August 2017 Guido T. Poppe A LISTING OF PHILIPPINE MARINE MOLLUSKS - V1.00 THE LISTING OF PHILIPPINE MARINE MOLLUSKS Guido T. Poppe INTRODUCTION The publication of Philippine Marine Mollusks, Volumes 1 to 4 has been a revelation to the conchological community. Apart from being the delight of collectors, the PMM started a new way of layout and publishing - followed today by many authors. Internet technology has allowed more than 50 experts worldwide to work on the collection that forms the base of the 4 PMM books. This expertise, together with modern means of identification has allowed a quality in determinations which is unique in books covering a geographical area. Our Volume 1 was published only 9 years ago: in 2008. Since that time “a lot” has changed. Finally, after almost two decades, the digital world has been embraced by the scientific community, and a new generation of young scientists appeared, well acquainted with text processors, internet communication and digital photographic skills. Museums all over the planet start putting the holotypes online – a still ongoing process – which saves taxonomists from huge confusion and “guessing” about how animals look like. Initiatives as Biodiversity Heritage Library made accessible huge libraries to many thousands of biologists who, without that, were not able to publish properly. The process of all these technological revolutions is ongoing and improves taxonomy and nomenclature in a way which is unprecedented. All this caused an acceleration in the nomenclatural field: both in quantity and in quality of expertise and fieldwork. The above changes are not without huge problematics. Many studies are carried out on the wide diversity of these problems and even books are written on the subject. Not the least is the violent movement of “paperwork” to digital work. The latter without proper storage capacities. Paper has proven until now to be one of the best media to preserve knowledge and this is the main reason we continue the publication of the PMM books, Visaya and other “paper-series” as such. As a direct consequence of the above enumerated revolutions, there were constant modifications and additions to the nomenclature used in the 4 published PMM volumes. On top of that, each year dozens of new species from the Philippines are described. Species change from genus, families and are either lumped or separated, it is a never ending story which gradually leads to a more and more perfect view and understanding of the faunas as time goes. We are still in the first decade of these ongoing changes: stabilization will step in and changes in classifications and names will start to slow down. We expect this to happen in a couple of decades from now. 1 August 2017 Guido T. Poppe A LISTING OF PHILIPPINE MARINE MOLLUSKS - V1.00 WORMS and MOLLUSCABASE In the meantime, a group of taxonomists created the database known generally as WORMS, which stands for “World Register of Marine Species”, followed by a newborn homepage called MOLLUSCABASE. The job is done thanks to an initiative of the Flemish government in Belgium, and the headquarters are based in Oostende, Belgium. There is an international community of scientists that give strong support to the realization of these databases that are continuously growing and that are kept updated by a number of expert taxonomists and nomenclaturists. It is the hope of all involved that these databases become “the standard” with as much stability in nomenclature as possible. The databases reflect the situation in the field and are “neutral”. They only absorb published work as time goes. The work to be achieved is still enormous and the skilled people are few. For the obvious reason of the much wanted stability, we adapt the nomenclature in our books to the work in WORMS and MOLLUSCABASE. There is a long series of reasons why the impediment in our domain is gigantic. But as time goes, we grow to a more comprehensive and uniform system of name-giving. Where we do not apply the WORMS view, we usually give a short text documenting the pro and contras, or we highlight the problems in the listing below. THE PRACTICAL LISTING In the present work, families are listed in alphabetical order. On this, we made the following exceptions: The former TURRIDAE are now an ensemble of 14 different families. As we know nobody who has a clear “mental view” of the families as yet, we group these families under names starting with “TURRIDAE – “. In this way, it will be easier for all to find back the species sought. Exceptions on this exception are the CONIDAE and TEREBRIDAE two families that remain on their alphabetical places. The CORALLIOPHILIDAE are now definitely MURICIDAE. The Coralliophilinae as a subfamily are a nice ensemble that all understand. We do not want the genera of this subfamily mixed up with the other Muricid-genera. Therefore they are listed as MURICIDAE – CORALLIOPHILINAE, behind the MURICIDAE. The same for the TRIDACNIDAE, which are now definitely a subfamily of the CARDIIDAE. They are listed as CARDIIDAE – TRIDACNINAE. We followed advise of scientists and split our former ARCIDAE into ARCIDAE and NOETIIDAE. There are many other changes on the family level, and a few hundred species moved between families. Philippe Bouchet was instrumental in this and guided us in these matters, often in such a perfect way as that the listing below is conform to the most modern view when it comes to family classifications. He is working at present at a new classification of the GASTROPODA, and we expect this work to be published quite soon. For each species, the volume and plate number on which the mollusks have been figured is indicated. These references contain Philippine Marine Molluscs volumes 1 to 5. Over 250 Philippine marine species have not yet been published in the five volumes. It most often 2 August 2017 Guido T. Poppe A LISTING OF PHILIPPINE MARINE MOLLUSKS - V1.00 concerns shells that have been described recently and of which we have no material: in this case the types are in museums and the effort to get photos or to photograph this material should have delayed the publication of volume 5 too long. These shells are indicted in the listing below as “Not yet documented”. The FUTURE There will be a follow up on the present volumes as the rhythm of publication of new Philippe material is ongoing constantly. The results of the French expeditions of Philippe Bouchet and collaborators undergo constant revisions and are a rich source of newly described species. We will add in future publications all Philippine species that we can trace and that are described from 2017 on. Apart from that material, we have a mass of new information provided by more than a dozen of experts on various groups. Some families we plan to re-figure completely in a not so distant future. On the following families there are books and articles that have to be scrutinized in detail for possible additions and modifications: BIVALVIA, ANGARIIDAE, CANCELLARIIDAE, CAECIDAE, CASSIDAE, CORALLLIOPHILIDAE, COSTELLARIIDAE, DRILLIIDAE, EPITONIIDAE, LUCINIDAE, MURICIDAE, NASSARIIDAE, NERITIDAE, OSTREIDAE, PECTINIDAE, PHILINIDAE, POTAMIDIDAE, PYRAMIDELLIDAE, RANELLIDAE, SCAPHOPODA, TEREBRIDAE, TRIPHORIDAE and several TURRID FAMILIES. Fishing shells for decoration, and as a by-product “for collector”, is an activity that has virtually stopped in the Philippines. In the collectors world, the venue of internet communication destroyed market prices and they fell below the cost of fishing for many species, which rendered investments in this type of fishing not a bright idea. Since 2010 the fishing gradually stopped and by now only a handful of fishermen are still occupied with “shells”. Fortunately, collections worldwide contain thousands of shells waiting to be studied. Activities such as deep-water dredgings by scientists brought to the surface a quantity of unexplored material. Diving goes on, and underwater photography has become more accessible to the well-doing citizen. This resulted in an expLosion of hitherto “never seen before” fotos of undescribed nudibranches. All the above factors together are enough to fill several more volumes as time goes, and by the end we will get a fine idea of what kind of molluscan species populate the Philippine seas. THE LISTING ONLINE: DOWNLOADS Our initial idea was to publish The Listing in the Volume 5, but after suggestions of a few malacologists, we opted for a publication online. The Listing will be put for free consultation and free download under pdf form on the homepage of Conchology, Inc. and on the iBook store of Apple. This will allow the user to download the pdf and eventually print it out for inclusion in the paper books. It will also allow us to update constantly The Listing and put new versions online. In this way all enjoy the latest changes. We start at version 1.00. 3 August 2017 Guido T. Poppe A LISTING OF PHILIPPINE MARINE MOLLUSKS - V1.00 AUTHORSHIPS As for the information in the paper version of the books, authors remain unchanged and they are listed below in their respective families. For each family we clearly indicate the author and in which volume he/she took care of which plate(s). Authorship for all volumes and/or plates without mentioned author are by Guido T. Poppe. As it is impossible to contact all of them for each of the hundreds, even thousands of changes I take full responsibility and authorship for changes and/or remarks, excepts for the parts on which authors have been explicitly mentioned. My personal view may differ consistently with the view expressed by some of the authors in the main volumes. This also has to be interpreted as an additional richness, not as a critique to the work done by these authors.