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It's complicated. If you're a tourist and just stumbled upon a species not yet described, that's only the start. Next is a whole lot of work to actually descri

It's complicated. If you're a tourist and just stumbled upon a species not yet described, that's only the start. Next is a whole lot of work to actually describe it which a tourist would typically not be doing, so the idea that you should get naming credit is not a given. There's no hard rule for it. You can definitely give input for the name, and there's rules to naming. You can't name it after a company, for example. The most generous example I've seen is a research organization where you can "buy" a species name. Within taxonomy rules, you can decide on a name for a fee, even if you didn't discover the species at all. It's a way to fund research. In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.

MattGaiser 3y ago
> In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded. Ah, so wait, is there a central taxonomy office (or at least relatively centralized ones for different species groups) that is basically backlogged like a government passport office? Is that how it works?
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Unfortunately, that too is a mess. In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority. But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status. All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded. Ah, so wait, is there a central taxonomy office (or at least relatively centralized ones for different species groups) that is basically backlogged like a government passport office? Is that how it works?

iteratethis 3y ago
Unfortunately, that too is a mess. In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority. But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status. All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.