Published on 17 January 2025
This week, my first paper on zoological nomenclature was published. It’s not my first zoology paper – I wrote some horrendous papers on laryngeal air sacs in Homo during my second masters. But it’s the first paper I’ve published talking about the names of living things, and the first new paper I’ve had in the literature for a couple of years.
You can read it here: Corrections for grammatical agreement in Ophiodermatidae. In short - I changed the names of some brittle stars, a relative of the star fish, so that the species name agreed with the genus name, as is necessary under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN, or the Code), which outlines how scientific names should look.
So, Ophiopsammus maculata should be Ophiopsammus maculatus, for instance.
This is kind of a weird thing to do. For one, it’s odd because it’s difficult to understand the Code. The ICZN is used by everyone across the world who uses a Latin name for an animal (except if you’re talking about butterflies, because lepidopterists are intense anarchists and more power to them). If you knew that humans are called Homo sapiens, and if you understood my first paragraph, you’ve used names that are described according to the Code. But this Code is really long, really technical, and also confusing, contradictory, and obscure.
It does say in Article 31 that species names need to agree with genus names, but how to do that well takes some knowledge of Latin or Greek, which most biologists don’t have. So, people mess up sometimes. And those mess ups, according to the Code itself, should be corrected.
Most people don’t bother correcting names, or, if they do, they do so as curators or taxonomic editors working on large projects. It is very rare to find papers on grammatical agreement coming from members of the public, and it’s a bit unclear if taxonomists even have to agree with them or implement any changes made in those papers. That makes sense - the main people editing Wikipedia are the few people who really understand Wikipedia, for instance, and big changes are normally done only by people who have understood how it works for a while. That’s how it is in any community.
But that doesn’t stop other people from getting involved. So, when I saw a brittle star that I found in a tide pool had a Latin name that didn’t make sense to me, I wrote a paper describing how the name should be changed to make sense. That is what the paper I wrote does.
Since publishing it, I’ve had a discussion a taxonomist about why I bothered making these unnecessary changes to species names. I’ve written a response, which I wanted to share more widely for those who are interested in why I think this work matters.
Here it is.
The Code is a monumental work because of its global relevance. Any educated person would recognize a scientific name. I think that is fascinating and awesome. As someone who works on protocols and with communities building digital infrastructure for society as part of my work in the open source ecosystem, the scope and breadth of the Code is really interesting to me from an anthropological perspective.
It is also deeply flawed. There are a lot of issues with it. The gender agreement clauses are confusing and occasionally contradictory. You can’t name a patronym after a non-binary person. The code is Eurocentric to the point of being explicitly colonialist. And the processes that the ICZN uses for updating it are byzantine, vague, and exclusionary (for instance - who is talking about abandoning agreement? How is the public involved with that?). Zoobank doesn’t currently fulfill its mandate. And species names don’t work well for classifying life, as is increasingly apparent for things like viruses. None of these controversies are new.
However, the Code does exist, and its authority is basically unquestioned. And the code does include grammatical agreement as standing articles within it. You’re right that Latin isn’t commonly known anymore (and much more so for Greek). So this creates a lot of confusion for people naming things. I think part of this confusion stems from the process where you don’t need a publication to use the correct name - meaning that Ophoipsammus maculata, O. maculatus, O. maculatos, and O. maculatum could all be at some point used by people who are trying to figure it out. Having a publication about changes in agreement makes it easy for people to point to that publication to say, “Here is the reasoning behind a change.” I think that that is helpful, because it clears up some of the confusion around names. O. maculatus was used in at least one paper that I found last night, but not by WoRMS - which means that confusion already exists in the literature for these names, and which could hamper search efforts by researchers using the internet. I don’t think just editing it is as useful as talking about why it is edited. And a species-by-species account, when people work on them, often doesn’t include these notes or overlooks broad changes that should be made.
“Necessary” is a word I would use for describing these changes, because I think that fixing errata should leave a papertrail, just like a Wikipedia edit should have a sentence describing the edit. And if we’re all going to use a Code, we should use it as it is currently written. I don’t mind the lepidopterists going their own way - at least they’re clear about it. A papertrail really helps with charismatic zootaxa like birds or turtles - the screeds written on why a name is what it is are helpful when a lot of people are invested in the correct spelling of a word.
The overwhelming response I’ve gotten from zoologists already in the establishment is “don’t bother”. I disagree with that injunction. I want to do what I can to be part of the conversation. It’s very rare for me to find a field where I can combine my work on protocols, open source, and open science with my Linguistics background - I have a masters (hons) in Linguistics and an MSc in Computational linguistics - and with my classics background - I teach Latin at the high school level, and did Greek for a few years in university. I applied to the ICZN to be on the commission this year, and wasn’t put on the slate, but have spent a lot of time talking to some of the commissioners about this sort of work, and want to continue doing that.
I wrote this paper on O. maculata because I found one in a tidepool and thought, “Huh, that name doesn’t make sense”, and just like putting it on iNaturalist (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/251421946), or creating the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiopsammus_maculata), changing the name is something I can do as a citizen scientist just interested in the world and how science works. It wasn’t a concerted, intentional effort to start here - I’ve been writing a few of these papers on other taxa, and am working on a much more thorough work on birds.
This paper on brittle stars is really small in scope, because I am still learning the system and how it works. The intent is never to shame other people for making mistakes in Latin, but rather to find out how and why the Code fails to make it easy for those people to do their work. I could make that clearer in my papers.
Don’t expect a lot of gratitude. Some may be happy, others will just wonder, who has time to spend on such housekeeping activities.
I don’t expect a lot of gratitude, but my hope is that people won’t take these things personally, because they’re not personal attacks. It’s the Code that is failing people, not the other way around. As for how people want me to spend my time – who cares? That’s not up to them. And hey, this work is fun!
Thanks for helping me understand that [how this process works]. The Code has a lot of unspoken rules around it (one could be “don’t change species names for grammatical agreement and expect to be thanked”).
There’s another argument for why I bothered that I didn’t get into in my response: science is about communication. Journals and books are just ways that people talk to each other, building up the world through words, just as blogs and social media posts also determine how we understand what each other are doing and how we should orientate ourselves.
Viewed in that light, the statement the taxonomist made that “this work is unnecessary” is really interesting to me. I’ve had several people tell me that working in this field is a waste of time, that I should “go grey elsewhere”, and that it is a rabbit hole that people fall down.
And a few people, mostly friends, have told me the opposite - that naming things is important, that I should follow my passion and curiosity, and that they think that this problem is the most Richard-shaped problem they’ve seen.
There is no God. There is no ultimate arbiter of the necessary. How we talk and what we do with our time is a personal prerogative. One could argue, probably correctly, that I am being ineffectual with these papers, in the sense that some people see it as bureaucratic silliness and they don’t think the spelling of maculata or maculatus is important, and the people who determine names in the major taxonomies could just ignore me.
But I think names do matter, because they determine how we understand the world. And the protocol behind naming matters, because it influences how people feel about names - whether they are easy to understand, or not, and whether science as a process is open to the laity, or not. Changing names for grammatical agreement and talking about that process is one small edit on Wikipedia, one piece of rubbish picked up off of an endless beach. And each small act adds up.
I once sat down with a friend of mine, a mother of four and an excellent birder. While we talked in her backyard, a Common Grackle walked by. I interrupted the conversation to say “Quisculus quiscula.” She asked me what I said, and I said, “That’s the Latin name.”
She turned towards me: “We don’t use Latin here.” I asked her why, and she mentioned something about exclusionary language. How I wish I had remembered what she said verbatim!
“Sure,” I responded, “but doesn’t it sound nice? It’s a fun word to say! Quisculus quiscula.” She paused for a second, and then tried out the sounds. Yes, she agreed, they were fun. Then her kid said it, too. I was overjoyed.
I think about that interaction a lot. What is it that turns something that is difficult, pretentious, unattainable, or obscure into a joy? And who decides how we approach the world?
The answer to the second question is, of course, that we do. Even if the work is seen as silly or useless or annoying by some, I don’t see it that way. And each small publication is me learning more about a system, so that I can go on to see if I can influence it in other ways - perhaps through eventually changing the code, or by pointing out issues that I notice that others who don’t have my background don’t. That’s all science, and it’s all part of what makes Homo sapiens into sapiens.
If you’re interesting in this stuff, I’d be really happy to hear from you. I’m a member of a community of taxonomists who want a decolonialised, trans-friendly, non-exclusionary, and non-Eurocentric world. Fixing the Code is part of that work.
Hit me up if you’d be keen on joining our discussions.