 81] the existing name-bearing type and
designate a neotype."

What I would like to propose, instead, is that a section be added to
"Article 12. Names Published Before 1931", allowing for an author to
propose in a published paper that a species be declared a nomen dubium if
the author can demonstrate that the original description of a species is
too vague and that the type specimen is of no use in sorting out the
important characters of the species because the type specimen is degraded
or lost.

In my opinion we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out
what some of these old species are, whether any modern specimen actually
belongs to that species, when we could just move on by saying we have no
idea what that species looked like and so the name should be taken out of
circulation, as it were. I suppose in some ways we do this already by just
ignoring some of those old names, but as responsible taxonomists we feel an
obligation to try to deal with them.

I wrote a paper a few years ago (Watling & France 2021, Bull. Yale Peabody
Mus. 62(2):97-110; freely available) sorting out the problem of what A.E.
Verrill's species, Lepidisis caryophyllia, actually looked like. It turns
out Verrill's description was partially wrong, and the type now consists of
two little dried up polyps. I won't go through the whole story of what we
did to try to sort it out, but it might have been better if we could have
just decided that his species be abandoned along with the genus Lepidisis.
In the time it took us to do all that sleuthing, etc., we could have
described several new species.

 There are a few other octocoral genera and species from the 1800s that
likewise are real problems and may take many more person-hours to get to
some agreement on. In the meanwhile other new species languish in museum
collections until these problems are solved. My view is we should just
declare that we have no idea what those things are and there should be a
formal part of the Code to allow us to do that.

Sorry this went on so long.....





Les Watling
Professor Emeritus
School of Life Sciences
University of Hawaii

Professor Emeritus
School of Marine Sciences
University of Maine