Botanists voted to remove offensive names; will zoologists follow?

The Nomenclature Section of the XX International Botanical Congress (IBC) was held from 15 to 19 July 2024, with 173 registered delegates in Madrid plus 219 additional attendees participating online (Gostel et al. 2014). It deliberated 433 proposals to amend the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Turland et al. 2018, the Shenzhen Code). Among the decisions, one received significant media attention and was featured in top journals Science (Ortega & Stokstad 2024) and Nature (Callaway 2024): the removal of the letter c and the second f (if applicable) from 301 racially offensive names that include caf[e]r- and caff[e]r- (Smith & Figueiredo 2021). This proposal, along with others on offensive names (e.g., Hammer & Thiele 2021), received heated debates in Megataxa (Pethiyagoda 2023; Smith & Figueiredo 2023) and other journals (e.g., Jiménez-Mejías et al. 2024, with summaries of debates prior to this paper).