Wednesday 23 January 2019

You May Have Noticed,

when ever I name a plant, fish, animal, bird, etc,


in brackets I always include a Latin/Greek name for it, that way wherever you are in the world, you will know exactly what it is, local names in a counties native tongue only serve to confused, and just occasionally someone's name can be used in the official worldwide name, take the dragonfly above, the species is found only in Madagascar, it could be called the blue eyed dragonfly, but as with most names there could be three, four or more known as the blue eyed dragonfly, photograph Greg Lasley, but by using the name Acisoma attenboroughi everybody in the world knows exactly which dragonfly you are talking about, and to honour Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM CH CVO CBE FRS FLS FZS FSA FRSGS, for his 90th birthday Klaas-Douwe Dijkstra named the creature after him, but naming species is no easy task, first formalised by famed naturalist Carl Linnaeus, there’s a Lord-of-the-Rings-thick tome describing exactly how one should name a creature, known as The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, to appease the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the chosen name for a newly discovered creature needs to be unique and, most importantly the rules do state, "No author should propose a name that, to his or her knowledge or reasonable belief, would be likely to give offence on any grounds." there are more than a few other famous people that have creatures named after them, a snail from northern Queensland that is the only member of the genus Crikey, literally named Crikey steveirwini, in honor of the late Crocodile Hunter,

Baracktrema obamai, the official scientific name of a type of parasitic flatworm that lives in the blood of Asian box turtles, one of seven creatures named after him, a similar example from the other side of the political aisle is the moth Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, a species of moth endemic to North America named after then President-elect Donald Trump, a spider named after Johnny Cash discovered near Folsom prison in California that, like the singer, is dressed all in black, Aphonopelma johnnycashi, a bee named after Beyonce notable for having a gigantic golden butt, with the namer stating "I figured, if I’m ever going to name a species after BeyoncĂ©, this is it."- Scaptia beyonceae

a beetle named after Arnold Schwarzenegger due to it possessing a pair of legs that resemble large, flexed biceps, Agra schwarzeneggeri, a parasitic wasp named after Shakira due to its habit of causing whatever it infects to convulse and twist like it’s bellydancing, Aleiodes shakirae, there are literally so many of these that I could not possible cover them all but if you are interested to there is this giant list of creatures named for individuals, but going back to the original, "No author should propose a name that, to his or her knowledge or reasonable belief, would be likely to give offence on any grounds." surely there must be at least one exception, right? well yes, one scientist who named a creature after someone they disliked out of spite it turns out, is none other than Carl Linnaeus himself, Linnaeus apparently got so sick of a botanist called Johann Siegesbeck criticising his work that he named what has been described as a “small, useless European weed” after him, for the curious, the weed’s scientific name is simply Siegesbeckia.


No comments: