Why are names important in science? What is the difference between scientific names (also known as Latin names or taxonomic names) and common names? Why do some species have multiple names? The grant project team for What’s in a Name, supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), set out to find answers and develop exhibits and other ways for anyone to explore this phenomenon. With millions of different species to identify and understand, the process of naming organisms helps scientists organize and understand the tree of life. The physical and virtual results of this exploration creatively demonstrate how scientists identify and name species, how names relate to scientific research and the progression of knowledge, and how museum specimen collections play a crucial role in the process of naming.

Why would something be called “Fried Egg jelly fish”, and also be known as Phacellophora camtschatica?

Image of the Fried Egg Jelly courtesy of gpapadop79 – Own work, CC BY-SA4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45347541.

Scientific names take the form of “Genus species”. Scientific names serve to distinctively identify an organism and also to show evolutionary relationships. The genus links the organism to its evolutionary relatives while the species name demonstrates its uniqueness (not unlike the family and first name convention of many people in North America). Organisms also have common names. Common names can be confusing—for instance a “Robin” in the United States is a completely different bird than a “Robin” in Europe, but if the scientific name is used, confusion can be reduced via the name unique to the organism.

The system of binomial nomenclature is used to assign species with their two-part Latin names. Carl von Linné (1707 – 1778) established a system of tiered taxonomic classification, which assigned species formal names, in the 18th century. His classification is outlined in his book, Systema Naturae. His purpose was to reduce confusion from the proliferation of common names by supplying a unique name to each organism that also displayed potential relationships with other organisms. The names were formulated from Latin words. Linné even Latinized his own name and is now best known by that name: Carolus Linnaeus.

From the What’s In a Name PDF, page 32: “Carl Linnaeus gave the European Honeybee its name, Apis mellifera, which is Latin for “honey-bearing bee.” By some accounts, Linnaeus later became dissatisfied with the name he bestowed and argued to change it from Apis mellifera, to Apis mellifica, or “honey-making bee.” His mistake, he argued, was that bees make honey within the hive; they do not bear it from the flower. His argument was presumably unsuccessful as the bee still bears the erroneous name.” Image: A European Honeybee, Apis mellifera, visiting a flower that is dusting it with pollen. (JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 3.0).

Species may be discovered by scientists poring over specimens in a museum or someone exploring an area rich in biodiversity. It is not necessary to be a scientist to name a new species but scientific names must conform to rules laid out by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code for Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants. Names can reflect a characteristic of a species (Peromyscus leucopus-white-footed mouse) or can be named after a person or location (Mandelia microcornata-a nudibranch named for Nelson Mandela). Sometimes, scientists display a sense of humor when naming: Agra phobia and Agra vation are the scientific names of South American beetles. A hungry entomologist (Neal Evenhuis) named a series of flies (genus) Pieza and most notably, a species Pieza pi.

The results from the work of What’s in a Name? include four interactive exhibit stations at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on Honeybees, the extinct Dimetrodon, Jellies and Poison Ivy. There are also free online resources, including a website and a 60-page free e-book. The online resources include eight more species stories that feature images and references from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and include familiar organisms like the dodo and sugar maple, as well as our favorite, the snail Vargapupa biheli named after BHL!

Vargapupa biheli. Image courtesy Dr. Barna Páll-Gergely.

Featured in the exhibit display on Dimetrodon, Stephanie Pierce, Assistant Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Harvard University, describes research being done right now on specimens of the fossil species Dimetrodon milleri, in the Museum of Comparative Zoology collection:

The What’s in a Name? project is a partnership between Harvard Museums of Science and Culture (HMSC), the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), and the BHL, as represented by the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. This project was made possible by IMLS.

For more information about scientific names and naming, check out the following sources

• Bright, M. 2012. The Frog with Self-cleaning Feet: And Other Extraordinary Tales From the Animal World. Biteback Publishing. 304 pages.
• Evenhuis, N. L.2002. Pieza, a new genus of microbombyliids from the New World (Diptera: Mythicomyiidae). Zootaxa 36(1). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.36.1.1
• Freeland, C. 2008. On Name Finding in the BHL. BHL Blog, March. https://goo.gl/wJIOWC
• Greenstein, B. 2016. How’s your fern and bird coverage, BHL? BHL Blog, August.
• Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. 2017, “What’s in a Name?.” http://whatsinaname.hmnh.harvard.edu/files/imls/files/_whatsinaname_.pdf
• Judd, W. 2014.Weirdest species names. Australian Geographic. March 2014. https://goo.gl/UQ3xMA
•  Zielinski, S. 2009. The World’s Strangest Scientific Names. Smithsonian Magazine. https://goo.gl/D3aMbb

Jeroen Snijders, Bob Corrigan, Peter Schalk, Donald Hobern, Tom Orrell, David Remsen, Alex Borisenko, Alex Borisenko, Martin Kalfatovic

On 13 April 2015, BHL Program Director Martin R. Kalfatovic attended the GBIF-CoL-EOL-BHL-BOLD Summit at Naturalis in Leiden, Netherlands. This meeting followed on the preceding Catalogue of Life meeting in Oostende, Belgium. The meeting took place in the historic Pesthuis on the Naturalis campus.

Other participants were:

• Donald Hobern, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)
• Peter Schalk and David Remsen, Catalogue of Life (CoL)
• Tom Orrell, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS)
• Bob Corrigan, Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)
• Alex Borisenko, Barcode of Life (BOLD)
• Jeroen Snijders, Naturalis

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss synergy and explore potential for intensifying collaboration concerning infrastructure, software tools, and services. The aims is to align strategic plans and future developments.

Jeroen Snijders, Naturalis CIO, opened the meeting with an overview of Naturalis IT structure and capacity. He also outlined recent past and upcoming EU funding opportunities.

Each of the participants then gave overviews of their programs and presented opportunities for collaboration and de-duplication of effort.

The Naturalis senior management team from collections, scientific research, and research and education joined the group for lunch.

The meeting concluded with a series of action items focused on aligning programs, developing interoperable resources, and sharing services and software tools.

The successful meeting built on existing partnerships and collaborations of the participants and provided a framework for advancing shared goals.

The Floral Magazine, v. 6, pl. 342.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library now has its own collection of images in the Encyclopedia of Life! This collection is comprised of images that have been tagged with species name machine tags, relating the species depicted in each image. The collection currently comprises over 11,000 images representing over 10,000 taxa, and will continue to grow as additional illustrations are tagged in the BHL Flickr.

The BHL Flickr

By now, you’re no doubt aware of the Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr, which provides free access to over 104,000 illustrations gleaned from the BHL collections. These images span over five hundred years and range in topic from fish to reptiles, mammals to birds, insects to mollusks, and everything in between!

Building the Collection: Tagging Images

To make it easier for you to search our Flickr collection and for us to share images with external websites like EOL, we’re adding species name machine tags to our images, and we’ve been encouraging you to help us do this.

A tag is basically a searchable keyword that you can add to an image to describe it, and a machine tag is a tag with special formatting to allow it to be read by computers. Thus, a species name machine tag is a tag that describes the species depicted in an image in a format that can be understood by computers.

When you add species name machine tags to our images, you as a user can not only search the BHL Flickr and retrieve any images tagged with a desired name, but these images can also automatically be uploaded to EOL and associated with the corresponding species page.

Example of an image from the BHL Flickr automatically associated with the EOL species page for Carduelis barbata, the Black-chinned Siskin, because a species name machine tag was added to the image in Flickr.

The format for species name machine tags is “taxonomy:binomial=Genus species,” where “Genus” and “species” are replaced with the particulars of the organism you’re describing. You can replace “binomial” with another taxonomic tag, such as “genus” or “family”, if you can only identify the organism at that level. Learn more about the Flickr tagging process and machine tag formats in our previous blog post.

The images in the new EOL Collection are images from the BHL Flickr that have a species name machine tag associated with them. Each time new images are tagged in the BHL Flickr, they will automatically be added to our collection in EOL, as well as associated with appropriate species pages.

You Can Help us Grow this Collection!

With over 104,000 images in our Flickr collection to date, and that number growing daily, it’s impossible for BHL staff to tag all of our images by ourselves. That’s why we need your help! You can help us by adding species name machine tags to our images in Flickr. All you have to have is a free Flickr account to add tags to BHL images.

Once you’re signed in to Flickr, browse our collection of images and when you see some with species you can identify, simply click “add a tag” and add the species name in the machine tag format (“Taxonomy:Binomial=Genus species”). Be sure to include the quotation marks around your machine tag.

Many images actually have the species name printed on the plate itself. In these cases, you can simply transcribe that name as a tag for the image. If the species is not identified on the plate, navigate to the book in BHL to find the associated description pages outlining the species depicted. We encourage you to tag the image with the species name provided by the book itself, but if that name is no longer valid, and you know the current, accepted name, feel free to add that name as an additional tag to the image.

Adding a species name machine tag to an image in the BHL Flickr. Click this image to enlarge for better viewing.

If there are multiple species depicted on an image, add a separate tag for each species depicted (or as many as you can identify). Learn more about tagging BHL images, and get additional tips, in our Guide.

Every time you add a species name machine tag to an image in our Flickr, you’re growing the BHL EOL Collection, as your tagged images will automatically be added to that collection.

We hope we’ve inspired you to help us identify life on earth, as portrayed through some of the most incredible scientific illustrations ever created! Keep exploring, and keep tagging!

Visit the BHL Image Collection on EOL today!