Phoronida

[mdoering]

Because of potential license issues with the Phoronida GSD I briefly looked at its data and alternatives to it. It is a tiny GSD with just 40 names and 19 species.

WoRMS is actually much richer than the data we have. It has references with links to BHL, includes families and more synonyms. WoRMS also has much more vernacular names in various languages. Also a recent new name from 2000, Phoronopsis malakhovi, is not included in COL, but it is in Wikipedia and WoRMS. Then there are accepted names in the genus Actinotrocha that COL accepts, but which are actually just larvae of Phoronis species and which should be synonyms.

Using WoRMS or maintaining a small new github repo for those names seems actually better regardless of the license problem.

[olafbanki]

Thanks Markus, that makes sense to me. I will still conclude the licensing debate. It could result in a temporary gap for COL.

[DaveNicolson]

The inclusion of family-group names in WoRMS Phorinida caught my eye, as some years back ITIS tried to look into this, and ended up adding this comment:

"Emig (Phoronida website, Oct. 2008) and Russel Zimmer (email, Apr. 2004) indicate that there are no available names, under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, between the ranks of genus and phylum within the Phoronida"

See also Emig's statement: http://paleopolis.rediris.es/Phoronida/SYST/PHORONIDA/Phylum-genus_EN.html

I can see that WoRMS has 2 non-accepted family-group names (with original description citations) in synonymy under "Phoronidae Hatschek, 1880", but there is no citation or link to the work that made that available.

If an available family-group name was located then that's great (I'm all for it!!), but given the comments from Emig and Zimmer, it would be good to verify that there is one (or more) available family-group name(s) with WoRMS if they're going to add the name.

From an admittedly quick look, there were at least two works used the name Phoronidae in/about 1880 that may have made the name available, one would correspond to the "Hatschek, 1880" authorship used by WoRMS (although I am following up with Thomas Pape ( @fleshflyguy ) to see if it is available under the lax pre-1931 rules, as it was used almost in passing), and one from another author who use "Phoronidae nov. fam." along with a description and more. I'll post Thomas' comments here (if he doesn't... although someone should probably conduct additional research to see if there are other works that may have made it available, and to try to confirm publication dates for each one, frankly).

[DaveNicolson]

Just a quick follow-up... Turns out the name Actinotrocha Müller, 1846(and A. branchiata Müller, 1846, from same paper) were formally suppressed by the ICZN in a 2015 Opinion (2373), and have been placed on the Official Index of Rejected and Invalid (names). They are "suppressed for the purposes of the Principle of Priority, but not for those of the Principle of Homonymy," meaning that there should only be 11 valid/accepted species now (8 in Phoronis, 3 in Phoronopsis), none of them in Actinotrocha. Actinotrocha is no longer senior to Phoronis, and is not a nomenclatural alternative (the way Fabaceae and Leguminosae are in the botanical world).

I'm not sure I understand the statements about the use of Actinotrocha on Emig's Phoronida website, but it sounds like at least some phoronid workers still want to use that genus for specimens in those larval states, although that could certainly complicate matters for users without knowledge about the group and the nomenclatural & taxonomic history, given Opinion 2373.