Why We Have To Have Those Nerdy Scientific Names

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I've noticed that nature bloggers tend to be taxonomists. Many always include a scientific name along with the common name. This may seem poindextery nerdy at first, but there are some pretty valid reasons for including the scientific name. That said, I usually don't, mainly due to being too lazy to look up the ones I don't know by heart.

(Actually, I think there are more important things to know by heart, like your children's friend's names, your anniversary date, and where the living room tv remote is.)

The fact is, we need those "official" names to eliminate the confusion of different languages and localized common names. Common names are what grandpappy called that flower, bug, snake, etc. He told your Dad and he passed it on to you. The problem is other grandpappys (and grandmammies) were sharing their knowledge with their children also.

The photo above is of a series of sandy mounds left by the pocket gopher (a mammal), which around here would just be called a gopher by most people, but oldtimers might call the same animal a "salamander". The salamander moniker comes as a corruption of "sandy mounder". Try saying it quickly. Seeeee? Just to confuse the issue, we also have a reptile, a tortoise, called a gopher and it too digs burrows and will make mounds of sand around it's burrow entrance. Lots of room for confusion here and we are still in the same language...

My favorite example of a cacaphony of common names for the same animal is the mountain lion, cougar, puma, panther, painter, cat o'mount, wildcat....whew! Same cat...different regions of the country.

Scientific names are decided by Gandalf The White and there are certain rules you must obey to use them correctly. It's not complicated.

Rule # 1: The standard scientific name has 2 parts. (yes, sometimes more, nerds)

Rule # 2: The first name is the genus and is always capitalized. This name represents a group of closely related organisms...kind of like your family surname.

Rule # 3: The second name is the species and is never capitalized. This is more like your first name, a more specific identifier.

Rule # 4: When you write a scientific name, you should underline or use italics.

This is wrong: Tursiops truncatus
This is right: Tursiops truncatus

Taxonomic trivia: Latin is used mostly. It's partly tradition and partly due to Latin being a "dead" language. Making it the official taxonomic language won't offend the Brits, Chinese, French, Russians, etc.

If this seems confusing, don't blame me.

Blame Linnaeus.