PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON 109(4):687-694. 1996 Copepod taxonomy: Discovery vs. recognition David M. Damkaer 21318-195th Ave. SE, Monroe, Washington 98272-9481, U.S.A. Abstract. — A table of copepod orders, families, and type genera, with authors and dates, revealed a general marked delay between the discovery of a genus and the establishment of higher taxa based on that genus. The average time from genus definition to order definition was 51 yr. For families, this delay was 31 yr, with a range of to 159 yr. Excluding the 54 families defined simultaneously with the discovery of their type genus, the average delay was 42 yr. The future trajectory of accumulating family definitions is discussed. The present dynamics of copepod taxonomy may require additional decades before a falling off of new orders and families can be predicted. A recently published copepod classifica-tion (Bowman & Abele 1982), in contrast to many such summaries, indicated authors and dates for taxa down to family. Since that publication, other authors have made additions or alterations to this classification (Fosshagen & Iliffe 1985, 1989; Ho 1990, 1991; Kim 1991, Grygier 1994). A revised classification of the current 10 copepod or-ders and 205 families is given in Table 1; changes from the table of Bowman & Abele are indicated. It became of interest to plot the establishment of the listed families by decade (Fig. 1), as a representation of the historical awareness of copepods as a large, distinct group of Crustacea. What is appar-ent is a steady increase in defined families over 160 yr, with at least four periods of exceptionally rapid progress. These periods can be attributed mostly to James Dwight Dana (1840s and 1850s), to Wilhelm Gies-brecht (1890s), to Georg Ossian Sars (1900s and 1910s), and to several investi-gators since 1950. Besides an obvious ex-pression of personal energy, the association of those periods with individuals reflects in part an ability to sample in or obtain ma-terial from a wide variety of new habitats. There is also a necessary time-lag, since in any era there had to be a reasonable back-ground of described species against which the higher taxa could be discerned. [Note that an investigator could have defined nearly any and all of these higher taxa from literature, without once looking at a speci-men — fortunately, this was not the case.] A second relationship (Fig. 1) shows the establishment of the highest taxa within Co-pepoda, namely the eight orders into which the subclass was divided, as given by Bow-man & Abele (1982), and two orders added in the subsequent decade (see Ho 1990). Again, this indicated a steady increase over the same long time. But was the establish-ment of these 10 orders, and their contained families as well, indicative of newly dis-covered fundamental copepod types, or were these higher taxa based on delayed recognition? Answering this question first for the copepod orders, it was seen that the genera upon which all 10 principal groups are based had been defined between 1776 and 1977, with 8 by 1891 and with 7 by 1865. The range of time between discovery of the genus and the recognition that it rep-resented an entirely new major copepod di-vision was yr, for Siphonostomatoida, to 88 yr, for Mormonilloida. The average time from discovery of the genus to the defini-tion of the order for which that genus is the type was 51 yr. That the earliest order, Cy-clopoida, was defined in 1835 does not
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