#Binomial nomenclature

[hbmmaster]

in zoology, animal species are given standard "latin" names consisting of two words, the genus name and the species name. typically, the genus name is a noun, and the species name is an adjective. following the rules of latin grammar, adjectives need to agree with nouns with grammatical gender, so if the genus name is a feminine latin noun then all species of that genus are given (in principle) adjectives marked with feminine latin suffixes.

in practice of course, new genus names don't always use actual latin words, so these latin grammatical gender rules need to be grafted onto words that aren't really latin. and this is where one of the weirdest conventions of zoological binomial nomenclature comes in!

how exactly do you determine what the latin grammatical gender of a word is if it isn't a latin word? according to the ICZN, it's simple:

if the word is from greek, use its gender in greek

otherwise, if the word is from a modern european language with grammatical gender that uses the latin alphabet, use the gender in the source language (yes it is that specific)

otherwise, if the name ends with -a it's feminine

otherwise, if the name ends with -um, -u, or -o it's neuter

otherwise, it's masculine

unless of course if the zoologist with naming dibs says explicitly that they think this genus should have an irregular gender.

anyway these rules are fascinating to me. why are they this specific? grammatical gender systems compatible with latin's adjective suffixes are found throughout the entire indo-european language family, so why restrict it to modern european latin-script languages (and greek)? I don't know!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ignatio Chapela, a forest pathologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was even more adamant that the idea of “species” limits the stories we can tell about kinds. “This binomial system of naming things is kind of quaint, but it is a complete artifact,” he told me. “You define things with two words and they become an archetypal species. In fungi, we have no idea what a species is. No idea. . . . A species is a group of organisms that potentially can exchange genetic material, have sex. That applies to organisms that reproduce sexually. So already in plants, where out of a clone you can have change as time goes by, you have problems with species. . . . You move out of vertebrates to the cnidarians, corals, and worms, and the exchange of DNA, and the way groups are made, are very different from us. . . . You go to fungi or bacteria, and the systems are completely different—completely crazy by our standards. A long-lived clone can all of a sudden go sexual: you can have hybridization in which whole big chunks of chromosomes are brought in; you have polyploidization or duplication of chromosomes, where a completely new thing comes out; you have symbiotization, the capture of, say, a bacterium that allows you to either use the whole bacterium as part of yourself or use parts of that bacterium’s DNA for your own genome. You’ve become something entirely different. Where do you break down the species?”

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

[fru-fru-brigade]

The scientific name of the Common House Mouse, Mus musculus, translates pretty directly to English as "mousie mouse."

[chadots]

Today I learned that Linnaeus named foul-smelling plants after people he didn’t like, and those names…are still the ones we use.

[peachdoxie]

I'm not a biologist but my understanding of binomial nomenclature naming conventions is that they don't exist because people ran out of reasonable names 140 years ago.

[miscellaneous-geekery]

(X)

[corin-tuckers-left-one]

Every time you capitalise the specific epithet of a binomial name a puppy dies

[teachersource]

Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707. A Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". In botany and zoology, the abbreviation L. is used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for a species' name. In older publications, the abbreviation "Linn." is found. Linnaeus's remains constitute the type specimen for the species Homo sapiens following the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, since the sole specimen that he is known to have examined was himself.

[iicaptainblog]

Felis leche Felis pan

[flyingsoup]

When I came out I turned into a beech tree, that’s why I’m a Fagus

…I’ll see myself out

[bethanythebogwitch]

Oh dear, that's an unfortunate scientific name

[academicelephant]

There's a hymenoptera species called Clistopyga caramba, and as the story goes, the species got that name because it looks really unusual, so unusual that none of the members of the research team that found it had ever seen anything like it, and one of them expressed her surprise by exclaiming "¡Ay, caramba!"

[a-ginger-in-black]

I want you all to know how much brain power I have dedicated to thinking about taxonomy this morning.

TLDR: At first I thought 'fiber artist' must be the family, in which case you'd get species like Sartor plicarus (common quilter) or Boucle virgula (knitter). But now I think it's the order, including such families as Sartoridae (sewists), Textilidae (weavers), and Nodidae (knotters, including knitters, crocheters, tatters, etc).

*releases pack of dads into home depot* go……be free

[reddirttown]

Language of Flowers: Yellow Lily

In the language of flowers, every day has its flower. The flower for today, November 14, is Yellow Lily, which signifies playful beauty. Image above from Wikipedia. Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus L., known as lemon daylily, lemon lily, and Yellow Lily, is found across China, in northeast Italy, and Slovenia, and is one of the first daylilies used for breeding new cultivars. Yellow Lily flowers…

[branches-in-a-flood]

Hey hey hey hey flood go on a ramble about any special interest/hyperfixation. Yell-Teach me about some shit

Oh lord, Drift. That is such a wide ask.

Tonight I went on a rant about how people in my field should unionize. And about how treating "technicians" like ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS actually makes life easier. Because a)they are humans and b) if you treat people well they are more willing to work with you. But that's not really info-dumping, though it was when it happened in person.

As a fun info-dump, one of my (debatable) favorite scientific names for a species I have worked with is Ammotragus lervia, which is the aoudad or Barbary sheep. Ammotragus essentially translates to sand goat, which is fair and not inaccurate. I originally learned that lervia relates to the shape of their horns, which are triagonal in cross section, though it now seems to be an anglicization of the name "lerwee" for wild sheeps of the area.

[tg-headcanons]

What exactly does H. Sapiens Cleptacaro mean? I gather it's the scientific name for ghouls, but does cleptacaro mean anything specific?

I made it with the Latin words for thief (Clepta) and flesh (Caro) so their species name more or less translates to “flesh stealer”! I figured that since ghouls had been around long enough for them to have a sizable mythos about them when people started using binomial nomenclature, it would be kind of freaky