Oh, I love the Brothel Creeper
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While it’s not an animal, I just found an observation of a Sexy Pavement Lichen and it was too good not to share here.
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Why on Earth is it called like that?
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The person who named them was in a weird mood.
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Hmmmm…
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It gets even weirder: Newsweek: Stop Eating ‘Sexy Pavement Lichen’, Scientists Warn. According to the article, it contains some chemicals similar to Viagra.
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Yes, I saw that! I got busy for a while so I’m late coming back to this thread but I was actually about to mention that myself. I thought once I understood the origin of the name it would be a bit less bizarre, but then it only got weirder! Nature surprises me more every day.
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Has the Monkey-Faced Prickleback been mentioned yet?
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/61376-Cebidichthys-violaceus
The Monterey Doris also goes by the much funnier name Monterey Sea Lemon (a very apt name!)
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47469-Doris-montereyensis
And no funny animal names list would be complete without this classic - the Slippery Dick!
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/49272-Halichoeres-bivittatus
On a similar vein, the Crimson Cleaner Wrasse also goes by the name Butcher’s Dick
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/113441-Suezichthys-aylingi
A favourite of mine, the Brown Sweetlips also goes by Harry Hotlips!
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/188071-Plectorhinchus-gibbosus
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I think it is actually “snottygobble” Persoonia longifolia and Persoonia elliptica .Apparently named after the appearance of the squeezed fruit which is said to be delicious. The name is somewhat offputting however
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I learned that fascinating fact as well. If you look at literature more than a 1000 years old there is no mention of the color blue. Homer describes the sea as “wine dark”. would that be a red? The Old Testament mentions red, yellow, green, black and white but never blue. apparently the same thing occurs in ancient Chinese texts. The first people to have a word for blue were the Egyptians. Possibly this was because they were the first to use the brilliant blue colors made by grinding lapis lazuli in their artworks. Anthropologists have found traditional communities living into the modern era who cannot distinguish the color blue. They describe the color of the sky or large bodies of water as being a shade of black. Blue flowers, insects and birds they describe as being a shade of green. These same people are able to distinguish many more shades of green than we from technically advanced societies. Astonishingly it seems that humans cannot see a color that they do not have a name for, which makes you wonder, will we discover more colors in the future? (How far off topic are we now?)
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A US paleontologist working on the Riversleigh fossil site in Queensland Australia, found a large species of fossil snake which he named Montypythonoides riversleighensis. The name has remained in spite of some grumbling from the more staid members of the scientific community in Australia
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Probably many existing shades would be used as regular colours if they were as common as others!
In our university one girl called her shirt blue, but it was purple, not close-to-blue purple, but a regular purple that you’d think nobody would call blue, but she did, and a good philosophical question is did she saw it blue or she just calls that shade blue?
But with sea colour it’s a bit complicated, it for sure can be brown and reddish, or dark green, close to black, water is blue only when you see the sky in it, so maybe Homer liked his sea dramatic?.) Or maybe some historical figures were colorblind?
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Sadly the original post is too old for editing.
Not sure if lack of color awareness is just historical, it’s a bit like this for my wife and I… there are colors she names I never knew existed:
Interestingly, there are some online quizzes that test one’s ability to distinguish shades, frequently called hue tests, like this one and some people can see more of the spectrum with tetrachromacy.
I guess we could refer colors by HTML color code or wavelenth too…
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Yeah, it’s like the Sapir Whorf hypothesis that if we don’t have a name for something, we can’t always conceptualize it.
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I believe that Vox has a video on this subject. It’s been a while since I’ve watched it, but from what I remember, the video says that black and white are usually the first colours (or shades) to be named with red following after. If I can find it I’ll add a link here.
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My mom has theses plastic storage totes. They’re an odd in-between shade. I call them purple, she calls them blue. She thought there was something off about my eyes until I clarified that they were “kind of a periwinkle shade”…and then she realized we were probably seeing the same thing.
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Maybe this conversation on colour could be moved to its own topic. It doesn’t really fit Funny, long, or just plain weird animal names, y’know?
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Okay, who started calling it the Thankless Snail? From what I just read it should really be called Unthanks Cave Snail. It comes from Unthanks Cave which was named for the previous landowner Mr. and/or Ms. Unthank.
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