> 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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