[Taxacom] angiosperm Order Hydatellales

[Kenneth Kinman]

Dear All,
      APG III apparently has continued it long-standing refusal to
recognize Order Hydatellales.  About 8 years ago, I criticized APG I for
dumping Hydatellales into Order Poales.  
      Finally new data showed that Hydatellales are not Poales at all,
but basal dicots (which I included in a different Class Magnoliales).
But instead of finally recognizing it as a good Order Hydatellales, they
decided to just dump it into Order Nymphaelaes, which is even more
unnecessary if it is a sister group to other Nymphaeales.  If you go to
the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website, there is still no Order Hydatellales
to show this total failure of phylogenetic nomenclature to reflect this
distinct taxon at Order level.  Instead they dump into a totally
different Order, like that is going to cover up the fact that their
bloated Poales was a bad idea in the first place.  
       Now I see that even genus Hydatella is getting dumped into genus
Triuthuria, which make Hydatellaceae monotypic.  Will Family
Hydatellaceae be next to become a synonym of some other family of
Nymphaeales if another case of paraphyly becomes evident?  Bad enough
that Hydatellales and genus Hydatella have been synonymized.  I wouldn't
be surprised if some strict cladist finishes the job by dumping
Hydatellaceae as well.    
        ------Ken Kinman    
P.S.  If nematodes did evolve from tardigrades, will nematodes be dumped
into a single Order of Class (or Phylum) Tardigrada?  To me that would
be even worse than dumping Class Aves into Class Reptilia, or snakes in
with the lizards, or whales into some ungulate group.   Strict cladism
tends to obscure more information than it creates, especially if it even
hints at paraphyletic relationships.  More importantly, APG I's Poales
was polyphyetlic, but easy to pretend that this never happened if they
just still don't recognized Order Hydatellales at all.