Comment on Cognettia Nielsen & Christensen, 1959 (Annelida, Oligochaeta, ENCHYTRAEIDAE): giving precedence to the name promotes stability

摘要

The authors of the study (Martinsson et al., 2015a) that prompted our application to give precedence of Cognettia over its senior synonyms Chamaedrilus and Euenchytraeus (Schmelz et al., 2015) have recently defended their position to maintain Cognettia as an invalid junior synonym (Rota et al., 2015). We distinguish two arguments in their well-written comment: (1) Precedence of Cognettia will fail to achieve its main goal, to avoid confusion, because ambiguities in the meaning of species names will persist; these ambiguities and the resulting confusion can be avoided in the future if Chamaedrilus is maintained as valid name. (2) The change from Cognettia to Chamaedrilus has already started to be accepted; instability would result from the reversal of this situation by revalidating Cognettia. The arguments are framed by an elaborate presentation of the achievements and novel aspects of the scientific results in the works of Martinsson and co-authors, and emphasis is placed on the advantages of the new concepts for taxonomists and ecologists. We believe that the arguments in Rota et al. are untenable, as will be explained in the following.