nomenclature

New ant species named in recognition of gender diversity

A newly discovered miniature trap jaw ant from the evergreen tropical forests of Ecuador bears the curious Latin name Strumigenys ayersthey, among hundreds, which are also named in honour of people, but end with -ae (after females) and –i (after males). This makes the newly described ant perhaps the only species in the world to have a scientific name with the suffix –they, thus celebrating gender diversity.

*A view of the head of Strumigenys ayersthey*

The insect was first found by Philipp Hoenle of the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, during a cooperative investigation of the Reserva Río Canandé in 2018. The reserve belongs to the NGO Jocotoco, and preserves a small part of the highly threatened biodiversity hotspots called the Chocó.

Hoenle reached out to taxonomic expert Douglas Booher of Yale University. Soon, Booher responded with excitement that this species was unlike any other of the 850+ species belonging to its genus. As a result, the team described the previously unknown to science species and its remarkable trap-jaw morphology in a research paper, published in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal ZooKeys.

Curiously, it was no other but lead singer and lyricist of the American alternative rock band R.E.M. Michael Stipe that joined Booher in the writing of the etymology section for the research article. This is the part in the publication, where they honor their mutual friend, activist and artist Jeremy Ayers and explain the origin of the species name.

“In contrast to the traditional naming practices that identify individuals as one of two distinct genders, we have chosen a non-Latinized portmanteau honoring the artist Jeremy Ayers and representing people that do not identify with conventional binary gender assignments – Strumigenys ayersthey”. The ‘they’ recognizes non-binary gender identifiers in order to reflect recent evolution in English pronoun use – ‘they, them, their’ and address a more inclusive and expansive understanding of gender identification.”

Current nomenclature practice on how to name animal species after people only differentiates between male and female personal names, offering respectively the ending -ae for a woman or -i for a man.

The research team additionally propose that the -they suffix can be used for singular honorific names of non-binary identifiers.

*A micro-CT scan of Strumigenys ayersthey*

When asked about the choice of a name for the ant, Booher said: “Such a beautiful and rare animal was just the species to celebrate both biological and human diversity. Small changes in language have had a large impact on culture. Language is dynamic and so should be the change in naming species – a basic language of science”.

With their choice, the team invites the scientific community to keep pace with the likes of Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and HSBC Bank, who have also adapted their own institutional practices, language usage and recognition to represent gender diversity.

“The discovery of such an unusual rare ant highlights the importance of scientific exploration and conservation of the Chocó region in Ecuador, which is at the same time one of the most biodiverse and threatened areas on our planet.”
the researchers add in conclusion.

Strumigenys ayersthey can be distinguished by its predominantly smooth and shining cuticle surface and long trap-jaw mandibles, which make it unique among nearly a thousand species of its genus. The researchers haven’t been able to obtain more specimens of the species, which suggests that it’s rare.

Original source:

Booher DB, Hoenle PO (2021) A new species group of Strumigenys (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) from Ecuador, with a description of its mandible morphology. ZooKeys 1036: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1036.62034

The Commission on Zoological Nomenclature proposes amendments to its Constitution

The ICZN Commissioners (Singapore, 2019)
Photo by ICZN

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) proposes amendments to its Constitution – the legal basis determining how the Commission is to be governed – to solicit feedback from the zoological community, who will have one year, starting 30 April 2020, to submit constructive comments before the Commissioners cast their votes. To prompt useful debate on the revision of the foundational rules and principles at the ICZN, these comments will be openly published in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature and the ICZN website.

In compliance with the ICZN Constitution, the proposed amendments are now available in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature (BZN) and three other suitable journals, including the peer-reviewed open-access journal ZooKeys. Given there is a sufficient consensus on the proposed amendments, the final version of the Constitution will be presented to the International Union of Biological Sciences for provisional ratification. Afterwards, the decision and date of effective ratification will also be published in BZN.

Established in 1895, the ICZN is an organisation, whose task is to act as the adviser and arbiter for the zoological community by generating and disseminating information on the correct formation and use of the scientific names of animals. The ICZN is responsible for producing the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which is a set of rules for the naming of animals and the resolution of nomenclatural problems.

Key proposed amendments address the terms of service and eligibility of members of the Commission; the inclusion of the ICZN website as a primary venue for information dissemination; reducing the standard voting period from three months to two, in recognition of the faster transmission speed of electronic mail compared to postal mail; and adding the maintenance of ZooBank – the Official Register of Zoological Nomenclature – to the list of responsibilities of the Commission.

“Along with recent amendments to its Bylaws, the proposed amendments to the ICZN Constitution will help the Commission to fulfil its aim of promoting stability and universality in the nomenclature of animals,”

comment from the ICZN.

Original source:

ICZN (2020) Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. ZooKeys 931: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.931.51583

It’s a girl! Tweaking the names of a pest fanworm group

The largest group of fanworm species with rigid chalky (calcareous) tubes belong to the Hydroides genus, and are easily recognised thanks to the shape of their beautifully ornate tube plugs. Hydroides is economically important as its members have the potential to cover immersed marine structures with massive nuisance settlements of chalky biofouling. The best-known example is Hydroides elegans, which settles on boat hulls so readily that colonies of it are perpetually in transit around the world, hitch-hiking to new places.

Latin names of animals mostly do not change over the decades because they are kept stable by a code book of naming rules. However, a mistake has recently been discovered regarding Hydroides. It turns out that it is a feminine genus rather than masculine, thus requiring each of the 107 Hydroides species names, described since 1768, to be re-examined so that the appropriate spelling, determined by the derivation of each name, can be used consistently by all biologists in future.

Scientists Geoffrey Read, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, New Zealand, Harry ten Hove, Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Netherlands, Yanan Sun and Elena Kupriyanova, Australian Museum, have carefully compiled the data on original Hydroides names, and published a checklist paper in the open access journal ZooKeys.

‘Detective’ work has often been required to get the details, as early biologists have been remarkably vague about the names they created and where their worms had come from. Fortunately, the Biodiversity Heritage Library has digitised many of the legacy taxonomic works required and it was possible to find out some unexpected information such as that species H. floridana actually did not come from Florida, although its name suggests it did.

Some Hydroides names have a descriptive basis that fits how the worms look, such as H. bulbosa, H. elegantula and H. longispinosa, others are named after people or places, for example, H. dafnii (after its collector, Yaacob Dafni) and H. sanctaecrucis (after Saint Croix Island). Yet, there are others, whose names are of quite tricky origin. It turns out that H. dianthus was actually named after a group of popular garden flowers, and H. euplaeana and H. stoichadon commemorate the long-forgotten names of tiny Mediterranean islands.

A few 19th century Hydroides descriptions are so bad that taxonomists have given up on using the names. However, one of these discarded names was revived last century by American biologists and was then used in often-cited research on sperm biology. Now, we can only guess what the actual species was.

Hydroides itself is a very old name, but it arose in a somewhat accidental and misleading way (in a letter to Linnaeus), because the worms have absolutely no connection to true hydroids, the well-known group of colonial animals related to corals.

The Hydroides species original descriptions are mostly accessible via the checklist because one third of the reports cited in the checklist are linked to the open access Biodiversity Heritage Library, and a large proportion are matched to an online source. While in the past one could only expect to find recorded the geolocations (the latitudes and longitudes) of worms collected during ship voyages, now the original localities of all the Hydroides are finally mapped. Further information on the taxonomy of all Hydroides, including many now regarded as synonyms, is available via links to the World Register of Marine Species Polychaeta web pages.

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Original source:

Read GB, ten Hove HA, Yanan Sun Y, Kupriyanova EK (2017) Hydroides Gunnerus, 1768 (Annelida, Serpulidae) is feminine: a nomenclatural checklist of updated names. ZooKeys 642: 1-52. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.642.10443

How the names of organisms help to turn ‘small data’ into ‘Big Data’

Innovation in ‘Big Data’ helps address problems that were previously overwhelming. What we know about organisms is in hundreds of millions of pages published over 250 years. New software tools of the Global Names project find scientific names, index digital documents quickly, correcting names and updating them. These advances help “Making small data big” by linking together to content of many research efforts. The study was published in the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal.

The ‘Big Data’ vision of science is transformed by computing resources to capture, manage, and interrogate the deluge of information coming from new technologies, infrastructural projects to digitise physical resources (such as our literature from the Biodiversity Heritage Library), or digital versions of specimens and records about specimens by museums.

Increased bandwidth has made dialogue among distributed data centres feasible and this is how new insights into biology are arising. In the case of biodiversity sciences, data centres range in size from the large GenBank for molecular records and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility for records of occurrences of species, to a long tail of tens of thousands of smaller datasets and web-sites which carry information compiled by individuals, research projects, funding agencies, local, state, national and international governmental agencies.

The large biological repositories do not yet approach the scale of astronomy and nuclear physics, but the very large number of sources in the long tail of useful resources do present biodiversity informaticians with a major challenge – how to discover, index, organize and interconnect the information contained in a very large number of locations.

In this regard, biology is fortunate that, from the middle of the 18th Century, the community has accepted the use of latin binomials such as Homo sapiens or Ba humbugi for species. All names are listed by taxonomists. Name recognition tools can call on large expert compilations of names (Catalogue of Life, Zoobank, Index Fungorum, Global Names Index) to find matches in sources of digital information. This allows for the rapid indexing of content.

Even when we do not know a name, we can ‘discover’ it because scientific names have certain distinctive characteristics (written in italics, most often two successive words in a latinised form, with the first one – capitalised). These properties allow names not yet present in compilations of names to be discovered in digital data sources.

The idea of a names-based cyberinfrastructure is to use the names to interconnect large and small distributed sites of expert knowledge distributed across the Internet. This is the concept of the described Global Names project which carried out the work described in this paper.

The effectiveness of such an infrastructure is compromised by the changes to names over time because of taxonomic and phylogenetic research. Names are often misspelled, or there might be errors in the way names are presented. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of species have no names, but are distinguished by their molecular characteristics.

In order to assess the challenge that these problems may present to the realization of a names-based cyberinfrastructure, we compared names from GenBank and DRYAD (a digital data repository) with names from Catalogue of Life to assess how well matched they are.

As a result, we found out that fewer than 15% of the names in pair-wise comparisons of these data sources could be matched. However, with a names parser to break the scientific names into all of their component parts, those parts that present the greatest number of problems could be removed to produce a simplified or canonical version of the name. Thanks to such tools, name-matching was improved to almost 85%, and in some cases to 100%.

The study confirms the potential for the use of names to link distributed data and to make small data big. Nonetheless, it is clear that we need to continue to invest more and better names-management software specially designed to address the problems in the biodiversity sciences.

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Original source:

Patterson D, Mozzherin D, Shorthouse D, Thessen A (2016) Challenges with using names to link digital biodiversity information. Biodiversity Data Journal, doi: 10.3897/BDJ.4.e8080.

Additional information:

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation.

From Sherborn to ZooBank: Moving to the interconnected digital nomenclature of the future

From the outside, it can seem that taxonomy has a commitment issue with scientific names. They shift for reasons that seem obscure and unnecessarily wonkish to people who simply want to use names to refer to a consistent, knowable taxon such as species, genus or family. However, the relationship between nomenclature and taxonomy, as two quite separate but mutually dependent systems, is a sophisticated way of balancing what we know and what is open to further interpretation.

Nomenclature is a bureaucracy that follows rules and is tied to published records and type specimens. It provides a rigid framework or skeleton for knowledge. Taxonomy, on the other hand, is a data-driven science, influenced by interpretation and resulting in concepts that are open to further test and change. To actually get the answers right, taxonomy needs to be responsive and fluid as a system of knowledge. The link between nomenclature and the published record is also the junction with the data that fuels taxonomic interpretation.

Biodiversity informatics aims to solve this issue, and its founding father is Charles Davies Sherborn. His magnum opus, Index Animalium, provided the bibliographic foundation for current zoological nomenclature. In the 43 years he spent working on this extraordinary resource, he anchored our understanding of animal diversity through the published scientific record. No work has equaled it, and it is still in current and critical use.

This special volume of the open-access journal ZooKeys celebrates Sherborn, his contributions, context and the future for the discipline of biodiversity informatics. The papers in this volume fall into three general areas of history, current practice and frontiers.

The first section presents facets of Sherborn as a man, scientist and bibliographer, and describes the historical context for taxonomic indexing from the 19th century to today. The second section discusses existing tools and innovations for bringing legacy biodiversity information into the modern age. The final section tackles the future of biological nomenclature, including digital access, innovative publishing models and the changing tools and sociology needed for communicating taxonomy.

In the late 1880s Charles Davies Sherborn recognised the need for a full index of names to the original sources that gave them legitimacy, their first publications. He set about making a complete index for names of animals, which are the largest group of described organisms (1.4 million of the current 1.8 million described species are animals). Because this work began while the very basics of nomenclatural rules were being thrashed out, the work itself affected how those rules were codified.

Sherborn’s monumental work, Index Animalium, comprises more than 9,000 pages in 11 volumes and about 440,000 names. This was on the scale of other hugely ambitious tasks at the time that changed the course of communication such as the Oxford English Dictionary. The error rates are astonishingly low, and it became, and it remains to date the most complete reference source for animal nomenclature. Taxonomic studies rely on Sherborn’s work today. While the future for information access is one of the most exciting frontiers for our increasingly interconnected, accelerated society, biodiversity information will continue to be grounded in this seminal work. The future for biodiversity informatics is built on Sherborn’s work, and is expanding to be digital, diversified and accessible.

The publisher of this volume, the journal ZooKeys, is itself a pioneer in developing a more stable and accessible scientific nomenclature. Together with PhytoKeys, ZooKeys is piloting an innovative workflow with a pre-publication automated pipeline for registration of nomenclatural acts. This initiative comes from the EU FP7 project pro-iBiosphere, and in close collaboration with ZooBank (the official online registry for scientific names of animals), Zoological Record, IPNI, MycoBank and Index Fungorum, and the Global Names project. The volume was inspired by a symposium held in Sherborn’s honour at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London, on the 150th year of his birth in 2011, organised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), in collaboration with the Society for the History of Natural History (SHNH).

Sherborn was a man with a vision for the future and respect for the accomplishments of the past. He would have celebrated the new tools for the ambitious goal of linking all biological information through names that are readable for both machines and humans. He would have understood the tremendous power of interconnected names for biodiversity science overall. And he would have knuckled down and got to work to make it happen.

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Original source:

Michel E (2016) Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond. In: Michel E (Ed.) Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and beyond. ZooKeys 550: 1-11. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.550.7460

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Anchoring Biodiversity Information – Sherborn Special Issue is available to read and order from here.

Novel cybercatalog of flower-loving flies suggests the digital future of taxonomy

Charting Earth’s biodiversity is the goal of taxonomy and to do so the scientists need to create an extensive citation network based on several hundred million pages of scientific literature. By providing a novel taxonomic ‘cybercatalog’ of southern African flower-loving (apiocerid) flies, Drs. Torsten Dikow and Donat Agosti demonstrate how the network of taxonomic knowledge can be made available through links provided to online data providers. Their work is available in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.

The present research showcases that the information cannot only be made available to the reader who follows the links, but also to machines that use the growing number of digital, online resources that are linked through persistent identifiers.

Primary data providers for taxonomic information such as species names (ZooBank), specimen images (Morphbank), species descriptions (Plazi), and digitized literature (BHL, Biodiversity Heritage Library; BioStor; and BLR, Biodiversity Literature Repository) play an important role in making data on species available in electronic form. Aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) gather this information automatically to distribute it even further to audiences beyond the reach of the life sciences.

In contrast to previous species catalogs, in cybercatalogs access to information is provided through links to open-access, online data repositories such as the ones listed above. Taxonomists and other users can now access this literature, species descriptions, and specimen records immediately without a search in a natural history library or collection. The cybercatalog takes advantage of a new publishing platform within the Biodiversity Data Journal that makes it easy to upload species information and links to data about these species through a CheckList template. Furthermore, the Biodiversity Data Journal now allows future updates and re-publications of the cybercatalog with the new unique persistent identifier (DOI, Digital Object Identifier) whenever a new species is described or other taxonomic changes take place.

The authors argue that cybercatalogs are indeed the future of taxonomic catalogs since the online data in them are easily accessible to anyone.

“It is a taxonomist’s dream to have online access to all previously published information on a species and through this step the discipline of taxonomy can (re-)position itself as a central resource within the life sciences and beyond to the public and society at large,” add the authors. “Online access will also help to narrow the gap between the South and the North as a fantastic example of unhindered access to our knowledge of the global biological diversity, which is increasingly under pressure from human populations.”

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For the realization of this project Plazi and Pensoft were partially supported by the EC-FP7 EU BON project (ENV 30845) (Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network).

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Original source:

Dikow T, Agosti D (2015) Utilizing online resources for taxonomy: a cybercatalog of Afrotropical apiocerid flies (Insecta: Diptera: Apioceridae). Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e5707. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.3.e5707

World-famous, yet nameless: Hybrid flowering dogwoods named by Rutgers scientists

Garden lovers and horticulturalists now have two new species names to add to their vocabulary and memory. The world’s most commercially successful dogwood garden trees have finally received proper scientific names decades after their introduction into horticulture. The big-bracted, or flowering, dogwoods are beloved trees with cloud-like branches blossoming in early spring in white, sometimes red or pink. The new scientific names are published by a team of American scientists in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.

The two hybrid species were artificially hybridized at Rutgers University by renowned ornamental tree breeder Dr. Elwin R. Orton decades ago and are now commonly grown across the United States, Europe and Japan. These two hybrids were developed from Florida, Kousa and Pacific dogwoods (Cornus spp.), all well known ornamental trees. The breeding program, which started in 1965, had the aim to create garden dogwoods with better aesthetic qualities, such as larger pink or red floral bracts, unique growth habits and better disease-resistance.

So, why do we need formal names? “Crucial to communication in all parts of our lives is the naming of objects and phenomena,” explains Mr. Mattera, a Rutgers University graduate student in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “Humanity needs words to tell other people what we are talking about, and the words need to have uniform and clear meanings,” he adds. Before their publication these horticultural plants largely lived in a taxonomic no-man’s land and could not easily be placed into horticultural databases.

Co-author Dr. Lena Struwe, a botanist also at Rutgers University, explains that “Even artificial hybrids created by the fusion of species from separate pieces of the Earth are living, evolving things that need scientific names so they fit into our encyclopedias of life.” She continues, “even if these are mostly sterile, but stable, hybrids they are now widespread components of worldwide garden biodiversity that get pollinated by native insects and interact with other local native and non-native species.”

Common garden plant hybrids, even if artificially produced from wild species, need formal species names to promote international communication and further scientific understanding. “If you can’t put a name on something, you can’t explain what you see, own, or remember,” Dr. Lena Struwe explains and adds: “Names and words are the basis for the transfer of all knowledge”.

The new hybrid species Cornus × rutgersensis was created by the hand-crossing of a an Asian species, the Kousa dogwood, with the common Florida dogwood. Most gardeners and horticulturist will recognize the pink-bracted cultivar Stellar Pink®, the most successful Cornus × rutgersensis hybrid. The crosses made by Dr. Orton were the world’s first known hybrid crosses between these two species. Many familiar with this hybrid may recall hearing this name before, and they probably have. Cornus × rutgersensis and similar names had been used informally by those in the horticultural trade before, but now the authors hope to provide clarity by formally publishing the name in the present paper. The researchers suggest Rutgers’ dogwood as the common-name for this hybrid.

The second hybrid, Cornus × elwinortonii, honors career-long ornamental plant breeder Dr. Orton from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ (United States). This cross produced a hybrid with larger white petal-like bracts around each flower head and resistance to the dogwood-killing fungal disease, dogwood anthracnose, that affects the native Pacific and Florida dogwoods. The cultivar Venus® is the most prominent example of this hybrid. The researchers have proposed the common name Orton’s dogwood for horticultural usage.

Both hybrid species represent long-distance artificial crosses of wild species that would never meet in nature, which were further developed into beloved commercial garden plants. Despite their parents being quite different in their flowers and fruits, the two new hybrid species are a clear combination of their ancestors.

“Such intermixing of parental characters is the key to successful plant breeding and artificial selection of new horticultural and agricultural varieties that can provide new forms of beauty, as well as new disease- and stress-resistant plants,” explains Rutgers University plant breeder Dr. Thomas Molnar, in Department of Plant Biology and Pathology.

According to the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), all proposed scientific names, including hybrid names, require that they are formally published and described in a scientific publication, as well as represented by a type specimen in a scientific collection. The formal types of these new hybrids will be deposited in several herbaria, and are also represented by living trees at Rutgers University in New Jersey (USA).

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Original source:

Mattera R, Molnar T, Struwe L (2015) Cornus × elwinortonii and Cornus × rutgersensis(Cornaceae), new names for two artificially produced hybrids of big-bracted dogwoods.PhytoKeys 55: 93-111. doi: 10.3897/phytokeys.55.9112