Just a question: exactly WHO is the ICZN?
    Art Weil


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---- David Campbell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > I apologise in advance if this is a rather ignorant question, but I thought
> > a new species name had to be accepted by the ICZN before anyone else would
> > give it credence? Who has the final decision?
>
> The ICZN has established laws.  Any proposed new name has to obey
> those laws.  However, the ICZN does not review each name.  It only
> reviews in cases where there is a problem.  For example, I need to
> write a notice to the ICZN to request that an obscure and largely but
> unfortunately not entirely overlooked genus name be suppressed in
> favor of one of the most frequently cited genera of south Asian
> unionids.  As far as I can tell, no one (including the original
> author) has ever recognized that the older name applies to Asian
> species because the type species locality was wrong.  However, the
> older name has been identified as a validly proposed name in a few
> modern publications.
>
> My impression is that the ICZN is generally reluctant to suppress
> legally published names, even if it can be shown that the quality of
> work was deficient.
>
> >maybe they dive or hire divers, or pay fisherman to come up with
> "new" species but then not have enough interest or resources from the
> scientific community to have them researched and named<
>
> Resources are sparse for the researching and naming of new species.
> As other posts have alluded to, it's a lot of work to track down all
> the previous literature on a group to check for previous names.  Often
> it's necessary to travel to museums and examine specimens to verify
> types.  For example, Dall named the new genus and species Eucymba
> ocalana based on material from the Ocala limestone of Florida, which
> he figured, but selected as type specimen a shell from the Moodys
> Branch Formation in Mississippi.  Unfortunately that specimen turns
> out to represent a very well-described and figured species named much
> later than Dall's, and the younger accurately descriptive name must be
> abandoned in favor of Dall's geographically misleading name.  Then
> there's the task of confirming that the form is actually different
> from all known species, which may require DNA and anatomy as well as
> shell features.  Obtaining a large enough population to characterize
> the variability (to demonstrate that the new form is not merely a
> variety of a known one) may be a challenge.  There's also the problem
> of maintaining funding long enough to complete the task of getting
> names published for one group before you have to get a new source of
> funding.
>
> DNA is not sure-fire for a few reasons.  Like any other feature,
> different organisms show different degrees of variability in different
> parts of DNA.  Sometimes weird things can happen, such as
> hybridization, maintenance of divergent alleles in a population, etc.
> Contamination can also be a problem.
>
> --
> Dr. David Campbell
> 425 Scientific Collections
> University of Alabama
> "I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
>
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