Preparation of the First Draft of Official List of Names in Ichthyology

California Academy Of Sciences, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to test the effectiveness and utility of a new provision of the Code of Zoological Nomenclature added in the fourth edition in 1999. This new article provides that a list of available names in a discipline can be approved by the International Commission; older names not on the list are then made unavailable. This will greatly stabilize zoological nomenclature and save workers much time. Via this project, the ca. 55,000 species names and nearly 10,000 generic names of all Recent fishes will be placed on draft lists of available and unavailable names. The latter list will include between 5,000-10,000 names that appeared in rejected works (publications), without descriptions (nomina nuda), or lack type specimens, have never been used, and are unrecognizable. These names contain no information content and can be purged. Drawing on the massive, existing Catalog of Fishes and its associated databases, it should be possible to produce the draft lists within a year; the drafts would be made available to the community for comment and change, and eventual community recommendation via the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature. This project that will save systematists, and the users of systematic information on fishes, a great deal of time and effort. It can be a model for other large disciplines wishing to use these code provisions for the improvement of the systematics of other groups of animals.