Published on 15 April 2026
My late night habit of reading open access papers published in Zootaxa continues to provide some interesting small papers. Last week, a paper of mine was published from this work:
The paper is, in short, a correction of a single name published in a new paper, so that the ending of the species name conforms to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Why is this important? It isn’t. It is in no way important. The Code is incredibly silly for mandating this kind of change. But what is important is that we follow the Code.
Codes like the ICZN are arcane and byzantine. They’re difficult to manage and difficult to follow. The more obscure rules, like with gender agreement, are annoying. But when we don’t follow those rules, the entire edifice of the Code is threatened, and we’re closer to not having a Code at all. That would be very difficult for science as a whole, as these names are currently the standard for talking about taxa.
I wrote this paper because I think that following the Code is important – and because I want to not-so-subtly shift the field towards making these sorts of changes unnecessary, by pointing out to scientists how silly the Code currently is. The more people have to wrestle with a poor Code, the more they are likely to push back and go through channels to ask their commissioners to change the Code.
It’s not the best strategy. A better strategy would be for me to talk directly to commissioners about changing the Code (which I’ve done), or to write articles about the changes directly (done that too), or to get myself elected to the commission (tried that). Given that those avenues are already being used or are exhausted, I’m doing what I can - by making sure the Code is upheld as it is. Further, I am also incentivized to publish papers. Academia is silly, too.
This paper is so short it doesn’t have an abstract. And, because I paid the $25 fee and because the paper is therefore under a CC-BY-NC license, I can reprint it here:
Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025 was first described as Lathrobium sapaensis Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025. The etymology states: “The specific epithet is an adjectival form derived from Sa Pa, the forest waterfall in mountainous Lao Cai Province, Vietnam, where nearby the species was discovered.” (Tokareva, Bekchiev and Nguyen 2025) The adjectival Latin ending -ensis has been added to the stem, sapa. This is the normal process for using this morpheme to latinize scientific names with non-Latinate etymologies. However, the suffix -ensis marks for the masculine and feminine gender; the neuter gender would be marked with the suffix -ense. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN 1999; henceforth ‘the Code’) mandates in Articles 31 and 34 that adjectival species-group names must agree with the genus-group name with which they are combined. In this case, Lathrobium Gravenhorst, 1802 has neuter gender, so the species-group name must agree in gender with it.
The gender of Lathrobium can be ascertained through combination with other species-group names in the genus, such as Lathrobium longwangshanense Peng, Li & Zhao, 2012 or Lathrobium tarokoense Assing, 2010, or by analysis of the generic name according to Article 30 of the Code. Under Article 30.1.3, the name is neuter because it is a Greek word, most likely λάθρῃ ‘stealthy’, with a change of ending, and so should take the neuter gender as -um is normally neuter in Latin. Using a different interpretation, the word does not resemble a Greek word exactly (necessary under Article 26), but it is combined by Gravenhorst with other neuter names, such as in L. lineare or L. terminatum (Gravenhorst 1802). Under Article 30.2.3, this confers neuter gender on the generic name.
The available name is Lathrobium sapaense Tokareva & Bekchiev, 2025
You can read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5792.1.12
Tagged: