Reply to Fordham and Welter-Schultes's comment on “Taxonomic review of living planktonic foraminifera” by Brummer and Kučera (2022)

In our recent review of the taxonomy of extant planktonic foraminifera (Brummer and Kučera, 2022), we explicitly stated that we consider the work by Fordham (1986) to not satisfy the criteria of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN, 1999). Whereas the latter system is used to recognize lineages defined solely by their position in the phylogeny, the system of phena is used to segment the morphologic variation, in the broadest sense, through time or space into practically useful units. Fordham (1986) offers no means to determine the level of distance from the terminal taxa at which his classification departs from the five conventional family-group taxa.