Dutch Caribbean Species Register

The description of a new species is an important moment in the life of a biologist. He or she does not just describe the species, but also invents a name for it. There is always the danger that a ‘new’ species has been described and named before by another scientist. This has happened so frequently in the past -- for instance when juvenile fish look completely different from their parents -- that even today taxonomists are still busy untangling the often complicated matter of names of species described in the past. The result of such an operation is a 'clean' list of names together with their accompanying synonyms.

In 2020, Breuil and co-workers, based on DNA-analysis, discovered that the black iguana of Saba differed enough from the introduced green iguana (<i>Iguana iguana</i>) to consider it a separate species. Therefore, they gave the black iguana a new scientific name, <i>Iguana melanoderma</i> (Breuil et al. 2020). When Van den Burg et al. however repeated the study and added specimens from continental South America, they found that the black iguana differed less from the green than thought earlier (Van den Burg et al. 2026). For the new study the researchers could make use of museum specimens, which enabled them to include genetic material from a much wider geographic area than in their first analysis. They concluded that even though there is a difference in their appearance as well as in their genes due to long isolation, the correct scientific name for the black iguanas from Saba and nearby islands should be Iguana iguana. So, even though the scientists are probably sad that they did not name a new species after all, they untangled their own knot of iguana names.