July 9, 2008
WHAT'S IN A NAME? "SPECIATION":
Many-named species pose registry problem (Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/07/08)
Any good pulp-fiction villain has an alias or two, in order to throw police off the trail. Let's hope the breadcrumb sponge never turns to crime. It has 56.That's just one of the curiosities that has emerged from an international effort to catalog all living things in the ocean.
To date, scientists working on the World Register of Marine Species (www.marinespecies.org) have found 31,366 species with at least two names, and 767 with 10 or more, says Rutgers biologist Edward Vanden Berghe. [...]
Extra names can arise from disagreements over where to draw the line between species, or simply from ignorance. About 1,400 "new" marine species are reported each year in various, sometimes obscure, publications.
If stuff won't evolve, just rename and reclassify it. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 9, 2008 9:48 PM
Reminds me of Kirtland's Warbler. The only good thing about that bird is it winters in the Bahamas and not northern Michigan, so it isn't entirely bird-brained.
Posted by: Mikey at July 10, 2008 6:35 PM
Linnean taxonomy is based on emanations from penumbras, too.
(To justify the importation of Canadian wolves into Yellowstone, the NPS had their employees and other shills "prove" that 27 different sub-classifications were really just 5. And no one saw any problem with that, since it resulted in more jobs for gov't biologists and their camp followers.)
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at July 10, 2008 10:27 AM