NABA Names Committee

[Doug Yanega]

Chris Durden wrote:

>Will these names appear in the Federal Register to become enshrined in law?

Do not downplay this. When the law is written such that a name change in a
protected species *invalidates* its protected status, one has to take name
changes seriously. Until we get laws that protect habitat instead of taxa,
this will always be an issue.

>What names are to be used in other North American countries such as Canada,
>Costa Rica, Jamaica or Haiti?

The scientific names, of course.

>Should these other communities not be represented on an official names
>committee?

They are. A committee that rules on whether a given new scientific name is
appropriate or not serves the international community.

>  Let's just produce a lexicon and thesaurus of names that have been used,
>with full disclosure of sources.

There are such things. They're called catalogs and checklists. For most
insect groups, there is little change over time (barring the occasional
major revision), so the catalogs are useful for years if not decades, but
this is not true with butterflies, in which new names appear in dribs and
drabs - practically every month, it seems. This is a group of insects for
which an electronic catalog would truly be justified, and a committee of
professional taxonomists that can oversee it and update it on a day-to-day
basis, if need be. It is, of course, a conflict of interests when committee
members are passing judgment on names they themselves coined, but I'm
willing to bet this can be resolved. Me, I run a museum, I *NEED* to know
which taxa are good and which are not, and that's a judgment that only
taxonomists are qualified to make. I could never justify using a list
devised by non-taxonomists, and such a list would only make my life more
difficult; when people are donating material to the museum, it's nice if
the names they use are the ones the museum uses, and when you're
responsible for communicating with laypeople, it's nice if the names you're
using match what they've learned from their field guides.

Peace,


Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
           http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82