"Official" common names, more useful than scientific names!

[killy]

Anybody who says scientific names are unnecessary are welcome to describe which of the following species are what. IMO this brief excercise illustrates the need for proper scientific naming.

Brazilian White Knee
Brazilian White Leg
Brazilian Red
Brazilian Red and Black
Brazilian Black
Brazilian Black and White
Brazilian Red Rump
Brazilian Pink Rump

Well, the list goes on and on but I think y'all get the idea. It's fine if you're just some new tarantula keeper looking at a webpage or an LPS but as soon as you try to collect a certain genus or start breeding the common names become pretty much useless.

I agree, and I base this concurrence on personal experience. When I first got into tarantula keeping, I decided I wanted a Chaco gold knee tarantula - I had seen one at a show. I felt it best to research the care and handling first, so I went to Google (finding this forum was one of the happy consequences) ... anyway, I kept encountering discussions about "gold-knees" and "gold-stripes" and even "golden legs" - I wanted to make sure that I got a "gold-knee" just like I saw at the show. It wasn't until it was pointed out to me that these are all common names for the Grammostola aureostriata that I realized the reason for my confusion - they're all the same spider! As if that wasn't enough, not long after getting my "aureostriata" (Latin for "gold-stripes" by the way) I found out that there are 2 Latin names for this particular Grammostola, and that "pulchrides" is the more correct :wall: This was a good lesson for me, and I henceforth stopped referring to my Ts by their common names on the forum and got used to using the Latin ones. But with people like my nieces, I'll still go with the common names (after all, what's more fun for little girls, Avicularia versicolor, or Antilles Pink-Toed Tarantula ?

 

[Stan Schultz]

Anybody who says scientific names are unnecessary are welcome to describe which of the following species are what. IMO this brief excercise illustrates the need for proper scientific naming. ...

Forgive me Ethan, but I don't recall anyone saying "scientific names are unnecessary." In fact any of us who have any grasp of taxonomy generally agree that scientific names hold a very important place in the scheme of things.

However, I have heard several major criticisms of taxonomy and scientific names as practiced today. Among them are:

1. There is no single, good, global definition of what a "species" is (understand that this is not the creature, but the philosophical concept). All we have are either a collection of disparate definitions dependent on each group of organism or expert, or a general "gut feeling" of what we're talking about.

This lack of a uniform, leveling, "common denominator" causes confusion and huge debates at all levels of taxonomy from newbie amateurs on the street to the "grand-daddy experts" who discuss the subject using words and concepts completely unintelligible to you and me. Truly a confusion of languages fit for the City of Babylon.

2. Because of the lack of a hard and fast definition of what a species really is, the naming of species becomes a highly opinionated matter with great potential (some would say certainty) for confounding issues such as personal bias, ignorance, incompetence, carelessness, personality conflicts, honest mistakes, and personal gain to sway the process from some hypothetical, "true" state. (This, of course, keeps many busily employed correcting the screw-ups of past generations!)

3. Our understanding of what species are, how they arise, and how we might differentiate them has experienced several really major upheavals since Linné or Linneaus or "our buddy Karl" first started this process. As a result of this, we're still playing "catch up," trying to coordinate and unify our system across the full spectrum of living organisms on Earth. And, it doesn't help that we're discovering and describing hundreds of new species a week, and a new concept for the organization of life on Earth is proposed almost monthly. Thus, taxonomists are in the peculiar position of having to "run as fast as they can to merely stay even!"

4. From a very practical perspective, the result of all this (and probably some other factors I've forgotten) is that scientific names tend to change, sometimes distressingly often. In this respect at least, scientific names are really little better than common names in that so much energy and time must be spent in tracking these changes. If you have any doubts about this I refer you to http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog/INTRO1.html. Dr. Platnick has dedicated a major portion of his career to trying to keep track of, and unsnarl, the name changing game with just one relatively small group of animals (spiders, 35,000 or 40,000 putative species out of a total of 10,000,000 or more organisms).

I'm beginning to like my Ouija board more and more every day!

 

[MutedUziel]

Maybe we could make it easier for noobs to the hobby by having a thread with Scientific Name, Common Name, Picture...


Avicularia avicularia
Pinktoe
http://jrscience.wcp.muohio.edu/photos/PinkToe1015Closeup00.jpg
( Google Image)

Brachypelma smithi
Mexican Redknee
http://www.arachnoboards.com/ab/gallery/displayimage.php?imageid=14715
(Posted By: a_shadow Arachnoboards)

I think this would have been very helpful for me.

 

[Michael Jacobi]

Of course there is a usefulness to common names, at least as a general concept. Most young English-speaking children know what a lion or wolf or housefly is, but even the vast majority of adults would have no clue what the scientific names of those animals are.

However, in arachnoculture we have adopted a more accurate and international language that we should all embrace. We don't have to deal with the confusion of arbitrary descriptions that examples in previous posts in this thread illustrate. We can rise above that, as an international collective, and strive to ensure our hobby is exceptional by using scientific names alone.

This isn't the case in all exotic animal hobbies. In herpetoculture you have a split situation with, for example, dart frog and leaf-tailed gecko keepers leaning to the exclusive use of scientific names, while few snake keepers would refer to a Burmese python as Python molurus bivitattus. (Hell, for many of these giant snake guys even "Burmese python" is too much and they settle for "burm".) And scientific names are the only terms used for many aquarists such as African cichlid enthusiasts. I hope you all would want to be more like the exacting detail-oriented dart frog and leaf-tailed gecko herpetoculturists and cichlid aquarists and keep our hobby accurate and striving to excel in all areas, including nomenclature. After all there is no confusion between elephant and elephant shrew, or Burmese python and ball python for that matter. But there is loads of confusion between many of the common names that have muddied tarantula discussions.

I appreciate the position expressed in the original post's quote. If you are giving a tarantula presentation to a classroom or are showing off a tarantula to a neophyte at a reptile show I sure hope you use "Mexican Redknee" instead of Brachypelma smithi. Technical terms can alienate future hobbyists at first. But for our hobby and amongst our developing hobbyists, let's strive to elevate arachnoculture to all that it can be, and accuracy in nomenclature and the incredible international usefulness of scientific names is an important way to make our hobby a leader in exotic animal husbandry hobbies.

A couple of sidenotes:

Scientific names are not scary.

They are scientific names, not Latin names. Although many are indeed derived from Latin, many are also derived from people's names (patronyms) or geographic names or Greek or... whatever.

Don't worry about pronunciation. Just worry about spelling.
Pronunciation doesn't matter: people from different parts of the world will all pronounce them differently and the many Latin-based scientific names will even be pronounced differently by Latin scholars. Most of your use of scientific names will be writing, not speaking. Get comfortable with writing and spelling correctly. Pronunciation in speech will come later by a natural process.
Just spell correctly: And remember that the genus is capitalized and the species is not. The most frequent mistake made - as evidenced by posts here every day - is using an uppercase letter in species name (specific epithet).

Yes, scientific names change more often than common names.
The Chaco gold-striped remains, but yesterday's Grammostola aureostriata is today's G. pulchripes, which is somewhat sad considering that "aureostriata" literally means gold-striped. But you are smart folks. You can keep up with change. There is my The Tarantula Bibliography to help.

All the above said, scientific names do not ensure accuracy.
It must be stressed that using scientific names in arachnoculture allows us to be more accurate communicating with each other, but that doesn't make the scientific names we use inherently accurate. We are hobbyists, not taxonomists, and we can only use the name that is prevalent in our hobby. We can't determine if we are using the correct one. The genus Avicularia is the prime example of this. We can only know that if we use Avicularia metallica we are hopefully all referring to the large, often docile, hairy, blue-sheened Avic with long grizzled seemingly white-tipped setae (hairs). We can't know that it is the exact species that was described so long ago as Avicularia metallica. Our spider might be something else. It likely is. That is for taxonomists not hobbyists to decide. But as long as we all use the same name... Who gives a punt? By using the scientific name we are striving to be accurate, not necessarily succeeding.

Best regards, Michael

 

[Stan Schultz]

Of course there is a usefulness to common names, at least as a general concept. ...

Though Michael and I have crossed swords on more than one occasion and topic, here I must agree with him fully.

Let cool minds prevail.

Way to go Mike! :clap::clap::clap:

 

[BCscorp]

A great reminder of the passion for tarantulas that we all share to some degree or another.