Scientific names are baffling to the layman, but carry all sorts of meanings to those who coin each new term. Martin Fone explains.
There are some 2,000 new genus names and 15,000 new species names added to the zoological literature each year, and each animal, whether living or extinct, is given two Latin names under the system of binominal nomenclature. The first indicates its genus and the second its species, providing a unique and unambiguous identifier for each organism that has lived on our planet, completed by a reference to the scholarly work and year in which it was first described.
The system is policed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which, as well as being responsible for maintaining and updating the Code, setting out the broad principles for naming newly discovered creatures, acts as a ‘Supreme Court’, settling disputes around the use and form of names. However, despite the apparent rigidity of the system, there is still scope for the inventive and imaginative scientist to display their sense of humour, boast of their prowess or to point score.
Take Terry L Erwin, for example. During his career as a conservation biologist he had the distinction of describing 438 species of Carabid beetle. Nocturnal, with slender heads and found high up in the forest canopy, they were difficult to find. A man of no little ingenuity, Erwin developed a technique called canopy fogging to collect them, using thermal foggers and biodegradable insecticides.
Erwin also had a sense of humour and was blessed that the genus name of the Carabid beetle was Agra. He was able to launch into the scientific community such species as Agra cadabra, Agra dable from the Spanish word ‘agradable’ meaning pleasing, Agra Memnon, Agra phobia, Agra katewinslettae, presumably after his favourite movie star, and the inevitable pairing of Agra vate (1986) and Agra vation (1983).
The Conquered Lorikeet was a parrot found in the Marquesa, Cook, and Society islands of Polynesia which became extinct no later than the 13th century, with the majority of the specimens found dating to around the 11th century. With the bird having been driven to extinction following the arrival of Homo sapiens to the islands, David Steadman and Marie Zarriello, who wrote the species description in 1987, could not resist giving it the scientific name of Vini vidivici. The clear reference to Julius Caesar’s boast after his swift victory over Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela in 47 BC was facilitated by the lorikeet’s genus name of Vini, Tahitian for local bird.
“Kirkcaldy came up with names such as Dolichisme (Dolly kiss me), Florichisme (Flori kiss me, you get the idea), and was roundly criticised by the London Zoological Society for his frivolity.”
Glass sponges are found in the deep ocean and get their name from the glass-like structural particles, known as spicules, made of silica found in their tissues. In 1927 one genus of the sponge was given the scientific name of Oopsacas minuta, the generic name sounding very much like the French phrase ‘oups ça case’, which translates as ‘Oops, it breaks’, an effective way of emphasizing its fragility.
George Kirkcaldy, as well as being an eminent English entomologist who discovered several genera of hemiptera, the so-called true bugs, was a bit of a ladies’ man. When, in 1904, the moment arrived to give them their scientific names, he could not resist the opportunity to immortalize some of his conquests. He came up with names such as Dolichisme (Dolly kiss me), Florichisme (Flori kiss me, you get the idea), Marichisme, Nanichisme, Peggichisme, and Polychisme. To each of these genuses he add the species name of Kirkaldy. For this rather tongue-in-cheek approach to the series business of allocating scientific names Kirkaldy was roundly criticised by the London Zoological Society for his frivolity.
Despite the reaction, the species names are used to this day. Neal Evenhuis emulated Kirkaldy’s approach in 2002 by naming a fossilised fly Carmenelectra schisme after the actress, Carmen Electra, whom he admired but had never met. What her reaction to this honour was is not recorded.
Names can reveal a certain degree of animosity, as two Swedish scientists, Elsa Warburg, a Jew, and Orvar Isberg, a man of far-right sympathies, ably demonstrated. In 1925 Warburg named a genus of trilobites Isbergia with two species, parvula, meaning unimportant, and planifrons, flat-headed. The latter was especially cutting as far-right geneticists believed that broad, flat heads were a sign of mental inferiority. Nine years later, Isberg retaliated by naming a genus of extinct mussel Warburgia with four species, crassa, meaning fat, lata wide, oviformis egg-shaped, and iniusta evil or unjust. Of course, Warburg just happened to be a particularly large woman.
The complete skeleton of a pig-like mammal that inhabited North America between 29 and nineteen million years ago was found in 1905 by the Carnegie Museum’s field collector, T F Olcott, in northwestern Nebraska. It was named by the museum’s palaeontologist Dinohyus hollandii, Holland’s terrible pig, in apparent tribute to the Institute’s then director, William Holland. There was a sting in the tale, however. Holland was disliked by the staff because of his insistence on being name-checked in all their papers whether he had made a contribution or not. Holland’s terrible pig would have appealed to his vanity but if the apostrophe was read as an elision rather than the possessive, it gave the name a completely different meaning.
Allowing the general public a say in anything is fraught with danger as the Museum for Naturkunde in Berlin found out when it put the selection of the name for the largest of the Ampulicidae wasps, first described by Michael Ohl, to a public vote. According to a study published in 2010 in Communicative and Integrative Biology, the wasp injects the brain of its cockroach victim with a toxin that keeps the cockroach alive but in a zombie-like state. Its behaviour was so similar to that of the dementors in the Harry Potter series, soul-sucking, dark creatures that feed on human happiness and leaves their victims in a vegetative state, that the German public saddled the creature with the name Ampulex dementor.
Some scientific names do not survive the language divide. Who can forget that the generic name of a thrush is Turdus or that an African species of wattled crane, the largest on the continent, is Bugeranus carunculatus, the genus a conflation of two perfectly harmless Greek words, ‘bous’ meaning ox and ‘geranus’ crane? Some with an anarchic streak use this to their advantage. Arnold Menke named a new species of wasp Pison eu while James Pakulak called a fossilised beetle Foadia pakaluk, FOAD being street slang for, ahem, go away and die. Well, after all, it did.
And the creature with the longest scientific name? That dubious honour belongs to the southeast Asian soldier fly or Parastratiosphecomyia stratiosphecomyioides to its friends. While it looks like a wasp, it has no stinger and so is a fly, as both its genus and species names in translation emphasise. In 1926 Benedykt Dybowski did give an amphipod an even longer name, Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis, but this was suppressed under the rules of the ICZN.
There is a predatory bacterium found near and named after the Anglesey village where I first went to school — Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis — which is longer still… but as it is an organism and not an animal, the southeast Asian soldier fly can rest easy for a while.
