Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Antsat the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
What's in a Name?
Vampire Names | Cicadas | Geese and Barnacles | Duplicate Species Names | Beetles | Chambered Nautilus | Monarch Butterfly
Vampire NamesThe vampires of literature are caped, blood-sucking creatures that rise from the grave at night to terrorize innocents. These legendary figures have also made their mark on science.
The small arachnid Draculoides bramstokeri uses large fang-like pedipalps, or pincers, to grasp invertebrate prey and crunch it into pieces before sucking out the juices. Named for this method of dispatching victims and for the author of Dracula, this creature dwells in dark caves in Australia. Often mistaken for a spider, D. bramstokeri is a schizomid: a small, soil-dwelling invertebrate that walks on six legs and uses two modified front legs as feelers.
In the dark ocean depths lives another vampire namesake. Vampyroteuthis infernalis, or "vampire squid from Hell," is named for its jet-black skin (it may look purple or red depending on the light); the cape-like appearance of the webbing between its arms; and its eyes, the largest of any animal in the world relative to its size, which appear red or blue in certain light conditions. But this creature is neither vampire nor squid. It has eight tentacled arms like squids and octopuses, but merits its own order, Vampyromorphida, because of its extra pair of sensory appendages. V. infernalis contains no ink. Instead, its arms are covered with sharp spikes for defense. But contrary to its image, V. infernalis is not a terror of the deep. With the lowest metabolic rate measured in any cephalopod, it often hangs motionless in the water, using tiny lights on its body and unpredictable flips and turns to hide from predators.
—Emily Huhn
From the September/October 2004 issue of ZooGoer
Cicadas
By now the Brood X cicadas are gone, but their name hints at the centuries of mystery and awe surrounding cicadas.
The group of cicadas that emerges en masse every 13 to 17 years was originally placed in the genus that Linneaus named Cicada, which means "tree cricket" in Latin. In 1925, American entomologist W.T. Davis renamed this group's genus Magicicada; Magi- probably comes from the Greek word for "magician" or "magical." Certainly it seems magical, if not miraculous, that these creatures emerge from the ground as flightless nymphs and metamorphose into winged beings. Ancient Greeks and Chinese likened this transformation to a resurrection and hailed cicadas as symbols of rebirth and immortality in art, literature, and poetry. According to an article by Garland Riegel in Cultural Entomology Digest, jade carvings of cicadas were placed on the tongues of dead people in China between 202 B.C.E. and 220 C.E. "to induce resurrection by sympathetic magic." In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells the titular character that cicadas were once humans so obsessed with music that they forgot to eat or drink and wasted away, then were turned into cicadas by the Muses.
Dog-day cicadas are so named because they breed in the hottest days of summer. One genus of dog-day cicada is Tibicen, which is Latin for "flutist, piper, or fifer." While many people consider cicadas' songs obnoxious, ancient Greeks revered their chirps. A cicada brought the mythological musician Eunomos victory in a competition. When one of the strings on his cithara (an instrument similar to a lyre) broke, the cicada replaced the sound with its beautiful voice.
Modern-day scientists can be a bit more irreverent about cicada names. A.J. de Boer found two new species of Baeturia cicadas in 1986, which he named B. laureli and B. hardyi.
—Shannon Lyons
From the July/August 2004 issue of ZooGoer
Barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) are birds, and goose barnacles (genus Lepas) are crustaceans—so why are their common names so similar? Because medieval European monks believed these two species were one and the same.
The monks saw barnacle geese when they wintered in Britain, but could not figure out where they went each spring to nest. (It was the Arctic, a land unknown to Europeans in the 12th century.) Never having seen a barnacle goose egg or gosling, the monks deduced that they hatched from the white "shells" that were encrusted on logs by the sea. The shells were actually barnacles belonging to the subclass Cirripedia. Their cirri—fluffy, hair-like appendages used for catching food—were thought to be the geese's feathers, and their peduncles—stalks that adhere to stationary surfaces—were thought to be the geese's beaks, with which the birds supposedly clung to the wood until they grew large enough to fall into the sea and mature. Species in the barnacle genus Lepas were named "goose" or "gooseneck" because of this legend.
In his 1597 book The Herball; or, Generall Historie of Plantes, surgeon and botanist John Gerarde examined the Lepas anatifera barnacles and claimed he saw birds in various stages of development inside the shells. He wrote, "There are...certaine shell fishes... wherein are conteined little living creatures: which shells in time of maturitie doe open, and out of them grow those little living things; which falling into the water, doe become foules, whom we call Barnakles...." Religious traditions may have carried the legend into recent history. During fast times, the Catholic church forbade meat consumption, but monks made an exception of barnacle geese because they were of the sea and therefore fish, not fowl.
—Kit Sergeant
From the March/April 2004 issue of ZooGoer
In 1842, in Old London Town, the Strickland Committee on taxonomy and nomenclature sealed the fate of a 200-million-years-dead dinosaur, an extant beetle, and an Australian entomologist. The committee ruled, according to Stephen Jay Gould in his essay Bully for Brontosaurus , that the first name given a species in print shall forever-after be its identity in the eyes of science.
A hundred and sixty years later (or sometime last spring), Adam Slipinski, of CSIRO Entomology, discovered that a beetle native to Madagascar, Syntarsus, bore the same moniker as a small bipedal dinosaur that last saw the light of day sometime in the Jurassic period. It ' s not uncommon for scientists to discover that one species has been named twice (or even, in the extreme case of the protozoa Tetrahymena pyriforme, 11 times), but to find two species with the same made-up Latin name is comparable to being struck twice by lightning in the span of a single game of golf.
It turns out that a French entomologist named the beetle in 1869, exactly 100 years before the discovery of its dino doppelganger. This left Slipinski, who has never dug up a bone in his life, in a peculiar position: he got to name the now-anonymous theropod. He called it Megapnosaurus. It means, in the language of Caesar: "Big dead lizard."
—Christopher Mims
From the September/October 2002 issue of ZooGoer
If you were to take one representative of every species of plant and animal on Earth and arrange them in a line, every fifth organism would be a beetle. The staggering diversity of Coleoptera, the order that encompasses beetles, presents entomologists with a potentially onerous task: naming the unending flow of newly discovered species.
How do beetle specialists respond to this challenge? Playfully. Terry Erwin at the National Museum of Natural History studies tree-dwelling beetles in the genus Agra that live in the forest canopy of South America. One shiny black species is only found in the dwindling habitat of the tropical lowlands of southwestern Brazil. Due to extensive forest destruction in this area, Erwin named the species A. calamitas, borrowing the Latin root calamit, meaning misfortune or disaster.
A beautiful metallic green Peruvian species with red and black coloration was named Agra vation. A meddlesome beetle with squirting poison glands? No, Erwin says, there’s nothing aggravating about A. vation. Other beetles have been graced with names such as Agra cadabra, A. phobia, and A. eponine (after the street urchin in Les Miserables).
For more examples of serious scientists concocting
tongue-in-cheek nomenclature, visit Curiosities
of Biological Nomenclature.
—Tim Stoddard
ZooGoer 28(5) 1999. Copyright 1999 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
When the Western world saw its first chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius), it quickly became intrigued with the strange creature. People imagined that the animal had a membrane that served as a sort of underwater sail. By the time this myth was disproved, it was too late. The name, nautilus—from the Latin and Greek words for “sailor”—stuck to these living fossils.
Quite a few things have been named after the ancient mariners since then. One is the paper nautilus, a small Mediterranean octopus. In contrast with the chambered nautilus, the paper nautilus has a smaller and thinner protective shell with no air chambers, which the animal can leave behind when it wishes. To distinguish between this octopus and its shelled cousins, the paper nautilus is now properly called Argonauta.
Outside the zoological world, Jules Verne immortalized nautiluses in literary tradition when he named Captain Nemo’s vessel Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The U.S. Navy followed suit, using the same name for its first nuclear-powered submarine.
For fitness-conscious Americans, perhaps the most familiar thing named after the tough invertebrates is the Nautilus brand of exercise equipment, which reminds the user of the strength of these remarkable creatures’ shells in withstanding 2,000 feet of water pressure. Although they cannot venture down 20,000 leagues, nautiluses can still dive far deeper than most fish or humans dare go.
—Alex Hawes and Katie Venit
ZooGoer 29(6) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
Monarch Butterfly
The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is one of the most recognizable butterfly species. It was named by early North American settlers, who saw its bright orange colors and thought of the King of England, William of Orange. This connection is even more obvious in Canada, where the monarch is called a “King Billy.” But the bright orange and black wings of the monarch also serve as a warning to predators. Monarchs are highly toxic. Eating just one can make a bird sick, and that’s enough to keep it away from monarchs in the future. In fact, monarchs are so well protected that another species of butterfly, the viceroy (Limenitis archippus), which is not toxic, has evolved a similar black and orange pattern. Predators that have learned to avoid monarchs also steer clear of viceroys. This is an example of Batesian mimicry, named for the 19th century naturalist who first described the phenomenon of mimicry.
ZooGoer 30(4) 1999. Copyright 1999 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
