Funny Names

A brief dispatch from the new job

awild | August 19, 2008

I've always been fond of playful and irreverent scientific names, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Paul Marsh, the taxonomist I will be working with over the coming year, is the same Paul Marsh who brought us the classic wasp names Heerz tooya, Heerz lukenatcha, and Verae peculya. I'll be supporting Paul's morphological studies in the taxonomically troublesome wasp genus Heterospilus with molecular genetic data, but be warned. There are several hundred species yet to be named in the genus, and who knows what sort of nomenclatural mischief awaits.

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