Scientific name Vs. Common name?

Here’s the setting to change that:

Also, I’d recommend using flashcards to jumpstart your learning of the scientific names. I use Anki.

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I like to use scientific names myself

My approach varies a lot with different groups of taxa.

Denmark has a fairly long tradition of assigning Danish names to locally present organisms, and in recent years there has been quite a few standardisation efforts such that some groups have unique, commonly known and accepted names. These naturally include terrestrial vertebrates and plants, but also several groups of insects (especially diurnal lepidoptera) and macroscopically ID-able macrofungi. For all these I mostly use common names, though I have made an effort to learn scientific names for plants especially to be able to consult litterature on parasitic and saprotrophic microfungi.

For my main group of interest, lichens, the situation is much less clear-cut. A lot of species, especially common ones, as well as foliose and fructicose ones have common names. Some of these are good and I use them for most things. If I am showing off lichens to people who aren’t familiar with them I will make an effort to use common names if ones are available. For my own notes, and for discussions with dedicated enthusiasts, as well as for any discussion taking place in English which seems to have less of a tradition for common names for lichens, I will use scientific names though. It ends up being easier in the long run when I constantly have to consult international litterature that doesn’t have the Danish names and occasionally encounter species which have no Danish names or even in a couple cases ones that had never been seen here before.

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I often use scientific names for the simple reason that I’m communicating with people who speak another first language than me. So the alternative would be to either learn each other’s language’s common names for everything, or learn the English common name for everything, and since we obviously can’t avoid the learning step, it seems the most practical thing to just use the scientific name to begin with.

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Welcome to the Forum!

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I believe scientific names are much better, but in practice I can’t remember them or how to spell them when I get to the dialog box.

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if it is common enough in iNat, then the first 3 letters will do
bie for bietou will bring me
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/404420-Osteospermum-moniliferum

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As others have mentioned, scientific names are precise (except when they keep changing - aaargh) and common names can vary all over the place. However, I find it typically makes sense to use the standard adopted by the group(s) with which you want to communicate. In the USA, for me, I use common names for butterflies, birds & mammals & scientific elsewhere.

99.99% of people I interact with would have no idea what I’m referring to if I said " Danaus plexippus". OTOH, if I said “Monarch butterfly”, the percent of people understanding the specific critter I mentioned would flip around.

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I use both types of names interchangeably. When I need or want to be specific, I tend to use the scientific name. When I’m being informal, more common names. Many of the common names I use are local and quite often I’ll just use the specific epithet as a common name for species and a version of the family name for stuff I don’t know well. “oh look, it’s repanda. And here’s a bombyliid. Blacksnake over here.”

The thing that I find counter-intuitive, attempts to standardize common names or assign common names to every single species. If you need to be a specialist to recognize the species, it doesn’t need a common name. A generic name that may apply to multiple species is fine. Use the scientific names that already exist for situations where precision is needed.

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I feel intelligent to speak scientific name in front of my small brothers, I enjoy there surprised faces

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Same, until the other person gets a really confused face and I feel like I have to tell them the common name so it sounds at least a little recognizable.

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Not all birders with advanced skills will use those four letter codes. Think about living in a place where your only species of crow is the American Crow. It takes exactly the same number of letters to write “crow” as “AMCR,” which to me makes AMCR seem unnecessarily pretentious. In my field notes, I often use even shorter abbreviations; for instance, when I know that the only species of waxwing in the area is Cedar Waxwing, it tends to show up in my field notes as “wx.” No other taxon will be confused with that. And then I write up my Grinnell journal account, and write out the full common name.

Often when I am doing that, I am speaking with a non-scientist who wouldn’t know the scientific name. So I learn to say “How do you call this?” in that person’s language, and go from there. I can learn a lot about a taxon by talking to a campesino about it.

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Interesting. Didn’t know that!

Thank you

I use scientific names, generally. With in person speaking I will often use common names as well, especially with life whose scientific name I haven’t memorized well. But online I almost always like to use scientific names, as if I do forget it, I can just quickly look it up. I prefer scientific names overall as they are much more consistent. Sure sometimes they’ll change if recategorization occurs, but oftentimes one group or species will go by many common names, or multiple different groups will share one common name (daddy longlegs is notorious for this), which can get quite frustrating so I end up defaulting to scientific names to avoid mix ups.

Plus a lot of species don’t even have common names. I’m not sure how much that happens with other groups, but I notice many arthropod species lack a common name.

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Thats something I enjoy with my family the most,to see their blank faces unknowing what to say next

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For a scientist or a professional, scientific names are always the most important, but for a naturalist-enthusiast, common names are sufficient, which are also good to know, especially the popular ones, for example in English.

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Not too long after I became active on iNat, I found that those constantly drifting, changing, contentious common names had become so irritating that I realized it was time to learn the Latins instead. Once I changed my display preferences, this task was a sample matter of repeating the new names in my head. The names may still change when the taxonomy gets revised, but at least it’s not so often.
Now I struggle to come up with a common name for anything.

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Yesterday, a friend pulled up the scientific name of a plant which I know only by common name. I was bamboozled. Made him look smart too, even if I was more experienced or knowledgeable.

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people speaking scientific can be deceptive

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