NABA Names Committee - explanatory comments and a question

[Felix Sperling]

>NABA Names Committee: Request for information


Well, now we have two committees trying to provide updated butterfly
names lists for North America. Both are intended to reduce the
"confusing welter of butterfly names". Both groups were initiated
by Jeffrey Glassberg. As a member of the first committee, I think
it is time for me to describe the events that have led up to this
counterproductive juncture, and to ask for some feedback from you.
Most of you are potential users of these names lists and many of
you are also members of NABA or Lep Soc or both. Basically I am
asking whether you would rather deal with an "official" NABA names
list or a names list produced by our now-independent committee.

The first group is composed of five professional systematists,
including Paul Opler (chair), Don Lafontaine, John Burns, Bob
Robbins, and Felix Sperling. [However, in this note I speak only
for myself (Felix), and I have not run the note past my fellow
committee members.] As a committee, we have now met in person
three times since 1997, first to sort out operating principles and to
agree on a starting point, and finally to consider about a dozen name
changes that relate to recent publications. Paul Opler put a request
for input into the Lepidopterists' News last summer, and put a precis
of our deliberations out on Leps-l this past January 8th. We got
feedback on the precis from several people, some of it positive and
some of it negative but constructive. Probably the most important
comment was that we needed to spend more time explaining the basis
for our recommendations, and we would certainly take that criticism to
heart for our next round.

One of our earliest decisions was to use, as a starting point, a
coordinated names list that Paul Opler and Don Lafontaine had put
together for the Peterson Field Guide to the Western Butterflies,
(by Opler) and The Butterflies of Canada (by Layberry, Hall and
Lafontaine). Our reasons were simple; the newer coordinated list built on
the NABA First Edition list, to which Paul Opler contributed as a
committee member and by the committee's reliance on his Peterson
Field Guide to the Eastern Butterflies. Opler's western list and the
Layberry et al list took into account additional information that
was not acted on in the NABA First Edition list, which primarily relied
on information available up to 1992. Given that Layberry et al was in
press when we started as a committee, and Opler's western guide was in a
very late stage of preparation, we did not want to confuse matters further
nor indulge in a large amount of inefficient work by starting all over
again and producing yet another list. Although we all felt that the
newer list was on the whole an improvement over the NABA First Edition
list, not all committee members were satisfied with all names in that
list and in a very small number of cases I believe that most of us thought
the names should be reexamined. However, we thought that the least
confusing thing to do at this point would be to use this new aggregate
list as a jumping off point, and to focus on recent literature as well
as responses to a notice that Opler would put in The Lepidopterists' News.

A second early decision that we made was to form an independent
committee that was not directly under NABA. Our primary reason was
that we did not want to contribute to exacerbating the split between
NABA and the Lepidopterists' Society. Our committee members included
members of the executive of both societies. We announced our intention to
other executive members of both societies and we did not receive any
indication that our independence automatically made our committee's
deliberations unacceptable to either society. I announced our work
personally to the Lep Soc, and got a cautiously positive response from
the executive. Their caution was mostly related to a desire not to be drawn
into what many of them saw (more clearly than I, in retrospect) as
a lot of work with little chance of a positive resolution.

Then a couple of weeks before we were to meet this past fall, we
received a letter from Jeffrey Glassberg. He stated that he was willing
to accept most of the 52 differences between our list and the NABA
First Edition list, but if we did not rescind 11 of these changes
then he would not adopt our list in his forthcoming Butterflies
Through Binoculars: The West. Unfortunately, we already had prepared
for a full slate of names discussions based on recently published or
reevaluated material, and our travel plans were already set.
We had published a notice in Lep News in which we asked that requests
for our consideration be sent to us by the end of summer and Glassberg's
letter came far past that deadline. We simply did not have the time for
a serious consideration of these additional taxonomic problems, both
because we had too little time for preparation and we would have had to
abandon most of our original slate. Thus we decided to schedule our
next meeting for the following April, in addition to the meeting we
had already planned for the next October. The timing of this meeting
was intended to accommodate Glassberg's expected time of delivery of
his newest book to his publisher. Glassberg's response was to write us
saying that if we did not accede to his wishes on 11 taxa by January
15th, 2000, then he would have a NABA Names Committee immediately
publish a second edition of the NABA checklist that incorporated only
the very most strongly supported changes from the first NABA list.

Considering that the Opler and Layberry et al books had been published
by this time, the Butterflies of North America website also used
this list, and accommodation of Glassberg's ultimatum would cause
considerable personal disruption and expense to some committee members,
Paul Opler wrote back to request that Glassberg reconsider using our list.
I am not aware of any response by Glassberg.

Yesterday we received a notice on Leps-l (also on Southwest Leps 
list) originating from Glassberg, in which he announced his new NABA 
committee
and requested information on any publications on butterfly systematics
in addition to the list he presented. The new NABA committee members
included four non-systematists (including himself) and one graduate
student in systematics. Presumably this new group will now
accommodate Glassberg's wishes for a list with fewer changes from the
NABA First Edition list. The result will be that the official NABA list,
which is used for the thriving butterfly counts that NABA sponsors,
will be congruent with Glassberg's new book while Opler's book and
the Layberry et al book will be out of synch.

I originally agreed, on Glassberg's strong encouragement, to serve on a
committee to help stabilize and standardize North American butterfly
scientific names. The committee's goal is still one that I strongly
believe is a worthy one. No one is obligated to follow such a
committee's recommendations, but I think that even the simple existence
of a committee that evaluates proposed name changes would encourage
greater scientific rigor in future publications, and eventually greater
stability of names. Obviously, however, we now have a situation that
will only make this situation worse.

Speaking just for myself, life is too short to put effort into
something that is clearly not wanted by the people who would use it.
I explicitly have not gotten academic credit for this kind of activity
from either of the universities where I have been a professor. I have to
admit that I would feel a twinge of regret that my services were being
rejected by the community that they are intended for. But heck, the
really satisfying work lies in working out the nuances of particular
species limits, and not in the inevitably more superficial exercise of
revising lists based on others' work.

So - here's the point. Is it time to bow out and wish the NABA
Committee members well? Or is it time to dig in my heels?
Please cut out the following and let me know by mailing directly to
me at felix.sperling at ualberta.ca and *not* the whole list (unless of
course you want to use it as the basis for general discussion). I'll
post a tally when the replies peter out.


1. Advice to me:
     a. Cut your losses and run.
     b. Hang in there.

2. Respondent is:
     a. NABA member
     b. Lep Soc member
     c. both NABA and Lep Soc member
     d. member of neither


Thanks for reading this far!

	Felix Sperling        felix.sperling at ualberta.ca