#also filed under topics I'm afraid to bring up with my paleontology profs

[cilantroodon]

[ID: Three Wikipedia screenshots, with text:

Taxonomy

Studies in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in several formerly separate genera being absorbed into Echinopsis:

Acantholobivia Backeb.

Acanthopetalus Y.Itô

Adenea Fric (nom. inval.)

Aureilobivia Fric (nom. inval.)

[etc]

Some have proposed merging Rebutia as well.^[who?]

Like several other taxonomic changes in Cactacae, this one has not been universally accepted. Amateur and professional growers still use names like Echinopsis (in the older sense), Lobivia, Setiechinopsis and Trichocerus, although many of the others listed above fell out of common usage long before the change.^[citation needed]

Changing the genus name necessitated using some different specific epithets to avoid creating duplicate names. Thus both Echinopsis bridgesii and Trichocereus bridgesii previously existed. These are very different plants: Echinopsis bridgesii is a chort clumping cactus, whereas Trichocereus bridgesii is a tall columnar cactus similar to E. (or T.) pachanoi. Under the new classification, Trichocereus bridgesii becomes Echinopsis lageniformis.^[citation needed]

The genus name Trichocereus was given to a number of columnar cacti in 1909 by/end transcript.

The final image is the "It's free real estate" meme, with the caption "It's colonialism." End ID.]

(Poorly organized long ass post about poorly organized botanical names incoming)

One thing that frustrates me at work is the emphasis everyone puts on Latin taxonomy names as absolutely correct. Like, it is definitely helpful to differentiate plants and make certain you have exactly the right plant and everything, especially when it’s a better understood and researched genus, but it’s not always a better description than just using the regional common name, especially if it’s a cactus or other plant native to the Americas, where a lot of societies already had an organized taxonomy tailored to their biomes (not that I know a ton of these names yet, to be honest :/) OR the plants just have practical, descriptive, and specific common names in English/Spanish etc.

European “scientific” naming conventions come hand-in-hand with the biases of colonizers’ unfamiliarity with the environment and dismissal of the knowledge of indigenous people’s. Rather than cataloguing plants and genuinely trying to understand them, Europeans in the early colonization of the continents were more inclined to define plants by what they already knew about European plants, and put a lot in boxes that really didn’t fit. This lingers still in our current scientific treatment of these plants. And furthermore, stripping plants of their traditional names and replacing them with “correct” European names was and is still absolutely a tool of oppression, and made our native plants less accessible.

Cacti especially get reclassified constantly as more research is done, so their Latin names change All. The. Time. Lobivia echinopsis (Lobivia being an anagram for Bolivia) is now called Lobiviopsis OR Echinopsis interchangeably, and Echinopsis in general is messy - these are some excerpts from Wikipedia I thought were interesting:

(the list goes on to include 29 genera of cacti)

like they gave out all these names without any genetic information and all these researchers were doing their own thing and it’s messy and inconsistent and often much less scientifically categorized than the names the plants already had.

Latin names have a lot of faults like any other naming system, because we don’t magically know all the genetic history of every single species in order to accurately classify them, and they were named by individuals without necessarily having any real scientific review or standardization, but it’s still held up as this infallible, scientific and 100% accurate system.

(Also relevant, check out how much shit in that article isn’t even backed up by any sources)

People in the U.S. treat Latin botanical names as inherently better and more scientific simply BECAUSE it’s Latin, no matter how much information they’re actually giving me

Labeling something as “Opuntia” isn’t helpful at all - Opuntia is a HUGE genus, which includes all prickly pear and cholla cacti (although chollas aren’t even mentioned at all in the Wikipedia page for the genus). It doesn’t really tell you much about it’s specific growth and what to expect from the plant. If you can tell me Opuntia macrocentra or Opuntia engelmannii var. linguiformis, I can find you your plant, but if you just know it’s an Opuntia? Tell me what it fucking looks like. “Cow tongue cactus” (by the way, “linguiformis” is named after the common name in this case anyway, which is often the case for cacti) is much more descriptive, and so is “I don’t know, it’s the purple one with more spines.”

Tecoma stans is the name I have to use at work for Esperanza, but it’s much more helpful to just tell me if you’re looking for yellow bells/jubilee or esperanza/trumpet vine because the species varies a LOT and the options look and behave very differently.

I’m not trying to say that Latin botanical names suck and they’re always unhelpful or inaccurate or anything like that - I’m thankful to have a relatively comprehensive and widespread system where species for the most part have unique names, especially when several plants share the same common name or one common name can refer to a bunch of different plants. They’re something very helpful that I’m glad to have as a tool. But I really wish people in general kept in mind the limitations of the systems they use, and thought more about why it is that they’re considered “standard.” Colonialism creeps into everything it touches and it has to be intentionally searched for and rooted out, especially in how we interact with nature.

(I really only looked at Wikipedia and went off shit I’ve been thinking about to write this, so it’s definitely possible some info is outdated or not completely accurate)