Naming organisms after people

Nature Talk
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I think you should refer to my previous comment. For the past 170 years, scientists have been giving honorific names to people from a variety of backgrounds. A quick google search will show that.

And the fact the 43rd president of the United States has more organisms named after him than any other politician combined leads me to believe that modern day scientists are more concerned with giving honorific names to people of color instead of someone who was directly involved with the discovery of species.

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I admit I’m surprised how many people are on the side of descriptive names over commemoration. Scientific names have never been helpful as a means of telling you how to ID a species or what they look like. Ok, maybe that’s unfair, there are some cases where the name very accurately describes the species, or a feature. But this does not work in any meaningfully logical way when it comes to ID purposes. For instance: please please do not ID your organism based on it being “pallida” because it’s pale. It might work sometimes, but unless you happen to be dealing with a group of highly distinctive species, it’s not a good habit to form.

I also second the note about insects, plants and fungi. You have many, many genera with a lot of species that just cannot be distinguished at a macroscopic level or with human eyes.

We already have this joke about the madness of black oystercatchers, whereby there are several identical species with an attempt at unique names that just call on synonyms of black. Black oystercatcher, sooty oystercatcher, uniform oystercatcher, blackish oystercatcher! It’s more comedic than actually useful. And it contributes to some of misIDs because some people IDed based on the name.

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I get the sense that some people are basing their knowledge of patronymics off what they’ve seen reported in the mainstream news and not what’s really representative. In the thousands of new species that get described each year people like presidents are NOT commonly honored. At least in my world (entomology) most people who get species named after them are people who have significantly helped advance the world’s knowledge of an obscure field, whether as researchers or collectors. And even those are a minority in the sea of names. While I used to think patronymics were crass, I’ve since come around to it as a fine practice in real life.

To illustrate this with actual data, here are some stats for the main robber fly genus I’ve worked on (Lasiopogon, in the Asilidae). There are currently 98 valid species in this genus (of note, there are only 32 species represented on iNat with any observations, and that’s after I’ve personally vetted them all!). Full disclosure: I’ve personally named 11 Lasiopogon species. There are no real common names for any Lasiopogon, but see my postscript for a further comment on that. Of those 98 species names:

29 are patronymics
– 22 are named to honor other* researchers, mostly entomologists who have spent a significant portion of their lives devoted to working on robber flies. (This count includes 1 species where the etymology is dual in deriving as a patronymic and ecology.) Is science an old boys’ club? Yeah. But community helps make any job fun, and it’s good manners to be nice to the giants whose shoulders got us where we are today. Some of these folks are people I wouldn’t care to hang out with, but I don’t have any qualms about them getting a species name. *Something many lay people don’t realize is that you NEVER name a species after yourself.
– 6 are named after collectors who helped obtain the original type series for that species but were otherwise uninvolved in robber fly work.
– 1 is named after a mythological figure (“esau”) in a backhanded allusion to the morphology. I figure this is a pop culture reference that has been pretty enduring for millennia.
– 0 are named after politicians, musicians, sportsfolk, etc.
– Here’s the full list of real people so far honored with a Lasiopogon species: Tardaio Akaishi, John Aldrich, Asmik Avetyan, Luigi Bellardi, Mario Bezzi, Robert Cannings, Charles Curran, Roland Dimick, F. Eichinger, James Hine, Lacey Knowles, Robert Lavigne, Pavel Lehr, Arkady Lelej, Bernhardt Lichtwardt, Pierre Macquart, Stephen Marshall, Charles and Dorothy Martin, Karl McKnight (my father), Riley Nelson, Fritz Peus, Rokuro Kano, Franklin Sherman, Annie Slosson, Josef Soffner, Joseph Wilcox, Monte and Grace Wood, Vadim Zaitzev. Make of that what you will.

25 are geographically informative
– 25 are named after some geographical aspect of the species distribution or type locality (this includes 1 where the etymology invokes both geography and morphology). The longer I’ve worked in biology the less enamoured I’ve become with these kinds of names, because at the time of description we usually don’t know a species’ range well enough to usefully encapsulate it in a name. So we end up with names where a taxon is named after a single mountain or river or state / province but is now known to range over hundreds of square miles. Or the converse, where a name is too broad to be meaningful (e.g., “pacificus” is only found in parts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, while “septentrionalis” only lives in part of Siberia and Mongolia). I have seen people make bad assumptions about how endemic a species is because they’re overinterpreting the scientific name.

34 are based on morphology
– 34 are named after some aspect of the species’ morphology (this includes 1 where the etymology invokes both geography and morphology). Again, the longer I’ve worked in biology the less enamoured I’ve been with these kinds of names, in part because as others have noted it’s impossible to come up with names that are both useful and unique when you work in the diverse world outside charismatic megafauna. So within this one genus we have redundancies like “quadrivitattus” and “tetragrammus” (i.e., the Latin or Greek translations of “four-striped”), or “chaetosus” / “hirtellus” / “pilosellus” / “solox” (i.e., all synonyms of “hairy”).
– Species named by early workers were often based off general impressions (i.e., dark, small, hairy) without knowing how that species would eventually compare to the full diversity of the genus, and so nowadays those names aren’t as helpful as people may assume.
– Furthermore, most Lasiopogon look pretty much the same externally and sometimes have to be identified by dissecting genitalia. So several (7) of these ostensibly informative names are based off an internal structure. That’s fine (I’ve done this myself!), but it’s not inherently any easier to remember and apply in the field.

10 come from ecology
– all 10 are named after the habitat (this includes 1 species where the etymology is both a patronymic and ecological). This has given us repetition like “montanus” / “monticola” / “sierra” for mountain dwellers, and “actius” / “littoris” / “arenicola” for beach dwellers. And there’s even one positively unhelpful name (“drabicolum”) where the original describer thought it was a species associated with a particular plant but it’s not! (It was like naming a person “Parking space 134”.) Usually you have to recognize a species and give it a name before you’ll begin to differentiate its ecology from that of other species, so taxonomy is usually sailing pretty blind on that front.

2 are meta. “prima” got its name because it was the first species collected on that author’s expedition. Big whoop. I’d take a patronymic over that any day of the week-- at least I’d learn some history! As for “novus”… that author had several logistical typesetting mistakes over the years, so I’ve wondered if perhaps this was a placeholder that he forgot to replace when he sent the manuscript in to the journal. If not, I guess it’s a perfect example of how someone’s creativity ran dry when they needed another name for a new species in a moderately big genus. It wasn’t even the only new Lasiopogon described in that paper!

I’ll also note that at least 3 names try to tribute indigenous peoples while also doing one of the above. (“apache” and “coconino” are named after counties that are named after indigenous nations in the region, “bitumineus” is in part a Latin translation of a local indigenous name for the type locality.)

Finally, I’ll mention that while there were scores of news articles this summer about the two new Australian robber flies named after Marvel-associated people, there were none for my new Lasiopogon. The famous names did help bring some attention to taxonomy, and the Deadpool fly really does look like the Merc with a Mouth, so I have no beef. Hooray! But don’t walk away thinking that’s what the majority of names are like.

P.S. About common names… I have yet to meet a non-entomologist who has even noticed a Lasiopogon in the wild on their own --these are not big memorable insects!-- so I would be pleasantly surprised if any indigenous people from anywhere in the world had a common name for a particular robber fly that was more specific than something equivalent to “that little buzzing thing”. That said, if anybody reading this has a lead for actual common names of robber flies outside Britian, send me a PM and I’d love to learn more and promote them. A few common names for asilid genera have developed over the last decade on the internet, and I see that the Brits have started calling their one species of Lasiopogon (L. cinctus) the “spring heath robber fly”. Sure. That certainly doesn’t help on a global level, though.

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That is not intrinsically a bad thing. If you figure that the Chinese, Japanese, Nepalis, etc., all have names for pine trees, that does not make it wrong for Western languages to have their own names for pine trees that are different. Every culture names plants in ways that are meaningful to it.

And that can happen with common names, too: hummingbirds of the genus Anthracothorax are commonly called mangoes, even though they are not particularly associated with mango trees or fruits. (Which are an introduced species in these hummingbirds’ native range) The genus name itself means “coal torso,” in reference to the black body plumage of the males of some species; but the male green mango does not have a black torso, yet is also in the genus Anthracothorax.

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Both myself and the other poster you responded to said “tends to”. Pointing out the occasional exception to the rule doesn’t change the fact that the overall tendency is clearly in one direction. I grew up in North America but now live in Asia. In both continents I’ve found that the large majority of honorifics in scientific names are of white people, and honorifics of native americans or asians are a distinct minority. Look at the examples I gave earlier of “Taylor’s Frog” and “Limborg’s Frog”. That’s an entirely Asian frog genus (Limnonectus), but where do you think the names Taylor, Limborg, Kuhl, Woodworth, Tweedie, Heinrich, Gyldenstolpe, Finch, Doria, Ferner, Dammerman, and Blyth come from? Can you come up with an American frog genus where the honorifics are predominantly Asian or African in the way that European honorifics dominate most taxonomic categories in the rest of the world?

Even when it’s not a White person being named, it’s almost always still someone who is or was in a position of power or authority, despite that person likely having a tenuous connection if at all to the organism in question. Using organisms named after Barack Obama as if that’s a positive example proves my point pretty well. Who benefits from naming an animal after one of the most famous people in the planet? This plays out on a small scale too - I’m not sure the exact %'s, but it seems that whoever is in charge of funding or department resources back at “home base” is at least 50x more likely to get the new organism named after them than the village locals who actually found the thing first, know quite a bit about its habits, and showed the researcher where to locate it. Heck, even the low-level researcher who themselves made “first European contact” only very rarely gets the name and often doesn’t even get co-authorship unless they have some degree of power they can throw around for themselves.

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That is not intrinsically a bad thing. If you figure that the Chinese, Japanese, Nepalis, etc., all have names for pine trees, that does not make it wrong for Western languages to have their own names for pine trees that are different. Every culture names plants in ways that are meaningful to it.

I agree if you’re referring to common names - meaningful names in whatever language is being used are helpful and don’t necessarily have to relate to the local tongue unless that’s the tongue being spoken (though I don’t find honorifics to count as meaningful regardless of the language). But when discussing scientific names, those are supposed to be universal, so one would think it would be most appropriate to use a name that is meaningful in the organism’s native range. Otherwise you’re telling people, “Yeah, I know your people have been coexisting with and using this plant for generations, but we have a policy that local people don’t get to make official names, only those of us with publishing access to international journals do, so I’m naming it after my research advisor who has never actually even seen the plant.”

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There is in Germany. With the recent publication of the great asilid guide ‘Die Raubfliegen Deutschlands’ in 2018 these names have now more or less become official. L. cinctus goes under the name ‘Common Grey Sprite/Gnome’ (Gemeiner Grauwicht), although the comical sense of its name is hard to translate (gemein can also mean mean, so another way to translate it would be ‘little vile grey kobold’). There are several other funny sounding names, especially for the smaller genera. I truly like them - they seem quite fitting and add a certain kind of personality or character to these flies, which might be helpful for people to sympathize with them.
Here is a published list of these names (not sure if complete). Only four species have patronyms as common names (all 4 named after entomologists)

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I don’t think anyone is suggesting that we will literally ID organisms by name alone. But a name that has a connection to the organism, that actually means something, is more interesting and enjoyable. It increases knowledge and information.

A person’s name, by itself, is abstract - other than being suggestive of the country of origin of said person, it tells you almost nothing, and is likely to tell you literally nothing about the organism. It is far less interesting, far easier to forget.

And, as I pointed out earlier, the descriptive name draws attention to the organism, while the honorific draws attention to people.

And finally, as common names are frequently derived from scientific names, especially for newly described species, the honorifics often make engaging the public with the name more difficult. Yes, “Black Oystercatcher”, “Sooty Oystercatcher”, “Blackish Oystercatcher” is a funny situation, and I have my own ridiculous examples with snakes. But how would changing it to “Hunt’s Oystercatcher”, “Shockley’s Oystercatcher”, “Watson’s Oystercatcher” be preferable? I would think that makes it worse, not better.

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I completely agree that very few organisms are named after presidents and such, or are named in order to honor “Black people”. I can see how a “deadpool” or “godzilla” name could work, but most celebrity names seem silly to me and are thankfully relatively rare.

Personally, I base my opinions on naming from my experience with the reptiles and amphibians of western North America and four Asian countries. In two cases I’m helping produce field guides that cover every species of reptile and amphibian in said nation, so I’ve become very familiar with their scientific names. I also recently published a paper on the herpetological assemblage of a national park, during the surveys of which I discovered a previously undescribed species of frog, which has since been described and named.

I’d say my experience is pretty close to yours in terms of numbers - a minority of species use an honorific, but it’s a substantial minority. When an honorific is used, the vast majority of names chosen are of older/deceased scientists in the field. In almost every case the scientist was someone who held a position of power and prestige, in many cases they were the advisor/mentor of the person describing the species or an institutional head. In other cases they were someone who had themselves described a lot of species in the genus (so taxonomists dominate the list, while ecologists, conservationists, and other scientists are comparatively rarely honored such). Very rarely did the person named have any connection to the particular species named, and almost never did they come from the local culture where the species was found.

It also seems to me that the use of honorifics is increasing with newly named species. Perhaps that’s just a small sample bias on my part, or perhaps like someone suggested earlier, it’s because the higher pace of splitting recently has led to laziness or creative blocks when it comes to making up meaningful new names. There are other more cynical possibilities too.

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Which attention is needed for 1-2 mm beetle? Please create descriptive names for 400 beetle that only have different genitalia and minor differences in their appearance. Naming birds or frogs is nothing compared with arthropods or fungi, amount of species is on the whole other level and they’re much more similar inside one genus, so when you see descriptive Latin names they’re more likely to describe the whole group.

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That is one thing I think we can agree on. I do not believe that organisms should be named after people in power. Maybe they benefit from organisms being named after them because it makes them feel better after doing a crummy job on environmental issues.

I also think honorific names come in two forms and I kind of resent the second form. You have true honorific names and humorous names. When you name an organism after someone who really deserves it (collector, tour guide, close accomplice, etc), that is what I call a true honorific because as the word says, you’re naming it as such because that person had an influence in your work. But when you name something after a celebrity because a moth looks like Donald Trump’s hair or a spider because Tobey Maguire played Spider-man is just simply inappropriate since the person has nothing to do with the organism except a mere funny coincidence. These fall under the category I call humorous and it’s something I resent as it puts to shame true honorifics.

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Ah right, I forgot about that book. (I have a copy of it, of course, and it is very nicely done.) But those reflect another very modern “let’s create a common name for every species” effort, not organic names that were pre-existing historically. I’m looking for actual established common names. But thanks for the reply.

My grandfather tried this approach with North American mushrooms for the Peterson field guide, and so I can understand that it has merits and demerits. But I’m mostly on the against side, since it’s turned into a modern gold rush of reinventing the wheel. If people want a one-to-one exclusive correspondence of names and taxa… just learn the dang scientific names! Now we have taxonomists rushing to invent and claim memorable and meaningful vernacular names by getting their book out before some other taxonomic group claims the low-hanging fruit…

Anyway, I always wondered why Danny’s book chose the common name “sandwicht” for the genus Stichopogon… Thanks for the link with his explanations. Still don’t like it, though-- I guess “sandwich” doesn’t connote “small” for Americans any more.

One other thing-- you mention how only four species on the German list use patronymics. That partially stems from the fact that German flies were among the first insects ever described… anywhere (German and Scandinavian dipterists like Meigen, Loew, and Fabricius were basically the world’s first experts in the order.) Only four species on this list were described from after 1900, by which time lots of the descriptive options had already been taken globally and whaddaya know, that’s where three of the patronymics are used.

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I also can’t stand humorous novelty names. I can’t find it now but there’s a genus named, something like, Okissmee and several specific epithets like katee or susie or sallie. Not terribly funny you sad old man.

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I am not sure is someone has stated this already, but the meaning and usage of words changes throughout the centuries. For instance, many youngsters nowadays use “ye” as a contraction of the word “yes”, while the original meaning of “ye” means “you”. I was watching a video on Europa Universalis IV and there was a state called “Boii”. Boii actually refers to the fact that the people who lived in Northern Italy herded cows, since it derives from “Boio”, meaning cow. Of course, today “boi” and “boio” are just alternative slangs for “boy”. So if a species was named Ye boii, people will interpret this name very differently.

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that would be sand-wicht (in German) not the (Earl of) Sandwich

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Sand + Wicht. Meaning something like “sand midget” or “sand mite” maybe?

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Yes, something like that. I explained the term ‘Wicht’ in my example above (‘Grauwicht’).
Midget, gnome, kobold, sprite, small person,…

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But I’m mostly on the against side, since it’s turned into a modern gold rush of reinventing the wheel. If people want a one-to-one exclusive correspondence of names and taxa… just learn the dang scientific names!

For the vast majority of people, scientific names are demonstrably more difficult to learn. Especially if they don’t have a background in taxonomy, even more so if they don’t have deep experience in a Latin-based language. I primarily work at the interface of scientists and lay persons. Why would you create a situation that is intentionally more difficult for the public? If I’m producing a field guide, or blogging a wildlife experience, or giving an educational talk or walk, every time we run into an organism that doesn’t have a common name I’m that much more hindered in my ability to connect with my audience.

One other thing-- you mention how only four species on the German list use patronymics. That partially stems from the fact that German flies were among the first insects ever described… anywhere (German and Scandinavian dipterists like Meigen, Loew, and Fabricius were basically the world’s first experts in the order.) Only four species on this list were described from after 1900, by which time lots of the descriptive options had already been taken globally and whaddaya know, that’s where three of the patronymics are used.

Scientists are bright people, I refuse to believe “all of the options are taken”. For any particular organism there are practically an infinite # of combinations of descriptive characteristics and place names that could be mixed and matched to create a unique name. Any aspect of morphology (including size), diet, behavior, reproductive characteristics, etc. can be combined with another aspect of the organism or numerous different aspects of its habitat or with any of dozens of available place names for the area.

I do agree that naming organisms after friends and family and colleagues rather than after aspects of the organism itself is becoming much more common than before, which aligns in some ways with other social trends, unfortunately.

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Just curious: how many people here have named an organism?
Or, expect to name one?

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Ah, thank you! That makes much more sense. Sand wight it is. (Though that term in English has taken on a little more “scary-undead” meaning nowadays than I think it has in German.)

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