Google easily gives you more examples, for example https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-str..., which explains the rules are not very strict: “The name must not be offensive, must be spelled in only the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and may be derived from any language. In fact, a name need not be derived from anything at all; the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable.”
The oddest thing was sitting through neuro lectures when this was introduced as if it was the most normal name in the world. We were looking at each other like "are we hearing this right?"
>It has been noted that mention of a mutation in a sonic hedgehog gene might not be well received in a discussion of a serious disorder with a patient or their family.
Imaging being told by a doctor that you have sonic the hedgehog disorder.
Pretty much all of the proteins that were discovered in fruit flies and have a human ortholog have funny names: frizzled, wingless, piwi, nubbin, etc etc
> The gene mutated in ‘cheapdate’ flies is actually called ‘amnesiac’, named because amnesiac mutant flies originally showed deficits in memory tests [1]
I thought it was a joke but apparently not. TIL
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Not the best source but...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/04/06/inside-the-res...
The Puerto Rican tody - a small, colorful bird - has the scientific name of todus mexicanus, even though it's endemic to Puerto Rico (where it's known simply as San Pedrito). Meanwhile, the todus portoricensis is actually a Cuban bird.
René Lesson, a French ornithologist, described the birds in 1838, based on information he received from his brother, who had collected some of the species and erroneously noted their provenance. AFAIK, there have been attempts to correct these entrenched errors, but there has been no success in doing so. To further confuse things, there are Puerto Ricans who will refer to the island bird as the todus portoricensis - perhaps as a way of correcting for the error, or just due to the confusion surrounding it.
OTOH, some good plants are as traditional as you can get.
When Marco Polo got to China, they had some plants & animals that had never been seen back in Europe.
When Western botanists followed over the next few centuries, they brought back specimens. Especially medicinal plants before there were drug companies anyway. It would seem there might be something worthwhile about a material which made it into a pharmacopiea over a period of millennia.
Eventually people started trying to give every different thing a different latin name, and when Linneaus got around to Chinese ginseng he dubbed it Panax Ginseng, simply preceding the Chinese name with panacea-derived "Panax" to classify the genus itself as the most highly regarded in the Far East for treating the widest variety of conditions. This must have also been considered relative to all the other plants that were known to the West for millennia themselves.
American ginseng, known to the natives for millennia on that continent, became Panax Quinquefolius.
Literally _plant with five leaves that can cure many things_.
For example, many terms in finance are satire with a thin veneer of seriousness and professional candor in the name.
Its a game of how long can you keep a straight face when you make up the name quantitative easing. Or when you make a derivative called DOOMs to market as an alternative to Credit Default Swaps, and do studies on payout when the company being bet on defaults.
IIRC, the discoverer of the RING protein domain couldn't come up with a name so they called it Really Interesting New Gene (RING) which duos as a pun for a ring finger.
"It was the unique dense golden hairs on the fly's abdomen that led me to name this fly in honour of the performer Beyonce as well as giving me the chance to demonstrate the fun side of taxonomy - the naming of species," Mr Lessard said.
OK, this is HN, so: it most definitely was not given the genus name "troglomyces". That would makes any biologist with an inclination towards taxonomy or systematics shudder with horror. A genus name is always capitalized, and the full binomial is always italicized: Troglomyces twitteri. (My username is worryingly not displayed in italics by HN.)
Awesome thread, really cool to hear there are so many. I only knew about the Atlascopcosaurus [1], from working at Atlas (not in any way related to the lizard which was found in 1989).
In the past my research has overlapped a fair bit with alpha taxonomy. Actually, whimsically or unconventionally named species are fairly common. Here are three examples that come to mind.
[1] Forget Twitter, when it comes to species literally "discovered on the internet" I don't think you can top this one. In 2005 or so, specimens of a beautiful and striking sea urchin test, in the genus Coelopleurus, started cropping up on eBay as collectors' items. They were eventually confirmed as a new species. No, they were not named after eBay (the eventual choice of species epithet, 'exquisitus', was entirely fitting), but their status as the first new species determined directly from eBay specimens is pretty interesting, especially in bioconservation terms.
[2] Spongiforma squarepantsii is a fungus described in 2011. If you've ever eaten a bolete (a cep, or porcini, in foodie speak), then you'll know there are mushrooms where the gills are replaced with a spongey layer of tightly-packed tubes. In its extremely wet habitat, S. squarepantsii has become specialized from bolete ancestors to disperse its spores locally, by rainwater or animal transport, rather than by air, and so the entire fruiting body is reduced to a mass of convoluted sponge.
From the Wiki article: "The surface of the fruit body has deep ridges and folds somewhat resembling a brain. It is sponge-like and rubbery — if water is squeezed out, it will resume its original shape... when viewed with scanning electron microscopy, [the spore producing-tissue] somewhat resembles a seafloor covered with tube sponges, reminiscent of the fictitious home of SpongeBob... Although the epithet was originally rejected by the editors of Mycologia as "frivolous", Desjardin and colleagues insisted that "we could name it whatever we liked"."
[3] In Borneo the other year I photographed a large, very hairy spider with bright red fangs that turned out to be a male color morph of a species named in 2008 as Heteropoda davidbowie. The linked Nat Geo article has more examples like that.
Tafazzin, a human protein named after the fictional character Tafazzi, an improbable wrestler whose super power is to got his own groin therefore causing the opponent to run away in reflected pain.
Right. Can someone explain? One of the circles has a white dot in the middle that looks like it could be just dust. The other a faint dark dot in the middle again that looks like maybe just dust or dirt. Nothing really in them that doesn’t just look exactly like what’s around them.
Hence the phrase "her well-trained eyes" in the article: to her, your last sentence would be false, because she's spent years (maybe decades) working in this field.
But that's not where this fungus attaches - something I'm sure the internet would've picked up on when deciding a name:
> The fungi are in a class of their own because they live on the outside of host organisms, and even on specific parts of bodies—in this case, on the reproductive organs of millipedes.
I have a few photographs, (may be most people have too,) of a few plants/fungi and animals/insects I couldn't identify, even after consulting resources like Wikipedia. What is the best way to get a species identification from a photograph.
You can post them to various relevant subreddits (/r/whatsthisbug, /r/mycology, etc). Identification requests are very common and people are receiving them well, so you'll likely to get some answers.
As azeirah writes, subreddits or Facebook groups for people interested in the particular group or location will often help.
For general wild plants and animals (and fungi and everything else) there's a computer vision tool from iNaturalist, which can be used independently [1], or when submitting an observation to the site -- by web browser or in the app. I usually start with that, then look at other observations on iNaturalist and Wikipedia pages for the species.
If the photos are of ornamental plants, I think PlantNet's [2] model is trained on them.
(I work at GBIF[3], where suitable data from iNaturalist[3b] and soon PlantNet is sent, and can then be freely downloaded and used in research etc.)
This is one of my favorite subreddits. I don’t think I’ve ever even posted in it. It’s like real life Sherlock Holmes sometimes. Quite often people will post a piece of a car involved in a hit and run, and it will be solved in minutes. Or someone will post the oddest looking item, and not only will it get solved, but you’ll learn a bit of background that you never knew.
Inaturalist is a great starting point! What's really funny is I identified a few millipedes on iNaturalist a couple weeks ago and the Twitter poster in this article (Derek Hennen) came along and narrowed it down for me. Very kind and knowledgeable person!
"I hope that it will motivate professional and amateur researchers to share more data via social media." -- and soon we'll see trolls photoshopping images as "new discovery".
Next time some scientist shares a picture of an xx discovery to their colleagues via Email, will the title of this article be "xx dicovered via Email"?
Maybe I’m being too dismissive, but this strikes me as an equivalent of existing-invention-but-using-a-computer software patents. I just don’t see how it’s particularly newsworthy or interesting that an image shared on Twitter was involved in the discovery.
It allowed for a headline that made me click, though.
The word news is literally the plural of new, as in new things. This is an new species discovered using a new method involving a relatively new communications medium. And in particular, it involves one of the strengths of this new medium: letting people share things with others that might be interested.
A key difference between social media and older media is who gets to say yes to publication. For this photo to reach this researcher in a previous age, there would have been several people who had the ability to say no. And limited space would mean they'd have a strong incentive to say no. But now it just takes one person to say, "Here's a thing I think is interesting." Every reader also has their own editorial power; they can share and retweet.
So for me, this is interesting because it's showing how the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" adage applies to literal bugs. That the chaotic nature of Twitter is not just providing me with things I find interesting, but leading to actual scientific advance.
I think you might be. Whatever its hype, Twitter (and its ilk) does enable a previously unheard of level of sharing of minor details.
This fungus is exactly the sort of thing which would normally go missing in the vaults of a museum because the five people who ever saw it didn't recognise it as anything interesting. This is such a common phenomenon that trawling through museum collections is a non-trivial source of new species identifications.
The fact that an image normally only seen by a few people should be shared to thousands, and hence a discovery made based on it, is significant because there were few avenues by which it could happen pre-social media.
since the article mentioned this, since when can people in the scientific field simply share their research data without facing any consequences?
edit: sorry my bad, I realized my question was not making sense, I actually mean they can publish research data if the authority does not approve of it?
I don’t think there is an authority in Denmark that could stop them, or would even want to. By default in most countries releasing any data is protected under free speech, unless the data belongs to someone else or is protected in some other way, such as if it has military value or is personal data covered by privacy rules.
I may be wrong but I suspect that there are many undescribed types of fungi out there and describing a new species isn't that unusual and there is nothing of interest in the fact that the photo in question was on twitter.
Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :)
As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?