Hyla prasina, Burmeister, 1856

Dubois, Alain & Ohler, Annemarie, 2018, The Hyla quoyi-Hyla prasina case (Amphibia, Anura), with comments on bibliographic and taxonomic databases and on Article 23.9 of the Code, Zoosystema 40 (23), pp. 501-506 : 502

THE HYLA QUOYI –

HYLA PRASINA CASE

Bory de Saint-Vincent (1828) introduced the nomen Hyla quoyi for a new frog species from the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro (southeastern Brazil) in a plate of the Dictionnaire classique d’Histoire naturelle. This book, and the new nomina it contained, were ignored by all subsequent authors, starting with Duméril & Bibron (1841), for one century and a half.

Burmeister (1856: 106) described Hyla prasina , also from the region of Rio. This nomen was first synonymised with Hyla pulchella Duméril & Bibron, 1841 by Steindachner (1864: 241), then resurrected by Barrio (1965: 117) as a subspecies of Hyla pulchella and finally reinstated at species rank by Lutz (1973: 83). This species was transferred to the genus Hypsiboas Wagler, 1830 by Faivovich et al. (2005: 88), and the combination Hypsiboas prasinus was universally used in the following years. Wiens et al. (2005: 789) showed that the nomen Boana Gray, 1825 was available for this genus but did not use the combination Boana prasina , which was published for the first time by Dorigo et al. (2018: 3).

Shea (2001) rediscovered the publication of Bory de Saint Vincent and subsequently Caramaschi & Niemeyer (2010) stated that the nomen Hyla quoyi in this work applied to the same species as Hyla prasina , but they argued that the nomen prasina should be maintained for this species by virtue of Article 23.9. However they failed to provide 25 references to the use of this nomen as expressly required by this Article. Dubois (2017b) had noticed that the conditions of Article 23.9 had not been complied with for invalidation of the nomen Hyla quoyi so that, without further detail, he stated that the nomen Hyla quoyi was the valid nomen of this species under the combination Boana quoyi .

Ohler & Dubois (2018) came back to this problem and stressed that indeed Caramaschi & Niemeyer (2010) had not validly used Article 23.9. They carried out an internet search which uncovered only 11 recent references (in the immediately preceding 50 years) to the use of the name Hyla prasina , and therefore confirmed Dubois’ (2017b) conclusion. Before publication, their paper had been sent out to four referees, none of whom questioned the statement that this nomen was not ‘very well known’ of zoologists.

Shortly after, Kolenc & Baldo (2018) and Costa & Santana (2018) independently showed that Ohler & Dubois’ (2018) internet search had provided incomplete results, and they gave lists of respectively 86 and 93 recent references to the use of this nomen as valid, thus complying with the criterion of Article 23.9.

We hereby agree that this number of references fulfills the requirements of Article 23.9 and should have led us to use this Article to validate the nomen Hyla prasina . However this case raises several problems that deserve discussion.