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This repeat posting of a piece I wrote about four years ago takes place partly because it is long overdue, partly because it will provide an 'anchor' for the material until the Articles section of the site is fully resurrected, and partly for the benefit of some of our newcomers.

So, here goes.

SCIENTIFIC NAMES FOR BEGINNERS

Novice aquarists in particular may find themselves a little perplexed by scientific names. What are they? How are they devised? And what purpose do they serve? Well, I shall try to answer those questions here, and in the process, bestow a few insights.

Scientific names were first devised by the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, better known by the Latinised form of his surname, Linnaeus. He recognised the need for systematic naming of living creatures, and developed the system that, with some modifications, is still in use today. This system was first fully expounded in the tenth revision of his life's work, the Systema Naturae, published in 1758. In this work, Linnaeus introduced the idea of binomial classification - a system based upon the use of two names for each organism. These two names are the genus, which can be thought of in layman's terms as akin to a surname, and the species, which can again, be considered as roughly equivalent to a forename. Linnaeus introduced, through this system, the idea of grouping similar, and presumably related, species, together under the heading of a single genus. In turn, different genera were grouped together into Families (notice the capitalisation), the Families into Orders, the Orders into Classes, and so on. At the top of this tree hierarchy is the Kingdom, and when Linnaeus published his work, two such Kingdoms were erected - the Animal Kingdom, and the Plant Kingdom. All other divisions of the tree hierarchy were sub-divisions of the Kingdoms.

One of the major headaches for modern readers concerns Linnaeus' choice of language for scientific names. Linnaeus chose to base his system upon Latin and Classical Greek. He did so because, in his lifetime, Latin and Classical Greek were mandatory entry requirements for admission into universities all over Europe, and Latin in particular was the language in which academic papers were published, and academic discourse conducted at a formal level. Choosing Latin and Classical Greek as the basis of his system, therefore guaranteed ready acceptance of his system during his lifetime: it also avoided the potential conflicts that might have arisen, if a more modern language had thus been favoured. European history is replete with wars that have been fought over more trivial issues than this, and even today, many in the French-speaking world are antagonistic toward the adoption of English as the lingua franca of commerce and modern scientific activity. By adopting Latin and Classical Greek for his system, Linnaeus neatly side-stepped the diplomatic nightmares that might otherwise have arisen.

This decision made perfect sense to an academic in the 1750s. After all, the underlying body of scholarship required to understand Latin and Classical Greek was firmly entrenched at that time, and continued to remain in place until the early 20th century. In our present time, of course, Latin and Classical Greek are no longer 'hot topics' for the school curriculum, in an age where manned spaceflight, supercomputers and manipulation of the genome are all engineering realities, and the requisite body of scholarship is now much less widely disseminated. Consequently, the 21st century reader is, the specialist scholar aside, less well placed to understand scientific names than his educated 19th century counterpart.

This is a pity in some respects, because an understanding of Latin and Classical Greek allows scientific names to come to life. Take for example, the White Cloud Mountain Minnow, a hardy aquarium favourite. Its scientific name is Tanichthys albonubes. The genus Tanichthys translates as "Tan's Fish", referring to the Chinese boy who first led Westerners to encounter the fish, while the species albonubes translates as "White Cloud", referring to the original location from which the type specimen was taken. Likewise, the Siamese Fighting Fish, Betta splendens, owes its genus to a Latinisation of the local native name, Ikan Bettah, while the species splendens is (fairly obviously) derived from the Latin for 'splendid' or 'brilliant', an appropriate choice of name for a fish that now appears in literally millions of different hues! The Head And Tail Light Tetra, Hemigrammus ocellifer, is named as follows: Hemigrammus translates as 'half-line', referring to the fact that many members of this genus appear to have an indistinct line along the body, stretching halfway from the caudal peduncle to the head,while ocellifer translates as 'eye-bearing', referring to the roughly eye-like spot at the tail end of the fish - to see this aspect, however, the spot is best viewed from above, not the side. And that perennial favourite, the Guppy, is known as Poecilia reticulata. Digging out my Greek Lexicon (one of my other activities outside fishkeeping, incidentally, is learning Classical Greek), Poecilia is derived from the Greek poikilos, meaning 'many-coloured', 'spotted', 'mottled' or 'dappled', while reticulata is derived from Latin, meaning "with net-like markings". Which is a pretty good description of the wild Guppy, and for that matter a good description of many strains of fancy Guppy developed by artificial selection. Incidentally, the observant reader will notice strict adherence to the capitalisation rules in the above names - the genus ALWAYS begins with a capital letter, the species ALWAYS begins with a small letter!

This feature of scientific names - that many are descriptive - was part of Linnaeus' original intention. That the names should be descriptive of the organism in question was one of his primary objectives. The trouble was, as the number of organisms known to science increased, the vocabularies of Latin and Classical Greek, rich though they are, were in danger of being exhausted. This situation is particularly acute with respect to insects, as there are over a million species known to science, and new ones are being added at the rate of approximately two a week! Even with fishes, however, scientists had to resort to some ingenuity when devising names. In the past, those with the requisite Classical scholarship turned to mythology, and looked for mythological characters with matching attributes: thus we have Hyphessobrycon eos, the Dawn Tetra, named after Eos, Goddess of the Dawn. And, when even that kind of lateral thinking began to encounter difficulties, the practice was adopted of naming creatures after eminent persons, usually fellow scientists, but there are notable exceptions. Mirolabrichthys imeldae, one of the Fairy Basslets that lives in Philippine coral reefs, was named after Imelda Marcos, who was later to become notorious for her shoe collection (!). More usually, however, persons connected with ichthyology are commemorated in fish names: thus we have the Black Neon Tetra, Hyphessobrycon herbertaxelrodi, named for Dr Herbert Axelrod, Labeotropheus trewavasae, named for Dr Ethelwynn Trewavas (whose obituary was sadly published back in 2002), and Apistogramma agassizi, one of several fishes named after the eminent 19th century Swiss zoologist, Professor Louis Agassiz.

Adding to the confusion, incidentally, is our ever-increasing body of knowledge. As more species become known, and our understanding of biology advances, previous decisions about the naming of some species are overturned. The Family Cichlidae has been subject to wholesale revision since the late 1970s, as a result of the work of Dr Humphrey Greenwood of the Natural History Museum in London, whose work on the riverine and lacustrine Haplochromine fishes in particular has led to the old genus Haplochromis being split into several new genera. Now, DNA analysis promises to introduce yet more revisions of scientific names. One crumb of comfort for Corydoras lovers is that the genus Corydoras is, for the time being, on firm footing, as a result of the work of Drs Nijssen and Isbrücker of Amsterdam University, and Dr Nijssen's reward for his 25 years' work on the genus is to have Corydoras nijsseni named after him.

All of this academic activity is devoted not only to devising a universally understood name, that uniquely identifies each species, but to placing these organisms into some kind of order, a task that acquired added impetus once Darwin published his landmark work On The Origin Of Species. The modern aim is to integrate all organisms, both living and extinct, into a scheme that relates them in terms of their evolutionary heritage, which in the case of fossil fishes, led to the development of a radical new approach to classification in the 1970s (again, at the Natural History Museum in London) called cladistic analysis, itself based upon a 1950's treatise by a scientist named Hennig. However, that is an advanced topic, and beyond the scope of this post to cover further! As a result of this expanded role of the classification system, it too has expanded - categories now exist that are modern inventions added to Linnaeus' original system. The original Class Pisces (the fishes) is now a Superclass, with the Class Chondrichthyes containing the cartilaginous fishes, and the Class Osteichthyes containing the bony fishes. Furthermore, if one adopts, for example, the Systematic List Of Families devised by Nelson in 1984 (which is the latest list I have in my literature collection), then the fishes grouped under the heading 'The Characins' in William. T. Innes' classic (and now vintage) work Exotic Aquarium Fishes are not only spread across 12 different Familes in the 1984 scheme, but two different Orders too! Innes' original 12 Orders (which date from a late 19th century classification scheme) have long since been superseded, and have grown to 40 Orders of bony fishes in the 1984 scheme - pardon the pun at this point, but the order in which they are arranged has also undergone some changes

Aquarists who have spent some effort mastering various scientific names, only to have the 'rug pulled from under them' by the revision process, will hopefully take some comfort from the fact that those changes are mainly the result of a better understanding of the natural world. Only rarely does the 'bureaucracy' of the classification system cause changes in the case of fishes. Like every other system, natural classification has its rules and regulations - these are laid down in the handbook of the International Committee for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN for short), and one of these rules is the 'rule of priority'. If two scientists write papers about the same species, then the paper that was peer reviewed and published earliest is the one whose name is accepted, unless there are very compelling scientific reasons to change this. The X-Ray Fish, Pristella maxillaris, fell victim to this - Dr James Böhlke discovered in 1945, that two papers had been written about this fish. The paper by Meek, containing the name Pristella riddlei, by which the fish was known for many years, was published in 1907. However, Ulrey wrote a paper on the same fish, and bestowed the name Pristella maxillaris upon it. Since the two authors did not disagree significantly about the fish's morphological characteristics, and furthermore assigned it to the same genus, the older name is now the accepted one. This 'rule of priority' extends to the level of detail of page numbers, and in modern usage, to the exact second at which publication took place, when correlated to the international atomic time standard!

I could not help but unleash a real tongue-twister upon everyone at this point. One of the Loricariid catfishes rejoices in the name Hemiodontichthys acipenserinus. What does this little lot mean? Hold on to your hats ... Hemiodontichthys translates as 'half-toothed fish', while acipenserinus translates as 'Sturgeon-like' (the Sturgeons belong to the genus Acipenser). The assorted catfish Families are full of such tongue-twisters: the Pimelodidae boasts a particularly fine collection. Which to someone like myself, who takes a perverse delight from being able to translate some of them, only adds to the fun of fishkeeping!



Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Great article! I know that some people like me, sometimes get annoyed with such names. But dont let it stop you from saying those extremely long names. I just cant remember the faintest hint of a name though. I also agree that, while being eaiser to read, the common names are somewhat of an unspecific type, and are sometimes even more confusing. Quite frankly, i can only remember my little buds name -Trichogaster trichopterus. Some people can remember all of them. Thats not me. You shouldve made this an article though, along with a list of commonly used genus names. This one will eventually become a starred topic. Thanks again

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That brain & dedication of yours is something else Calli.!

I can only sit back in admiration as my eyes search the posts for easily recognizable names such as guppy, or angel fish, or blue rams, or any other number of aquarium fish.

I sit at the bottom rung.....in front of my aquarium....just appreciating & enjoying the results of the hard work & dedication of others.....(watching my pretty fishies.)

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