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Sorting out nomenclature

Scientists seek to bring order into naming of sealife

122,500 species names, 56,400 aliases validated
Census expected to include 230,000 species

WASHINGTON: An international effort to catalogue all species of life in the oceans, called the Census of Marine Life, has validated 122,500 species names so far as well as 56,400 aliases, different names that have been applied to the same species over the years.

“Convincing warnings about declining fish and other marine species must rest on a valid census,” Mark Costello of New Zealand’s University of Auckland said in a statement.

“This project will improve information vital to researchers investigating fisheries, invasive species, threatened species and marine ecosystem functioning, as well as to educators. It will eliminate the misinterpretation of names, confusion over Latin spellings, redundancies and a host of other problems that sow confusion and slow scientific progress,” he said.

Modern scientific naming was introduced in the 1750s by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in an effort to organise the list of living things.

The idea was good, but over the years different scientists “discovered” and named what turned out to be the same thing, resulting in more than one scientific name for several species.

Halichondria panicea — the breadcrumb sponge — is the champion name-holder so far, having been given 56 separate names in the scientific literature since the first one was attached in 1766, according to researchers compiling the census. Among the sponge’s other names: Alcyonium manusdiaboli (1794), Spongia compacta (1806), Halichondria albescens (1818) and Seriatula seriata (1826).

Not even Linnaeus was exempt, research shows. It turns out that over time he assigned four different names to the same species of sperm whale.

So the census is compiling a World Register of Marine Species to sort out the nomenclature, a project that shed light on the many aliases of sea creatures.

When they discover marine species with more than one scientific name, the oldest one wins, but the others are listed in the register for cross reference.

The register is being hosted by the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium.

“Describing species without a universal register in place is like setting up a library without an index catalogue,” said Philippe Bouchet, a census scientist.

The first Census of Marine Life is expected to be released in 2010 and to include more than 230,000 species, only a fraction of the number of species thought to exist in the oceans. Researchers are cataloguing about 1,400 new marine species each year, a rate experts say will take more than five centuries to complete the total list. — AP

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