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A Fly Called Iyaiyai

Science News, May 26, 2001 by Susan Milius

And other true stories of scientific name-calling

Neal Evenhuis takes it rather well when a reporter phones his office at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and asks, What were you thinking? Some of the scientific names he's invented.... Well, ... Did he do those things on purpose?

Most of the time, Evenhuis comes across as an eminent, sane scientist. He's spent years mapping out the family trees and describing new species of flies, and he's published such landmark works as a catalog of 5,100 fossil species. He's officially named more than 300 kinds of flies, and most of the terms sound respectably unintelligible to the uninitiated. Several hours before fielding the phone call about his intentions, Evenhuis heard that he had been elected to the international commission overseeing scientific names for all of zoology.

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So, what did the accomplished taxonomist have in mind when he chose Dissop as the name for a genus of a hard-to-see fossil with the species name irae? Disap-pear-ee?

And what about the genus called Iyaiyai, as in the lamenting trills of a mariachi song or the cry that goes with thumping a hand against one's forehead?

Evenhuis has committed other merriments, too, and, yes, he says he intended all of them. Although he practices world-class systematics, he advocates lightening up every once in a while. What's more, he's not alone.

Despite the precision of this science--these people know how many hairs grow on a fly's legs and how to say white nine ways in Latin--taxonomists preserve a tradition of sly wordplay. Evenhuis rattles off two Web addresses, in addition to his own, that document whimsical nomenclature.

Some names just sound funny: Zaa, Mops mops, Bla nini, and Awuka spuzzola. Some names evoke celebrities, from Ludwig van Beethoven and Arthur Conan-Doyle to Frank Zappa and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and some make eye-crossingly awful puns.

Some, including many created by renowned scientists, get so rambunctious that they can't appear in a family magazine, and the humor behind others is hard to classify. Fly specialist David McAlpine of the Australian Museum in Sydney, for example, named a genus This. A picture of one of its species hangs on his office door with the instruction, "Look at This!"

To show how a taxonomist can end up doing something as odd as that, Evenhuis describes his first excursion on the wild side of nomenclature. It all started, he says, when he fell in with a bunch of wry entomologists.

In the early 1980s, Evenhuis once or twice a year visited the Smithsonian Institution's superb collection of flies in Washington, D.C. Before the workday started, resident entomologists and their guests swarmed around coffee in one of the labs. "I was in awe in the midst of such champions of taxonomy," Evenhuis remembers.

During the start-up caffeination, Evenhuis learned about the species Verae peculya and Heerz lukenatcha. At the Smithsonian, Arnold Menke had added the new species name eyvae, pronounced "eye-vee," to the genus Pison, and beetle maven Terry Erwin had enlarged the genus Agra with the species phobia and vation. All comply with at least the letter of the law of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and had been accepted as valid arthropod species names.

"I came away from those morning coffees knowing that I just had to find a name to compete and be accepted into that club," Evenhuis recalls.

At that time, Evenhuis was studying a group of so-called bee flies and had found several new species, most in the genus Phthiria. He recalls, "I thought to myself, `What species name would go well with a genus like that?'"

Evenhuis was then, and still is, sticking to the tradition of two-word names established in the 18th century by Carl Linnaeus, who actually came up with some doosies himself. The Swedish botanist-physician arranged the living world in categories that branched into smaller ones, which likewise branched repeatedly. In the last of Linnaeus' branchings, the so-called genera split into the most basic identification of organisms, the species.

"Most names are descriptive, and a big chunk of the rest of them are honorific," explains bee specialist Doug Yanega of the University of California, Riverside. Even within those categories, though, there's room for inventiveness.

In creating descriptive names for some species, Linnaeus "was a prurient guy," opines Yanega, who created one of the online collections of nomenclaturial high jinks. Linnaeus noted similarities between plant parts and human anatomy when he named the pink-flowered butterfly pea Clitoria mariana and a stinkhorn species Phallus. The species name impudicus means shameless. "If anything, we've toned down since then," Yanega says.

Even a G-rated description can go too far. In the 1920s, amphipod researcher Benedykt Dybowski crowded so many descriptors together that his names stretched out for several dozen letters. Yanega translates Dybowski's polysyllabic horror Gammaracanthuskytodermogammarus loricatobaicalensis as "amphipod with hollow spines on its skin from Lake Baikal." Although the names did follow the rules, the commission finally decreed all Dybowski's names invalid because they proved so unwieldy.

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A Fly Called Iyaiyai

Science News, May 26, 2001 by Susan Milius

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