Category: systematics

A Denisovan skull–at last!

June 24, 2025 • 9:00 am

JAC: Greg sent me some thoughts on the new hominin finds involving what used to be known as Denisovans. I suggested he put up his own post on these thoughts, and he kindly agreed. The result is below.

Greg has asked me to weigh in at the end, and I will, under the JAC initials. Except for that, credit for this post goes to Greg.

by Greg Mayer

In a recent pair of papers, Qiaomei Fu and colleagues show, via both DNA and protein analyses, that the skull known as “Dragon Man” from Harbin, China, is a Denisovan. The Denisovans, first identified in 2010 by DNA from a single finger bone from a cave in Siberia, are a long-separated (several 100 kya) lineage of humans that has interbred with anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals, leaving a fairly strong signature (ca. 6%) in the ancestry of modern humans from East Asia and the Pacific. Although several more Denisovans were identified by DNA after the first one, all were from very incomplete remains– until now.

The Harbin skull. CCA 4.0 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040

The Harbin skull was first made known to science in 2018, and was named Homo longi in 2021. I have been able to access only the DNA paper, not the protein one, but Carl Zimmer gives a fine summary in the NY Times.

Zimmer notes that some scientists, including Chris Stringer of the British Museum (Natural History), are now using the name Homo longi, based on the Harbin skull, as the name for the Denisovans. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, pushed back on this, telling Zimmer “I’m pretty confident saying these are all Homo sapiens.”

Jerry, Matthew, and myself have discussed Neanderthals (or Neandertals) and Denisovans several times here at WEIT.

About 10 years ago, Jerry, I, and Hawks all agreed on all three forms (Neanderthal, Denisovan, anatomically moderns) being members of one interbreeding species. But when I read David Reich’s book and other papers about five years ago, I was impressed by the paucity of Neanderthal DNA on the X chromosome of moderns, suggesting that Haldane’s Rule had kicked in, and there was partial intrinsic isolation (probably sterility) of hybrids between Neanderthals and moderns. (Haldane’s Rule states that if there is partial reproductive isolation due to infertility or sterility of hybrids, it is the heterogametic sex—XY males in Homo— that is most affected.) So, my view now is that a few hundred thousand years of isolation had moved the Neanderthals and moderns measurably down the road to speciation, though obviously not completely.

My earlier view had been that the low percentage of Neanderthal DNA in moderns was due to social/historical factors, analogous to how there is little European/American Indian admixture in North America, even though there is no intrinsic isolation between these two groups. There’s probably still some social/historical factors involved in the Neanderthal/modern encounter, but part of the disparity in genetic contribution is due to some infertility in male hybrids. [JAC: This infertility is suggested by the observation that introgression of Neanderthal DNA into modern humans is less pronounced on the X chromosome than on the other chromosomes, or autosomes.]

As far as nomenclature goes, I’d be happy with them all being sapiens, but we should recognize that the differences between Neanderthals/Denisovans and moderns are greater, and of a different sort, than differences between the obvious geographic races that exist within modern humans today.

Hawks has a piece on his website, “The humanity of a new Denisovan“, in which he expands on his comments to Zimmer and goes much deeper into the issues of the history of Homo in the last million years; I heartily recommend it. His fourth figure (the second phylogeny) in particular provides a nice summary of his view of that history, including various episodes of interbreeding. He does not mention the distribution of Neanderthal DNA within the moderns’ genome (i.e., the paucity of it on the X), so I’m not sure if this has affected his thinking in any way. I’m hoping that Jerry will weigh in with his current thoughts on the significance, if any, of the distribution of Neanderthal DNA across the moderns’ genome.

JAC:  I’m in agreement with Greg (and Matthew, who I hope will also weigh in here) that “modern” sapiens, Denisovans, and Neanderthals should be considered members of the same biological species, Homo sapiens.  I don’t know how big the disparity between introgression of X-linked vs. autosomal DNA is with respect to modern human genomes, so I cannot judge if it is substantive evidence for some sterility (or inviability) of the hybrids between modern sapiens and Neanderthals. Since the sterility would have to be strong to even consider these two as different biological species, and because there is a sizable aliquot of Neanderthal DNA in many modern humans, the sterility could not have been nearly complete. (I don’t know if Denisovan DNA in modern humans show the same disparity between that from the X chromosome versus the autosomes. If it doesn’t show that, there’s no reason to split Denisovans off as a new species.).

At any rate, the biological species concept (BSC) regards two populations as members of the same species if they can hybridize when they encounter each other in nature and some of the hybrids are viable and fertile. To the extent that Neanderthals meet that requirement, I would say that they, too, are members of H. sapiens.  This kind of “splitting” of groups into different named species is pervasive in human paleobiology, as it is in some other groups, like giraffes, but to me rests on shaky grounds. People like to split human groups into new species, for you get a lot more attention if you can say you found a new species than if you say you simply found a new subspecies or population.

Matthew: The identification of the extraordinary ‘Dragon man’ skull with the Denisovan lineage is probably what most people expected, but is nonetheless an astonishing development, using protein profiles to establish evolutionary relationships (first suggested by Francis Crick in his 1957 ‘central dogma’ lecture, but he never imagined this could be done on a sample over 140,000 years old!). The issue is what we call the Denisovans – the skull was described as Homo longi, and paleoanthropologists, such as the Natural History Museum’s Chris Stringer, accept this, just as they accept Homo neanderthalensis for the Neanderthals. I agree with Jerry that from a biological point of view, these are all members of the same species, because of the existence of fertile hybrids (us!).

This was Chris’s reply to me on Bsky:

This is a link to the article he refers to.

There are two points that make me pause. First, the taxonomic powers that be are unlikely to change their collective minds on this (they haven’t shifted over H. neanderthalensis in the last decade or more, since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced and the existence of introgression was established. It’s mildly irritating, but that’s the way it will be. Secondly, the points raised by Greg are interesting – we were separated from these lineages for hundreds of thousands of years, and during this time some striking morphological adaptations occurred. They clearly did not lead to the establish of biological species, although we have little grasp of morphological or genetic variation in these groups (all of which were composed of very small (tens of thousands at most), dispersed populations). The role of the X chromosome, as highlighted by Greg, suggests that all three lineages may have been on the way to speciation, although that process was stopped by the demise of the Denisovans and Neanderthals (whether it would have continued in the presence of introgression is another thing to consider).

Finally, our understanding of human evolutionary history is perpetually changing. Stephen Jay Gould used to rewrite his slides each year; I did the same, pretty much, until I found this on Twitter, back when it was good, and now use it in all my human evolution lectures (along with more serious stuff).

 

Fu, Q., P. Cao, Q. Dai, E. A. Bennett, X. Feng, M. A. Yang, W. Ping, S. Pääbo, and Q. Ji. 2025. Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin cranium. Cell 188:1-8. pdf

Fu, Q., F. Bai, H. Rao, S. Chen, Y. Ji, E. A. Bennett, F. Liu, and Q. Ji. 2025. The proteome of the late Middle Pleistocene Harbin individual. Science in press. locked

Reich, D. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Pantheon, New York

Now the botanists have come for “offensive” Latin binomials for plants

July 21, 2024 • 11:30 am

I’ve written quite a bit about the brouhaha over species names of plants and animals considered offensive to biologists and laypeople.

Remember first that every species has two names: the Latin binomial that is standard for the scientific literature (e.g., Passer domesticus), and the “common” name, which varies among countries (e.g., “House sparrow” in English).  Along with the present climate of trying to purify the world from words considered offensive and hurtful, scientists have been trying to purify species names, too, changing common names to conform to modern ideology.

They’ve had mixed success with animals.  Common bird names, for example, are being purified, especially when birds are named after “bad people”, like John James Audubon. Anybody who had a connection with the slave trade is toast.  In fact, some have suggested that we simply ditch all common names derived from people’s names, and use descriptors of the bird’s appearance and location.  But even that has its drawbacks. Reader Lou Jost, for instance, pointed out that there is substantial benefits to conservation to name organisms after people, both in Latin binomials and common names:

. . . .  naming species after people has always been a powerful tool that biologists have used to thank their patrons, recognize their field assistants and honour their colleagues or loved ones. This is the highest honour that an individual biologist can bestow on a person; we have very little else at our disposal. In recent years some biologists have also used the naming of species to raise funds for research and, especially, for conservation. Guedes et al. mentioned the auctioning of names by the Rainforest Trust. Fundación EcoMinga2 —an Ecuadorian non-governmental organization that is managed by some of us — was the beneficiary of two naming auctions for species new to science3,4. With these funds the foundation was able to pay for journal publication fees so that the resulting articles would be open access as well as pay for some of the logistics of the investigations. Most importantly, we were able to use the funds to help to directly conserve many hundreds of hectares of the habitats of these very same species. In many megadiverse countries of the tropics, funds for these purposes are otherwise scarce or non-existent.

And of course common names vary from language to language, so the purification process occurs only in Anglophone countries.

The debate over the Latin binomials for animals has already been settled by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), which decided that ANIMAL bibnomials will not be changed, for those Latin names are standard throughout the literature, and changing them now would seriously screw up the literature. The ICZN did suggest, however, that Latin names proposed for newly described species not be such as “would be likely to give offense on any grounds. But that is only their suggestion, not a rule.  So you could still name a species like the blind cave beetle Anophthalmus hitleri (yes, it was named in der Führer’s honor), though I doubt anybody would do that now.  As for common names, the ICZN has no authority over them, and no recommendations.  I agree with their decision not to give new Latin names to already-described species, as this would seriously confuse the scientific literature. And of course what’s considered “offensive” changes as our morality and ideology changes. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for instance, were slaveholders, and any Latin binomials with their names would be seen as “offensive”; as should “Washington, D.C.” site of the ill-named “Jefferson Memorial.”

But the ICZN decision goes for animals only. The botanists, on the other hand, have just decided that offensive Latin names for plants already given can be changed, and some will be changed. Click below to read the article in Nature:

Excerpts (bolding is mine):

For the first time, researchers have voted to eliminate scientific names of organisms because they are offensive. Botanists decided that more than 200 plants, fungi and algae species names should no longer contain a racial slur related to the word caffra, which is used against Black people and others mostly in southern Africa.

he changes voted on today at the International Botanical Congress in Madrid mean that plants such as the coast coral tree will, from 2026, be formally called Erythrina affra, instead of Erythrina caffra.

“We throughout had faith in the process and the majority global support of our colleagues, even though the outcome of the vote was always going to be close,” says Gideon Smith, a plant taxonomist at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Gqeberha, South Africa, who proposed the change along with fellow NMU taxonomist Estrela Figueiredo.

Their proposal takes species names based on the word caffra and its derivatives and replaces them with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa. The measure passed in a tense secret ballot, with 351 votes in favour against 205 opposed.

Alina Freire-Fierro, a botanist at the Technical University of Cotopaxi in Latacunga, Ecuador, says it was good that the ‘caffra’ amendment was passed, because of the offence it causes. But its passage could open the door for other similar changes, she says. “This could potentially cause a lot of confusion and problems to users in many fields aside from botany.”

And that’s the rub! I can barely agree with the notion of changing “caffra” (a derivative of “kaffir”, a deeply insulting term for a black African—the African equivalent of the n-word), but only because changing “caffra” as the species name to “affra” will not cause much confusion. But in general I think the botanists, do what they will with the common names of plants (“Trumpet vine” may have to go), should go along with the ICZN, and leave Latin names of plants alone, both new and old. The damage to the scientific literature is potentially large. Yet the International Botanical Congress also seems to be vetting all newly suggested Latin names as well:

A second change to the rules for naming plants that aimed to address problematic names, such as those recognizing people who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, also passed — albeit in a watered-down form, says Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, who made the proposal.

Scientists attending the Botanical Congress Nomenclature Section voted to create a special committee to deal with the ethics of names for newly described plants, fungi and algae. Species names — usually determined by the scientists who first describe them in the scientific literature — can now be rejected by the committee if deemed derogatory to a group of people. But this applies only to species names given after 2026, not to historical names that Thiele and others would like to see eliminated.

Still, this opens the door to Pecksniffian policing of plant names. I am not comfortable with someone vetting all suggested new binomials for offense, as “offense” is a slippery word, and a mere suggestion (like the ICZN’s) should suffice for guidance.  As for changing older names, well, the botanists have created a slippery slope here. If they can change one name, they might change others, as was suggested by Thiele in an earlier article:

Kevin Thiele, a plant taxonomist at the Australia National University in Canberra, expects that, if his proposal to create a mechanism to remove offensive names is approved, a relatively small number of species names would change. It’s likely that the argument for stability in species names would be outweighed only in cases in which plants are named after “sufficiently egregious” individuals, he says.

One change Thiele would like to see is to a genus of flowering shrubs, most of which have yellow blooms and are found in Australia, called Hibbertia, with new species routinely discovered. They are named after George Hibbert, an eighteenth-century English merchant who profited from the slave trade and fought abolition. “There should be a way of dealing with cases like Hibbert,” he says.

You know how these things go.  Once “caffra” is changed to “affra”, people like Thiele will create a movement to change older species names not derived from “kaffir”, because, after all, opposing changing the names of plants named after those in the slave trade (or who did other bad things) would be considered racist, and who wants to be called a racist? (Note that even the vote for “caffra”—>”affra” was pretty close.)  It is the loudest people, even when they’re in the minority, who ultimately win in this kind of endeavor.

These acts are performative only, for offensive species names don’t seem to affect whether people go into botany or zoology because of offensive Latin binomials (I haven’t heard of a single case). The Botanical Congress should simply make a suggestion to avoid offensive Latin binomials and then keep its sticky fingers off names that botanists suggests for new plants. And, after making the “caffra” change, they should vow that this one change will be the only older species name to be changed, and will also be the last one.

h/t: Ginger K.

Now the Pecksniffs want to change dinosaur names

February 22, 2024 • 10:30 am

Yes, it was inevitable. Now that birds and other animals are undergoing woke scrutiny to see which names are problematic (though scientific names cannot be changed), the Pecksniffs have begun to examine the names of dinosaurs, too. And according to this article from Nature (which contains a blatant misspelling), they have found some “bad” names, though not many. Click to read.

First, remember that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has decreed that, for purposes of scientific communication, the Latin binomial names of animals (e.g., Anas platyrhynchos—the mallard) cannot be changed, though “mallard” could be changed. (The equivalent plant group hasn’t yet weighed in.) Thus what has been at issue is “problematic” common names, seen as being non-inclusive and fostering bigotry and racism (example Wallace’s owlet, named after the supposed miscreant Alfred Russel Wallace). See all my posts on this fracas here).

The problem with dinosaur names is that the common name and the scientific name are often similar, like Stegosaurus, a genus containing three recognized extinct species of dinosaurs. That one isn’t named after a person (the Latin name, based on its dorsal plates, means “roof lizard”), so it’s not problematic. But if it were, I suppose the woke could cancel the common name and call it something other than Stegosaurus.

In fact, dinosaur names can be problematic for reasons other than the person after whom they’re named (eponyms).  And, sure enough, the Perpetually Offended are trawling through dinosaur names to find the bad ones. Nature carries the article, even though this effort hasn’t been published in the scientific literature.  Below (indented) are some excerpts of this risible endeavor. Note the common error, due to ignorance, that I’ve put in bold. Of course you know that it’s “free rein”, referring to letting go of a horse’s reins. It has nothing to do with kings and the like.

It’s been 200 years since scientists named the first dinosaur: Megalosaurus. In the centuries since, hundreds of other dinosaur species have been discovered and catalogued — their names inspired by everything from their physical characteristics to the scientists who first described them. Now, some researchers are calling for the introduction of a more robust system, which they say would ensure species names are more inclusive and representative of where and how fossils are discovered.

Unlike in other scientific disciplines — such as chemistry, in which strict rules govern a molecule’s name — zoologists have a relatively free reign over the naming of new species. Usually, the scientist or group that first publishes work about an organism gets to pick its name, with few restrictions. There is a set of guidelines for species naming overseen by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). These include the requirements that the name is unique, that it is announced in a publication and that, for dinosaurs, it is linked to a single specimen.

Screenshot proof before the journal wises up:

But I digress, simply because this kind of stuff irks me.  Examples of “problematic names” are few, and in fact they don’t give a single one. The Pecksniffs simply decry the lack of dinosaurs named after indigenous people or the places where the bones were found. Further, if there were gendered names, most were male—as one expects when the field was dominated almost exclusively, as was the case a while back, by men.

To explore how dinosaur naming has changed over the past 200 years, Emma Dunne, a palaeobiologist at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen–Nuremberg, Germany, and her colleagues analysed the names of all of the dinosaur fossils from the Mesozoic Era (251.9 million to 66 million years ago) that have been described, around 1,500 in total.

The authors wanted to know how much effort it would take to address what they saw as problematic names, which they describe as those “emanating racism, sexism, named under (neo)colonial contexts or after controversial figures”. They found several such names, equating to less than 3% of the dinosaurs they looked at.

Some of the names the team identified derive from the colonial names for lands where species have been discovered. Indigenous-language names of places or researchers are often not used or are mistranslated, the authors say.

For example, many of the dinosaurs discovered during a series of expeditions between 1908 and 1920 by German explorers in Tendaguru in Tanzania, which was then part of German East Africa, were named after German people rather than local expedition members, and the samples remain in Germany.

Now the ICZN says it’s not changing any of these names, though, disturbingly, its president says it could be open to “introducing different naming systems.”  But the article implies that this isn’t impending. And there aren’t that many dinosaurs that haven’t been found.

The main issue, of course, is whether changing 45 dinosaur names (3% of 1500) will make a substantial—or even a detectable—difference in the inclusivity of paleontology. Will people of color and women, previously repelled by the bigotry and patriarchy of dinosaur names, now come pouring into paleontology after 45 common names are changed?  If you believe that, I have some land in Florida to sell you. Regardless, the Pecksniffs think they’re doing a lot of good:

“The problem in terms of numbers is really insignificant. But it is significant in terms of importance,” says Evangelos Vlachos, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Chubut, Argentina, who also worked on the study. He wants future naming systems to be more rigorous. “We don’t say that tomorrow we need to change everything. But we need to critically revise what we have done, see what we have done well and what we have not done well, and try to correct it in the future.”

Besides the redundancy of “it is significant in terms of importance,” the fact is that changing 45 dinosaur names won’t accomplish anything except enable the re-namers to feel good about themselves. And this is the problem of all the biological renaming initiatives. They apply only to common names, which aren’t the same from country to country, and it’s ludicrous to expect that changing some of the “problematic” ones will actually make a field of science more inclusive.

This kind of effort would be much better spent tutoring or giving lectures to underprivileged kids. But that’s too much work.

h/t: Alex

An online debate about naming species after people

October 12, 2023 • 9:00 am

Some time ago I wrote about two papers in science journals urging taxonomists to stop using people’s names when naming new species (“eponyms”). One paper at issue was in Nature Ecology & Evolution (click below to read):

The Guedes et al. paper included stuff like this:

From a contemporary perspective this is potentially problematic, as many of those honoured are strongly associated with the social ills and negative legacy of imperialism, racism and slavery. Moreover, 19th-century and early 20th-century taxonomy was largely dominated by white men who, by and large, honoured other men (funders, colleagues, collectors and so on) of their own nationality, ethnicity, race and social status. For example, a recent study has documented that over 60% of the eponyms given to the flora of New Caledonia have honoured French citizens and that 94% of the eponyms were named after a man.

I believe that they were arguing about scientific species names: Latin binomials like Setophaga auduboni, whose common name is Audubon’s warbler (Audubon, of course, has been canceled), but the argument could also apply to common names (“Audubon’s warbler”).  It’s an ideological argument.

Although I strongly oppose changing scientific names already given (it’s not allowed for animals), and am not so keen on changing already-used common names, either, you can make a good argument that even new common names are okay if they’re named after who we see as decent human beings. Several reasons to keep eponyms for both common and scientific names were made in a rebuttal paper whose first author, Lou Jost, is a reader here (he’s a biologist who works for the EcoMinga foundation in Ecuador).

Here’s the abstract of Jost et al.:

Guedes et al. argue that eponymous scientific names, despite their long tradition in biology, have no place in the modern world. They want to erase eponyms assigned to species in the past and want scientists to stop naming new species after people. Both of these proposals would hurt science, and disproportionately hurt science in the Global South — the region that is supposed to be the primary beneficiary of their proposal.

Well, today at noon Eastern US time and 11 a.m. Chicago time (that’s also Quito time), the authors are going to duke out this issue in a podcast sponsored by the Society of Conservation Biology. The pugilists will be Patricia Guedes in one corner and Lou and one of his coauthors in the other. (There may be other participants whom I don’t yet know.)

If you’re interested in listening to this podcast, you can do so for free simply by going to the site below and registering. Once you give your name and email, they’ll email you a link to the Zoom session. Click the screenshot to start the short process:

 

I’m rooting for Lou & Company, and not because his foundation is buying up rainforest that will help save many species, including a frog named Atelopus coynei!

Once again: should we rename animal species?

May 29, 2023 • 12:15 pm

I’ve written several times about the current drive to rename plant and animal species, usually on the grounds that their common or scientific names reflect somebody in the past who did something bad, like owning slaves. (Most of this drive has involved bird names.) In general I’m not a huge fan of changing common names, but I don’t care nearly as much about changing common names as I do about changing scientific names, also known as Latin binomials. For example, “Audubon’s oriole” is the common name of a bird species, but its scientific name is Icterus graduacauda. So if you want to change the common name because (as one scientist notes), Audubon was “a bit of a monster”, I don’t much care. But you can’t change the scientific name (which doesn’t contain Audubon’s name), because the official body that assigns scientific names won’t let you.

This becomes problematic in a case like Audubon’s warbler, whose scientific name is Setophaga auduboni, in which both the common and scientific names are eponyms.  You can change the common name, but you wouldn’t be allowed to change the scientific name, so you couldn’t completely expunge Audubon. (The common name has in fact already been changed, with the warbler now called the “yellow-rumped warbler.”) In many cases a person’s name will appear in both common and scientific names, but you can’t change the latter.

Ed Yong’s latest piece in The Atlantic describes the political, moral, and ideological fights brewing around changing animal (and plant) names. It’s a good descriptor of the kerfuffle about naming, but fails on several counts.

To read it, click on the screenshot below, or if it’s paywalled I found the piece it archived here.

This is a good overview of the fracas. But there are two problems with it, the first more worrisome:

1.) Yong seriously downplays the fact that every animal has at least two names, as I indicated above. The common name can vary from place to place, but the scientific name is constant throughout the world, as it’s used by scientists to identify animals.  Yong does mention the two-names issue in one place, only in passing:

Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things.

But there’s a huge difference between changing common names and changing scientific ones.  Doing the former, like changing the name “Audubon’s warbler”, in which the scientific name isn’t eponymous, doesn’t affect much except the labels that bird aficionados give to the species. But changing the scientific name of a species is a big deal, because those are the names used throughout the entire scientific literature to identify species and to link biological information about that species, like Panthera leo as the scientific name of the lion. If you change the scientific name, it affects the entire scientific literature around that species, potentially causing mass confusion from Linnaeus’s time until today.

This is why the body concerned with the scientific names of animals, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), has refused to change the scientific names of any animal except in a few special cases that involve biology and taxonomy—but not ideology or politics (see below). (As far as I know, the equivalent botanical body hasn’t weighed in yet.)  So if you want to change “bad” animal names, as Yong appears to favor, you have to make it clear whether you want both common and scientific names changed, or just the common ones. Yong appears to favor changing both names for eponymous animals like Audubon’s warbler, but also seems to think that’s just as easy as changing common names. It is not, and that’s why the ICZN won’t do it.

2.) Yong doesn’t present both sides of the controversy, especially when he floats the newest idea:  that the names of all eponymous animals should be changed.  I wouldn’t really agree with that, but as one of Yong’s interviewers says, “only birders over 40” oppose renaming every animal named after a person.  In general, Yong seems to favor the idea that not only birds named after bad people like Audubon and John Bachman should be renamed, but that all animals bearing people’s names should be changed.  Of all the many people he quotes who favor name-changing, only one, Thomas Pape (head of the ICZN), says that it’s not his “mandate” to change scientific names. But even Pape says, well, scientists do it all the time, so his position is really a bit waffle-y.

The reason I think Yong takes sides in this controversy is that he quotes only those who favor changing names, including scientific ones, even quoting someone as saying that only old people—geezers like me over 40—are conservative about changing names.  If you present only one side of a controversy—and yes, it is a controversy, even among the young—it can be assumed you are on that side.

Although there are several reasons to oppose the willy-nilly changing of common names, Yong gives none. Thus the article is one-sided, and even favors what nearly all biologists oppose: the changing of scientific names on ideological, political, or moral grounds. Yet from my private conversations with birders, I know that there are many who oppose this drive to change names. You won’t hear from them, because the drive is designed to be “inclusive”, and if you oppose it you could be called a racist.

Let me give the list of reasons why people are favoring renaming animals (I’m not going to distinguish between common and scientific names because Yong doesn’t), and then I’ll give a few reasons why we should be wary about changing even common names. (Again, I’m dead set against changing scientific names.) Quotes from Yong’s article are indented.

a.) Immorality: bad people like Audubon, who did bad things, should not have animals named after them. If they did some good stuff, like Darwin (even though Yong mentions his racism), this doesn’t necessarily hold. Any species with the name darwinii is presumably okay. Here’s the argument (“eponyms” are organisms named after people):

Many other eponyms present similar cases for change, although none have been altered yet. John Kirk Townsend, whose name still graces two birds and almost a dozen mammals, dug up the graves of Native Americans and sent their skulls to the physician Samuel George Morton, who wanted to prove that Caucasians had bigger brains than other people; those remains are still undergoing a lengthy process toward burial or repatriation. John Bachman was a practitioner and defender of slavery, reasoning that Black people, whom he compared to domesticated animals, were so intellectually inferior to Caucasians as to be “incapable of self-government”; Bachman’s sparrow was named by his friend, John James Audubon. And Audubon, the most renowned—and, more recently, notorious—figure in American ornithology and the namesake of an oriole, a warbler, and a shearwater, also robbed Native American graves for Morton’s skull studies, while casually buying and selling slaves. “People have been singing his praises for 150 years, but in the last 15 years, he has turned out to be quite a monster,” says Matthew Halley, an ornithologist and historian, who has also found evidence that Audubon committed scientific fraud by fabricating a fake species of eagle that helped launch his career. In light of Audubon’s actions, several local chapters of the National Audubon Society have renamed themselves, as has the society’s union. In March, though, the national society’s board of directors voted to keep the name, on the grounds that it would allow the organization to “direct key resources and focus towards enacting the organization’s mission.”

Would you call the Audubon society racist because it’s keeping his name?

At any rate, if you’re going to change an animal name because the person involved was “problematic,” I’d use Coyne’s Criteria for Renaming (also good for deciding when to take down statues, though I favor contextualizing them rather than removing them):

  1. Is the name given because of something good the person did?
  2. Was the person’s life a net good for the world’s well being?

If the answer to both of these is “yes,” you should keep the name. And if you’re giving a scientific name to a new species, the answers should both be “yes” as well.

b.) Most names were given by Europeans, who were both colonialists and also carried invasive species with them. 

For some scientists, the eponym problem is about more than the egregious misdeeds of a few individuals. As Europeans spread to other continents, they brought not only invasive species that displaced native ones but also invasive nomenclature that ousted long-standing native terms for plants and animals. In Africa, the scientific names of a quarter of local birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are eponyms, mostly from Europe. On the biodiverse Pacific island of New Caledonia, more than 60 percent of plant eponyms honor French citizens. Countless species around the world have been named after European scientists whose travels were made possible by imperial ventures aimed at expanding territories or extracting natural resources. “We have romantic ideas of these explorers going around the world, seeing beautiful things, and naming them, and we forgot how they got there to begin with,” Natalia Piland, an ecologist at Florida International University, told me.

Such naming patterns still continue. Piland and her colleagues found that since 1950, 183 newly identified birds have been given eponyms, and although 96 percent of these species live in the global South, 68 percent of their names honor people from the global North. In 2018, the Rainforest Trust, an American conservation nonprofit, auctioned off the rights to name 12 newly discovered South American species, leading to a frog named after Greta Thunberg and a caecilian named after Donald Trump. (A similar auction in 2005 landed a Bolivian monkey with the name of the internet casino GoldenPalace.com.) The beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has more than 50 species named after him, most of which live in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. That is not to begrudge Attenborough, Thunberg, or Trump; having a species named after you is widely considered a great honor, but globally, such honorees are still disproportionately people of European descent—a perpetuation of colonialism through taxonomy.

This of course doesn’t take into account that European name-giving may hold for scientific names but not for common ones, which often differ from culture to culture. As Ernst Mayr discovered when he tried to correlate bird names in New Guinea with scientific names, New Guinea birds are given names in New Guinea languages.

c.) Animal names ignore indigenous people who may live in the same area. 

Some scientists have proposed reinstating Indigenous names for animals wherever possible. But many species live across the territories of different Indigenous groups, or migrate across national or continental divides, making it hard to know whose names to prioritize. And if native names are applied without native consultation, the result can smack of cultural appropriation. Emma Carroll from the University of Auckland took on both challenges in naming a recently identified species of beaked whale. Carroll spent a year consulting Indigenous groups in countries where the new whale’s specimens had been found. In South Africa, the Khoisan Council suggested using the word //eu//’eu, which means “big fish” and is now immortalized in the scientific name Mesoplodon eueu. For the common name, Carroll asked a Māori cultural expert in New Zealand to draw up a shortlist, which she then ran past a local council. She eventually named the creature “Ramari’s beaked whale” after Ramari Stewart—a Māori whale expert whose work was pivotal in identifying the new species, and who has been “working to bridge Western science and mātauranga [Maori knowledge] for decades,” Carroll told me. Fittingly, ramari also means “a rare event” in the Māori language, and beaked whales are famously elusive.

But this raises the issue, as Yong says, of the re-namers engaging in cultural appropriation! And if you rename an animal after a local indigenous person, such as “Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin” (named after a Native American), that raises another problem: that of “ownership, as if an individual could lay claim to an entire species—a fundamentally colonial way of thinking, no matter whether the honoree is an Indigenous woman or a European man.”  Yes, the woke can sniff out problems within problems within problems.

Yong then floats what I think is his own favored solution:

By that logic, the issue with eponyms isn’t that some of them honor people who did vile things. It’s that animals shouldn’t be named after people at all.  That is:

d.) Naming animals after people “dishonors the organism”.  I’m not kidding.

Others argue that, more importantly, the act of honoring a person through an organism’s name dishonors the organism itself. It treats animals and plants as inanimate objects like buildings or streets, constructed and owned by humans, instead of beings with their own lives and histories. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think of an individual human becoming the signifier of an entire species,” Piland said. A more descriptive name, meanwhile, is a chance to tell a creature’s story. Joseph Pitawanakwat, an Anishinaabe educator, notes that many of his people’s bird names are layered with meaning—onomatopoeias that mimic calls, and descriptions of habitat and behavior, all embedded in a single word that could have been coined only through a deep understanding of the animals. English names could be similarly descriptive: Thick-billed longspur tells you something about the bird that might help you recognize it in a way that McCown’s longspur does not.

Now I agree that if you’re going to change a common name, perhaps you should do something that describes the animal, though sometimes that’s hard. But changing names because it “dishonors the organism” is a claim that carries little weight with me. It’s a descriptor, and the organism doesn’t care what it’s called. Nor does this argument change anything substantive: renaming Audubon’s warbler will not lead to more intensive appreciation of the bird, more effort to conserve of the bird, nor draw more diverse people into birding. Renaming pretends to be “inclusive”, but it doesn’t clearly foster inclusion. This is one of the issues with the whole endeavor: it’s basically performative virtue signaling, and changing names, an easy job, is a way to signal your virtue without having to do very much. That’s why people are keener on changing animal names than doing the hard work of conserving the organism.

One more issue before I sum up. Pape, the ICZN head, is not allowed to change scientific names because of the reasons I gave, but his quote is still ambiguous:

But, though [Pape] argues that set names are important for allowing scientists to unambiguously communicate about the organisms they study, Pape also admits that “it’s strange that we keep talking about stability when we keep changing names.” Scientific names change frequently, when a species is reclassified or split into several new ones. They can also change because scientists uncover an alternative name that was assigned first and then forgotten, or because they violate Latin grammar. There are also routes for changing scientific names through societal force of will. Pape cites the case of Raymond Hoser, an Australian amateur herpetologist who has assigned hundreds of new names to questionably defined species and genera of reptiles—often on shaky scientific grounds, usually in his own self-published journal, and in many cases honoring his family members and pets. Other taxonomists are simply refusing to use his names; if that continues, “it might be possible for the ICZN to rule that those names should not be used,” Pape told me.

According to the ICZN, though, changes  in scientific names can occur only under those specific circumstances, which are not that common. Importantly, many of the names that get changed under these circumstances keep the eponym, which is usually the species name and not the genus name. If Audubon’s warbler were found, for example, to comprise several species, one of them would still be named after Audubon. Reclassification usually involves changing the genus name if it’s changed at all, not the species name. And if a species is found to have been described earlier under a different name, then the rules mandate that the older one be the valid name, regardless of whether it is named after a bad person.

As for cases like Hoser, these are very rare, and aren’t worth discussing here: zoologists and ultimately the ICZN decide if they’re kosher.  But note that the rules do not mandate that scientific names be changed for any of the four reasons given above. They are changed only to clear up taxonomic errors, misclassifications, or in light of further biological knowledge..

To sum up, Yong lays out the case for changing common names (without giving opponents a say, because we’re too old!), but fails to seriously tackle the huge issue of changing scientific names. In fact, under current rules of nomenclature, they cannot be changed for political or ideological reasons

Here are a few arguments for retaining common names, though, as I said, I’m not all that opposed to changing them, except that it’s laborious and also creates certain confusion in the literature.

a.) It is largely performative, doing little except to flaunt the virtue of the renamers. It’s an easy way to pretend to effect social change.

b.) It doesn’t effect much social change. This drive is largely done by privileged people who think they are doing something good for the world, but really, do you think the world would be a better place if every species named after a person (or only a “bad” person) were changed? Would bigotry be palpably eroded?

c.) Changing common names does cause confusion in communication, though not as much as changing the scientific name would.

d.) Who gets to decide which names are good and which are bad?  Is “auduboni” a bad species name but “washingtonii” not? After all, both men kept slaves!  At any rate, there’s no “official” list of common names, though the American Ornithological Society keeps a list of common names. And renamings are still ignored.  I know people, for example, who still use the term “gypsy moth” out of continuity in the literature, even though, because it was considered bigoted, the creature been renamed the “spongy moth.”

In the end, the renaming of birds and other animals is one of the more striking cases of performative wokeness that I know of. As I said repeatedly, I don’t much care if common names are changed, but you can’t monkey around with the name of the beetle Anophthalmus hitleri (yes, named after Adolf), for it’s a scientific name.  And really, is renaming a beetle now bearing Hitler’s name going to get rid of neo-Nazism or racism? Will it suddenly bring a flood of Jews into entomology—Jews who avoided the field because it contained a beetle named after Hitler? I doubt it.

Yong is an excellent science writer—one of my favorites—but I can’t let it go by when he slips up—as I think he did here. He should have given the article more balance and talked to the opponents of renaming (who might have chosen anonymity!). And, most important, he fails to recognize the reason why the ICZN will not bow to ideological pressure to change animal names. 

h/t: Susan, Phil

Famous biologist Ernst Mayr about to be heaved into the dumpster by the Society of Systematic Biologists

January 6, 2022 • 9:15 am

This really peeved me when it came to my attention, for the man up for cancellation—it’s not fully settled yet—was someone I knew, a a scientific hero of mine, and one of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. I am speaking of Ernst Mayr. Further, there are NO grounds for effacing his name from an award—as proposed by the once-venerable Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB)—save that he was a white man. That’s it. He was not a racist—in fact, he fought for equality for all and repudiated racism (see below). Nor did he, as far as I’m aware, ever say anything “problematic”.  His only sin was his pallid skin.

For this (there are dark hints that he said “problematic” things, but these aren’t identified in the SSB’s statement), the Society—partly founded by Mayr—is proposing to eliminate Mayr’s name from the Ernst Mayr Award, given annually to the best student paper presented at the SSB’s annual meeting (by the way, Mayr also endowed that award and left a sum in his will to keep funding it.) This makes it quadruply shameful that the SSB is voting whether to cancel him. The good news is that the members’ vote hasn’t yet been taken, and it requires two-thirds of the membership to take his name off the award. I’m hoping the SSB members are not such sheeple that they will vote for this misbegotten proposal.

Forgive me if I seem excessively steamed—after all, nothing permanent has yet been done—but Mayr was a good man, a superb biologist, and the man whose writings, more than anything else, helped inspire me to go into evolutionary biology and, in particular, the study of speciation. His early books, including Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) and its large update, Animal Species and Evolution (1963) are classics of the genre, and helped bring to the attention of biologists that the origin of species was not only a problem that Darwin really didn’t solve, but also proposed a way to solve it (the “Biological Species Concept” combined with geographic isolation of populations, or “allopatry”).  His work, combined with two charismatic undergraduate teachers at William & Mary (Jack Brooks and Bruce Grant) are what got me started working on speciation and its genetics, summarized in my 2009 book with Allen Orr, Speciation. I knew Mayr at Harvard and spoke with him occasionally, always finding him strongly opinionated (and sometimes wrong) but also polite and courtly. But he was wrong in matters of biology, not morality or ethics.

When Mayr turned 90, the Society for the Study of Evolution, which he also founded, put out a special issue devoted to him, and I was honored to write the chapter assessing his contributions to speciation (free access here  or here). And when he died at 100, I wrote his obituary for Science, which you can see here. If you want a short take on how important he was, I’d suggest reading the Science obituary.  You can read about his contributions to systematics here; I’m not as familiar with them as with his contributions to evolutionary biology, for I’ve never done systematics. Yet, as I said, he helped found the very society that proposes to erase him and the award that he endowed, also endangered.

The SSB announcement here, which I’ve reproduced below, notes that the Council (governing body) of the SSB voted to put to their members a proposal to eliminate the name of the award for the best student paper at the annual meeting. The proposal, as you’ll see, is to change its name from “The Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology” to “The Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology.” That’s a nameless generic award, and I wonder if the proposers feel any shame at removing from the award the name of the man who funded it, and is still funding it. I consider that unethical as well as dumb.

So, here’s the announcement, and I’ve put my own comments and questions in bold brackets within the text.

SSB Council Review of the Mayr Award and Award Names

In the summer of 2020, the SSB Council began a discussion about potentially renaming the Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology at the request of society members [How many society members asked? A handful? A lot? Does it take more than one?]. Since then, the SSB leadership have been working in conjunction with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee to learn more about the origin of named awards and their representation of the diverse membership within the society. Renaming the award is one step toward greater inclusivity within the society, as named awards often lead to feelings of exclusion among those who are members of underrepresented groups whose scientific contributions continue to remain unrecognized. [ This keeps being asserted, but how true is it? Do minority students or women truly feel hurt and excluded at getting an “Ernst Mayr” award, or even by the existence of that award? That sounds unbelievable. If this is the case, though, then they should rename the Nobel Prizes, for Alfred Nobel endowed these most famous science awards in his will, and he was an Old White Man. Further, one must balance the degree of “hurt feelings”, if any, against perpetuating the memory of the name of Mayr and of his legacy. Students are already beginning to forget who he was, even as they labor in fields he started.] At a council meeting following Virtual Evolution 2021, the Council voted to propose to all members an award name change, in conjunction with other actions intended to better recognize SSB’s history and legacy. [I consider that last statement bogus, as how better to recognize the SSB’s legacy than to give an award in its founder’s name?]

The SSB Council proposes to rename the Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology to the Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology. Our scientific community is more diverse than the cohort of early scientists with recognized contributions to systematics and science generally [True: this is part of the history of the field, indeed of society, which has become more inclusive.] Many current members do not see themselves reflected in awards that bear the names of these early scientists and can feel excluded as potential recipients as a result. In a field whose composition still does not reflect global human diversity, having an award named after a particular individual reinforces that members with other identities are outsiders. [Here we see the key to why this is being proposed: members don’t “see themselves reflected in the award”, and what they mean is  “in sex and race”. Women, as they imply, are too fragile to bear having an award named after a man, and minorities too fragile to accept an award named after a white person. They won’t say this explicitly, but it’s clear that this is what the proposal means. Are they saying that NO award should be named after any person? For, after all, if an award is named after anyone, it will limit severely the number of people who can “identify” with that person.] By proposing this name change, we hope to address this specific barrier [Is it a barrier? What is the evidence?] to making our society more inclusive and welcoming. [This, to me, is the most ludicrous part of the proposal. It is simply performative wokeness. Does the SSB council think that the award has actually hindered people from going into systematic biology? If so, then they have a low opinion of the ambition of future systematic biologists! Nobody thinks that blacks, women, Hispanics, and so on will come pouring into the SSB once the award is renamed. The proposal is performative wokeness alone, for it will accomplish nothing to promote racial or sexual equality. Rather, it is simply a big virtue signal meant to say, “Look how much we care about the oppressed!”] We, the SSB council, are made up of a diverse group of people who don’t all view Mayr in the same light. [Okay, what is the disagreement, then? I don’t think any two biologists view Mayr in the same light! If there’s controversy about his statements or activities, tell us what it is!] This proposal is not intended to cast judgement on the legacy of Ernst Mayr, who was a prolific and profound scholar of evolutionary biology and a dedicated champion of students, nor are we intending to defend the contents of his writings which some find problematic.[WHICH writings? How are they problematic? Note that they don’t list any, and I believe that whatever is considered “problematic” is at best trivial. Or perhaps it was Mayr’s controversial–and probably erroneous–views on founder-effect speciation?] We are grateful for Mayr’s generous gifts to our society, which created the endowment that allows us to support student research today. [Not grateful enough to keep his name on the prize! And of course this is a statement about the legacy of Ernst Mayr, which is that his mere name makes minority systematic biologists uncomfortable.]

The Council sees preservation of the society’s history and increasing diversity, equity and inclusion as synergistic endeavors toward the improvement of our community. The proposed change continues our history of becoming more inclusive over time: for example, in the 1990s we changed from the Society for Systematic Zoology to the Society of Systematic Biologists (and changed the journal name as well) to welcome members of our community who do not study animals. [Inclusivity of fields is not nearly as invidious as removing someone like Mayr’s name on the grounds of “inclusivity”. The only people who would be convinced by this analogy are those who aren’t thinking very clearly and are blinded by ideology.] Thus, SSB President Laura Kubatko has acted on the recommendation of the DEI Committee to form a new committee, the SSB Legacy Committee, that will be tasked with creating accessible content about our society’s history (e.g., as a section on our website). The formation of this committee is intended as a way to acknowledge the contributions of past members to the existence of the society and to the field broadly. In this way, the legacy of the society may be understood by our membership more comprehensively than is possible through named awards, and we have the opportunity to celebrate the many people of various backgrounds who have made systematic biology what it is today. [Does this mean that no award should bear a name, for that’s the logical conclusion of the argument they make above, or will they rename awards after members of minority groups?]

Because the award is named in our Constitution, the name can only be changed by a formal amendment to the Constitution. Following the procedure outlined in our Constitution, the SSB Council thus voted in August 2021 to propose an Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to the SSB Membership for a vote. The Constitution specifies that the proposed Amendment will pass if at least 2/3 of the members vote in favor. This issue will be presented to the membership on the Spring 2022 ballot. The proposed amendment is shown below.

Proposed amendment
Original text:
1) The Ernst Mayr Award in Systematic Biology given for the outstanding paper presented at the Annual Meeting by a student member of the Society or a member who has received the Ph.D. degree within the last 15 months;
New text:
1) The Outstanding Student Presentation Award in Systematic Biology given for the outstanding paper presented at the Annual Meeting by a student member of the Society or a member who has received the Ph.D. degree within the last 15 months.

So, first, if you’re a member of the SSB, you must vote in the Spring 2022 election. If you’re not, lobby your systematist friends to vote.

I’m not even going to be neutral enough to tell you to “vote your conscience”. For unless you want to change science from a way to understand the universe to a misguided and ineffectual way to achieve Social Justice, there is only one rational way to vote: against the defenestration of Mayr. I know that you may be thinking, “Surely more than a third of members will oppose the name change,” but I wouldn’t be so sure about that. After all, more than half the members of the SSB Council voted for this ludicrous proposal.

I end by trying to suss out what statements of Mayr are considered “problematic”. I’ve read a LOT of what he wrote, though I haven’t read his bird work, and I know of nothing that is “problematic.” In cases like this one, “problematic” is a euphemism for “racist”, but Mayr was not a racist, but an egalitarian!

Here’s one example. In 1951 UNESCO issued a statement “The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry,” which analyzes the biology of race and declared no substantive differences among races that would support racism. The UNESCO document was apparently disseminated to biologists and their reactions are given in the report itself. Here’s the take Ronald Fisher, who already has been cancelled, making pretty racist criticisms of the Report:

. . .Darlington, Fisher, Genna and .Coon are frankly opposed to the Statement.

Sir Ronald Fisher has one fundamental objection to the Statement, which, as he himself says, destroys the very spirit of the whole document. He believes that human groups differ profoundly “in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development” and concludes from this that the “practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature, and that this problem is being obscured by entirely well intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exist”.

. . . Fisher’s attitude towards the facts stated in this paragraph is the same as Muller’s and Sturtevant’s, but this is how he puts his objections: “As you ask for remarks and suggestions, there is one that occurs to me, unfortunately of a somewhat fundamental nature, namely that the Statement as it stands appears to draw a distinction between the body and mind of men, which must, I think, prove untenable. It appears to me unmistakable that gene differences which influence the growth or physiological development of an organism will ordinarily pari passu influence the congenital inclinations and capacities of the mind. In fact, I should say that, to vary conclusion (2) on page 5, ‘Available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,’ seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes.”

In contrast, Mayr approved of the UNESCO report and its conclusions. This is a direct quote from page 18:

Mayr also hopes that “the authoritative Statement prepared by Unesco will help to eliminate the pseudo-scientific race conceptions which have been used as excuses for many injustices and even shocking crimes”. “I applaud and wholeheartedly endorse [it],” he writes, adding: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly that all so-called races are variable populations, and that there is often more difference between extreme individuals of one race than between certain individuals of different races. All human races are mixtures of populations and the term “pure race” is an absurdity. The second important point which needs stressing is that genetics plays a very minor part in the cultural characteristics of different peoples. . . . The third point is that equality of opportunity and equality in law do not depend on physical, intellectual and genetic identity. There are striking differences in physical, intellectual and other genetically founded qualities among individuals of even the most homogeneous human population, even among brothers and sisters. No acknowledged ethical principle exists which would permit denial of equal opportunity for reason of such differences to any member of the human species.”

You can’t get more egalitarian and antiracist than that! And this was Mayr’s view on race.  Is this PROBLEMATIC???  Is the SSB willing to die on the mountain of this statement? Why would it not be an honor to get an award named after a man of sound moral views and superb scientific accomplishment?

STEM disciplines are falling all over each other in this genre of performative wokeness. I hope the SSB comes to its senses and does the right thing.

Here’s a rare photo of Mayr in middle age; he’s usually shown as a young man during his New Guinea expedition or as an old man (remember, he lived 100 years).

A large new salamander from the United States

December 18, 2018 • 11:20 am

by Greg Mayer

Sean Graham, Richard Kline, David Steen, and Crystal Kelehear have just published a description of a new species of salamander from the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida (reference at bottom). It’s quite a handsome beast, with bold reticulations and an almost decorative frill of external gills.

(From paper): A) Siren reticulata paratype specimen captured in Okaloosa County, Florida. (B) Location of Siren reticulata captured in 2009 by D. Steen and M. Baragona. (C) The type locality of Siren reticulata, Walton County, Florida.

 

Photo by Pierson Hill, from the New York Times; another photo by Hill is in the paper. If it’s the same animal photographed by Hill for the paper, this is not one of the paratypes.

It’s a species of siren, a type of permanently aquatic salamander that lacks hind legs and has three pairs of external gills. There are, with this new one, three species known in the genus Siren, all from the southeastern United States. The new species stands out for three reasons.

First, it’s a genuinely new discovery, not just elevating to species status a previously known subspecies or population of some other species. The new species, Siren reticulata, is at least broadly sympatric with both the Lesser Siren (Siren intermedia) and the Greater Siren (Siren lacertina), and the authors’ genetic analysis show it to be markedly distinct from both of these species. It thus seems to be a “good” biological species. Much of the “increase” in biodiversity these days, especially in biologically well-known regions such as North America, comes from changes in taxonomic rank, not actually finding a previously unknown form.

Second, it’s awfully large for a previously unknown species: around 60 cm total length, and that’s based on a sample of just 7 individuals used in the description. Again, this stands out because the beast is from North America, where there are lots of new species of small animals to be described, but not so many largish ones. It’s bigger than the Lesser Siren, but not as big as the Greater Siren (which gets up to a record size of about 1 m in total length). Of course, it’s likely that the new siren grows larger than can be judged from just 7 specimens.

Third, this is a sort of success story for cryptozoology. The “leopard eel” was at first only hinted at, but eventually was shown to exist. The existence of it was first intimated by Robert Mount, who, in his The Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama (1975), had this to say about a siren he included in his discussion of the Greater Siren:

A siren tentatively assigned to S. lacertina collected in the Fish River in Baldwin County does not conform [to the description above]. This specimen, which has 39 costal grooves and is 520 mm long, has a silvery gray ground color. The back, sides, and tail are profusely marked with conspicuous dark gray spots and vermiculations. The venter is unmarked. Additional specimens from that locality, as well as some localities to the east, will be needed to determine whether the specimen on hand is correctly assigned to species.

A few other specimens over the years apparently sparked some interest, but it was not till Steen caught one in 2009 in Florida that serious work began, and now Graham, Steen, and colleagues have been able to confirm that there is a new species, and Mount’s suspicious specimen belongs to it—so good on ya, mates, to Graham and colleagues for solving a decades-old mystery! The case fits a classic cryptozoological scenario: a new animal is reported on insufficient evidence, stories and reports continue to come in, and then, finally, proof is brought to light—in this case, 7 salamanders, along with their attendant morphological and genetic data. I’m not sure if cryptozoologists will embrace this discovery, as they prefer their ‘cryptids’ (unknown animals) to be big, but it is big for a salamander, and a big one for the U.S.

As a common name, the authors propose “Reticulated Siren”, dismissing the name “Leopard Eel”, by which it was apparently known informally (perhaps when it was still just a cryptid). (Large aquatic salamanders with reduced legs are often called “eels” in the southern U.S.) If “Leopard Eel” is a genuine vernacular name, then I would suggest that that name be used. Common names should be just that: part of the language used by people who actually know the species. Standard English names (which many birders and some herpers have a passion for) are fine, but they should not be mistaken for common or vernacular names. Perhaps “Leopard Siren” would be an appropriate middle ground to serve as both type of name.

___________

Graham S.P., R. Kline, D. A. Steen, and C. Kelehear. 2018. Description of an extant salamander from the Gulf Coastal Plain of North America: the Reticulated Siren, Siren reticulata. PLOS ONE 13(12): e0207460.

Mount, R.H. 1975. The Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama. Auburn University Agricultural Experiment Station, Auburn, Alabama.