Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Five panels amended

It's inevitable that the first draft of this collection would have mistakes: two careless ones have recently been corrected (Pholidichthys leucotaenia picked up the wrong Species name first time round when a previous panel was used as a template - I had mistakenly let it slip through as P. fasciatus; additionally, I missed out a letter when transcribing Ctenogobiops pomastictus first allowing it to be C. pomasticus). More important is to rename a fish originally identified by an apparently junior synonym: what I said was Halichoeres purpurescens appears more appropriately named Halichoeres leucurus (search Eshmeyer to compare). I have corrected this (as per the example shown here) in both the Initial and Terminal phases. The knock on effect has been the need to change a comment under the Initial phase form of Halichoeres melanurus which made reference to H. purpurescens.

Incidentally, a number of other fish face a similar predicament (Eshmeyer versus FishBase) but I have left them alone for now firstly because there is only one entry in FishBase for them so there should be no confusion - FishBase tends anyway to default to its preferred name when a species search is done (whereas there are entries for both H. leucurus AND H. purpursecens so I wanted to clarify my association), and secondly because in most cases the difference is just the Species suffix which technically according to the ICZN should match the gender of the Genus but FishBase appears to favour the original suffix given when the fish was first named, whilst Eschmeyer appears to have attempted to correct the suffixes of Species as their Genera evolve).

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