I spoke at the Malacological Society of Japan 2025 meeting about Japanese vernacular names for sea slugs
Going forward, I want to push for standardising Japanese vernacular names for sea slugs.
- Japanese vernacular names for sea slugs were rapidly proliferated from around 2000 onward, largely through commercial field guides
- For divers, this had real upsides (every animal you photograph has a name to write down), but it also created a lot of confusion behind the scenes
- I went through several concrete examples of that confusion
- As a solution, I proposed that Japanese vernacular names should go through a peer-review process, similar in spirit to how scientific names are reviewed
- To make that review process workable, we need a standard Japanese-name checklist and a naming-guideline document, and I am going to start putting those together
That was the gist of my talk.
https://www.docswell.com/s/seaslug-world/KWWQJX-2025-05-18-203741
(The talk was given at the 2025 annual meeting of the Malacological Society of Japan. The slides linked above are in Japanese.)
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