The Snakeman and the Rulebook of Life

The field in brief

Taxonomy asks which organisms are truly distinct; nomenclature asks only what to call them, and the two are not the same job. Animal names are governed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, a document usually just called the Code, administered by a small volunteer body known as the ICZN.[1] It is not an experimental science. It runs closer to a body of law, where a name earns standing by satisfying formal rules rather than by being correct.

The pivotal distinction is between two words that sound alike. A name is available when it clears the Code's formal bar, meaning it is Latinized, published in a durable medium, and attached to a description and a preserved specimen. A name is valid when working scientists judge the animal it labels to be real and judge that name the right one for it. The Code governs the first question; taxonomists argue the second. Binding them together is the Principle of Priority, which holds that among competing available names the oldest one wins, a rule meant to stop everyone minting private synonyms.[1]

Two more ideas drive the fight. The Code is deliberately content-neutral, a stance its defenders call taxonomic freedom, because it refuses to judge whether a naming is good science, since deciding that would mean appointing someone to police it.[8] And a name can be gamed. Nomenclatural harvesting is the practice of reading other researchers' evolutionary trees, spotting a branch they have not yet formally named, and rushing a name into print first, claiming the authorship without doing the underlying work.[3]

The fight

Raymond Hoser calls himself the Snakeman. From the early 2000s, working outside any university, he began naming animals at industrial scale in the Australasian Journal of Herpetology, a publication he owns and edits.[7] Between 2000 and 2012 he alone accounted for roughly three-quarters of all newly named reptile genera on Earth.[7] One 2021 audit put his lifetime output above 1,700 animal names.[1] The problem, his critics say, is not the volume but the method. His diagnoses often rest on other scientists' published phylogenies rather than his own study of specimens, several of his taxa carry the names of his pet dogs and relatives, and his prose turns abusive toward anyone who objects.[7][1]

Here the machinery works against the profession. Because the Code weighs form and not merit, Hoser's names are, in the main, technically available, and priority says the world is obliged to use them.[1] In 2014 he pressed that advantage, asking the Commission to formally confirm one of his names, the spitting-cobra genus Spracklandus.[8] More than 150 herpetologists signed comments urging the ICZN to reject it.[8] The matter, numbered Case 3601, sat for years as a referendum on whether the naming system could defend itself.

The rumors are that if the Commission rules in Hoser's favor, then it's over. Then we drop the Code and make our own.[8]

In 2021 the answer arrived, and it satisfied no one cleanly. In Opinion 2468 the Commission declined to confirm that Spracklandus was available, and separately declined to adopt its own Code of Ethics as a formal ground for deciding such cases.[2] It was a non-decision dressed as a ruling. Hoser declared total victory, posting that the Snakeman had won and branding his opponents a gang of thieves.[6] His critics read the same document as a pointed refusal to bless him.[8] The commissioner Doug Yanega defended the neutral stance bluntly, noting that no other science lets a person self-publish his own conclusions into the permanent record.[8]

The oldest name wins, unless the entire field quietly agrees to forget it.

Denied a rescue from above, the field organized its own defense. Wolfgang Wuster of Bangor University, with Hinrich Kaiser, Scott Thomson and Mark O'Shea, formalized a tactic they named the aspidonym, from the Greek for shield, a replacement name coined properly that the community agrees to use in place of a vandal's name.[1] They and others published such shields, Afronaja for Hoser's Spracklandus, Malayopython for his Broghammerus, and then simply campaigned for colleagues to adopt them.[1] By their count, 59 shields were taken up 1,087 times in the literature, against a single use of the names they were meant to bury.[1] It is collective disobedience of the Principle of Priority, justified as the lesser harm.

The escalation has not slowed. In 2023 a study formally anatomized nomenclatural harvesting as an identifiable offense.[3] In 2025 the herpetologist Henrique Costa carried the fight back inside the rulebook, arguing that five reptile names should be treated not as merely bad but as never validly available at all, because they failed the Code's own formal tests.[4] The stakes are concrete. They are careers and the authorship that builds them, the stability of a naming system that biology quietly depends on, and the meaning of a freedom the field is not sure it can afford.

What the fight reveals

The dispute exposes something an engineer will recognize instantly, that the naming of all animal life runs on a content-neutral protocol which assumed good faith and shipped without an admissions committee. The Code checks whether a name is well-formed, never whether it is worth having.[1][8] On the narrow factual question the evidence is one-sided. Independent workers judge Hoser's diagnoses inadequate and his method to be harvesting rather than discovery, and the community's shields have held in practice, adopted more than a thousand times against almost nothing for the names they replace.[1][7]

The governance question is the one that is genuinely unresolved. Every proposed fix that would let some authority reject a name for being bad science also hands that authority the power to reject names it merely dislikes, and taxonomy's long tradition of serious amateur contribution is precisely what such a power would chill.[8] Community self-organization avoids that trap, but only by asking hundreds of specialists to maintain a parallel, unofficial nomenclature through sheer collective will. That the plumbing itself is still failing became clear again in 2025, when a separate analysis found that names registered through the standard database can be formally unavailable anyway, because an archiving requirement was never enforced.[5] The field has proven it can defend itself against one man. It has not resolved whether a system that requires such a defense is one worth keeping.