New sub-Saharan spider species Kuamthana Huber, 2003 is described as having been collected in garden centers in Poland and the United Kingdom. The closest known relative is probably Q. Roch Huber, 2003, known as the Free State Province of South Africa. We work from the premise that placing species in time and space is a fundamental task of taxonomy, and we recognize that we cannot provide biologically meaningful spatial information about this species; We prefer open nomenclature to inform science without formally describing this species. unique kana Kuamthana sp. ZFMK Al 24490 Ah. Roch. We argue that judicious use of public nomenclature can improve the quality of species lists and reduce noise in large-scale analyzes of biodiversity data. We extend this argument to “fragmentary” species descriptions in general, such as single-sex descriptions in large genera that often have male-only and female-only descriptions. Not all classification actions permitted by the Code are necessarily beneficial. Under certain conditions, an informal description of a putative new species can be more useful to science than a formal description based on insufficient documentation or data.
Huber BA, Szymański H, Bennett-West A (2024) Progress or burden? A formal description of every apparently new species available in a collection is neither necessary nor useful. Zookey 1214: 77-90. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1214.130592
