Taxacom: Big changes / increases in virus taxonomy - who knew?

Fri Jan 17 06:22:15 CST 2025

I found it interesting, but i do not work with viruses so I breathed a sigh of relief that I do not have to cope with amending the names of anything I work with- and I thank Tony profoundly for being willing to take a deep breath and starting to address how the changes affect him. This past year, I made more use of IRMNG that before because I began needing to look up insect names. His is one of the best sources of author names for higher ranks and also for "old" names and various other items - I have not made detailed notes - but THANK YOU. And thank you to all those other people who work to help make scientific names a more reliable means of international communication.

If there is a virologist out there who could point anyone interested to an article explaining the big decisions that led to the massive changes, please share it. I would like to know that too.

Mary

________________________________
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> on behalf of Tony Rees via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2025 12:12 AM
To: Bevan Weir <WeirB at landcareresearch.co.nz>
Cc: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Subject: Re: Taxacom: Big changes / increases in virus taxonomy - who knew?

For pine plantations above, I probably mean spruce plantations, apologies
for that but it was 50 years ago!!

On Fri, 17 Jan 2025, 6:10 pm Tony Rees, <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting, I might have expected a little more interest among Taxacomers
> regarding developments in virus taxonomy but hey, the little critters are
> mostly harmless it seems. Except...
>
> As it happens, viruses have intersected my life one or twice even though
> my main interests have always involved larger things. Once back in the 70s,
> a colleague at University was studying virology while I did Bot. and Zoo.,
> I could not understand the attraction but perhaps I was wrong in hindsight!
> Later I was a contract worker for a while for a study that was trying to
> control spruce sawflies, pests of pine plantations in the UK, by means of
> introduced viruses. Later still in Tasmania, I recall the state environment
> department doing intermittent releases of rabbit calcivirus to knock down
> the numbers of those which were in pest proportions at times. To say
> nothing of world events since Jan 2020 or so. So I guess, yes, virus
> studies are important!
>
> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025, 4:14 pm Tony Rees, <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Bevan, I purposefully refrained from including the changeover from the
>> previous "vernacular style" species names to new, binomial style names of
>> the "genus species" type as adopted in other groups for many centuries now,
>> but yes, that is an additional, and non trivial, issue to be managed by all
>> compilers of such names.
>>
>> Regards, Tony
>>
>> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025, 3:48 pm Bevan Weir, <WeirB at landcareresearch.co.nz>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> It is certainly a massive change moving to a (pseudo)binomial system.
>>> I spoke with one of the guys who is the chair of an ICTV 'study group'
>>> and he explained it to me, but it seemed to me a compromise to keep almost
>>> everyone happy with four different ways of forming names (for plant viruses
>>> at least). The ICTV website is quite good, although some digging is needed
>>> for historic synonymy.
>>>
>>> I have not yet got the courage to update all of the virus names for NZ,
>>> but it will be a big project, for example 'Grapevine Syrah virus-1' is now
>>> Marafivirus syrahense:
>>>
>>>
>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbiotanz.landcareresearch.co.nz%2Fscientific-names%2Fcd45ebe5-14d9-467a-9b61-45ad117955e5&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C368fb9241837479721bf08dd36f19663%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638727133411734538%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=PrwyZ3ZBP9q7rxLe59jzj1uBOuAY7P6JNT24vTPJjUI%3D&reserved=0
>>>
>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fictv.global%2Ftaxonomy%2Ftaxondetails%3Ftaxnode_id%3D202102349%26taxon_name%3DGrapevine%2520Syrah%2520virus%25201&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C368fb9241837479721bf08dd36f19663%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638727133411749441%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=xqIyfO3Lp1Mv2f4eqm5nVBNE8foE3sU%2FH2g%2B%2BNmz2b4%3D&reserved=0
>>>
>>> Bevan
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Tony Rees via
>>> Taxacom
>>> Sent: Thursday, 16 January 2025 4:38 pm
>>> To: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
>>> Subject: Taxacom: Big changes / increases in virus taxonomy - who knew?
>>>
>>> Dear Taxacomers,
>>>
>>> I recently came to update the virus taxonomy in IRMNG (last updated from
>>> the 2018 ICTV list) only to discover that not only had there been an
>>> explosion in higher taxonomic ranks including completely new taxa at realm
>>> and virus-only kingdom levels, but the number of accepted genera has blown
>>> out from under 900 to over 3,000 in the intervening 6 or so years, to say
>>> nothing of species. Current statistics from https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fictv.global%2Ftaxonomy&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C368fb9241837479721bf08dd36f19663%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638727133411757565%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=IVQ7wMheZHVI%2BhLN4rIRscXZOiF66eMtYq1dbB1x%2Fxw%3D&reserved=0
>>> read:
>>> ----------
>>> Virus Taxonomy: 2023 Release
>>> EC 55, Jena, Germany, August 2023
>>> Email ratification April 2024 (MSL #39); release v4, October 30, 2024
>>> 6 realms, 10 kingdoms, 18 phyla, 2 subphyla, 41 classes, 81 orders, 11
>>> suborders, 314 families, 200 subfamilies, 3522 genera, 84 subgenera, 14690
>>> species
>>> ----------
>>> Cited reference works on the ICTV website include such exemplars as:
>>> Muscatt G, Kuhn JH, Millard A, Bending GD, Jameson E, 2023 "Create 418
>>> new genera and 1,706 new species in the class Leviviricetes, move and
>>> rename 375 species, and abolish 114 genera and 48 species."
>>>
>>> As apparent from this example, a number of previously recognised genera
>>> have also been abolished (more than 350 at my count) with species
>>> reassigned elsewhere in the main, in most cases to other newly erected
>>> genera (the concepts of typification and date priority do not appear to be
>>> invoked in the virus world), although in a subset of cases the genus name
>>> has simply been changed to a newer one for any of several reasons, with the
>>> old genus name treated as a synonym of the newer one.
>>>
>>> At any rate this keeps workers such as myself, attempting to track such
>>> changes in our own system (albeit with a few years' latency), not short of
>>> a job or several. As an aside, I note that NCBI taxonomy as well as
>>> Catalogue of Life do appear to have taken these changes on board sooner
>>> than myself. One might hope - optimistically perhaps - that the rate of
>>> change might tail off a bit now that these massive changes have taken
>>> place, but who knows... Any other comments welcome,
>>>
>>> Regards Tony
>>>
>>> Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
>>> https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.me%2FTonyRees&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C368fb9241837479721bf08dd36f19663%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638727133411765565%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kbWbbT3E0et2XYLBUB2vt30%2FKJU5lyU2ijOlVmijBqs%3D&reserved=0
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