Taxonomic practice, creativity and fashion: what’s in a spider name?

Abstract

There is a secret pleasure in naming new species. Besides traditional etymologies recalling the sampling locality, habitat or morphology of the species, names may be tributes to some meaningful person, pop culture references and even exercises of enigmatography. Using a dataset of 48 464 spider etymologies, we tested the hypothesis that species names given by taxonomists are deeply influenced by their cultural background. Specifically, we asked whether naming practices change through space or have changed through time. In absolute terms, etymologies referring to morphology were the most frequently used. In relative terms, references to morphology peaked in 1850–1900 and then began to decline, with a parallel increase in etymologies dedicated to people and geography. We also observed a dramatic increase in etymologies referring to pop culture and other cultural aspects in 2000–2020, especially in Europe and the Americas. While such fashionable names often carry no biological information regarding the species itself, they help give visibility to taxonomy, a discipline currently facing a profound crisis in academia. Taxonomy is among the most unchanged disciplines across the last centuries in terms of tools, rules and writing style. Yet, our analysis suggests that taxonomists remain deeply influenced by their living time and space.

Can species naming drive scientific attention? A perspective from plant-feeding arthropods

“…Mammola et al . [5] found a similar but stronger effect for ecologically informative names among spiders, although Poulin et al . [6] found no such trend for parasitic worms.…”

Naming the menagerie: creativity, culture and consequences in the formation of scientific names

“…Data for spiders are estimated (and thus approximate) from fig. 1 of [28]; data for worms are estimated using combinations of subcategories from [31]. Note that totals are heavily influenced by the spider dataset, which makes up nearly 88% of the total.basis for etymology Aloe parasitic worms (described 2000–2020)spidersphytophagous arthropodstotalsper cent of species (number)per cent of species (number)per cent of species (number)per cent of species (number)per cent of species (number)morphology38.6 (353)20.8 (601)40.5 (19190)32.7 (895)39.1 (21039)geography20.0 (179)19.0 (550)27.2 (12868)11.0 (300)25.7 (3821)habitat/host4.0 (37)21.3 (616)5.8 (2750)26.7 (731)7.8 (4210)eponomy30.4 (278)34.7 (1004)19.4 (9157)15.4 (422)20.2 (10861)other7.4 (68)4.2 (120)7.1 (3360)14.3 (391)7.3 (3939)total100 (915)100 (2891)100 (47325)100 (2739)100 (53870)citation[30][31][28][29]…”

“…We tested the 'reduced classical dominance' hypothesis more broadly, considering the linguistic origin of 1280 species chosen from each of two large, systematic compilations of scientific names: those of Mammola et al [28] for spiders and of Mlynarek et al [29] for phytophagous arthropods (insects and mites). Mammola et al's compilation is close to exhaustive (for known spiders), being taken from the World Spider Catalogue, while Mlynarek et al's compilation represents a small (2739 species in 30 genera) sampling from global biodiversity.…”

“…Poulin et al [31] similarly identified individual taxonomists of outsized influence on the etymological basis of names in particular groups of parasitic worms (that is, at a finer taxonomic level than seen in table 2). But this variation in practice is not likely to lie entirely at the level of individual scientists; similar variation is likely to occur among geographic regions among the taxonomic community, among academic lineages (if students are influenced in naming practice by their advisors) and more [28,31].…”

“…For example, he named Linnaea after himself [24], and other genera, unkindly, after botanists whom he considered inferior: the weedy Siegesbeckia after Johann Siegesbeck, and Commelina after Jan, Caspar, and Casparus Commelin (for Linnaeus, Commelina's two showy petals were for Jan and Caspar, and the third inconspicuous one for Casparus, who 'died before accomplishing anything in botany'; the name was originally suggested by Charles Plumier but adopted and explained by Linnaeus [33]). Eponymous namings have proliferated since and are increasing in frequency (table 2; [28,30]), and often receive considerable popular attention. Heard [24] has recently explored the history and practice of eponymous naming in detail.…”