I'm currently working on a project to assemble species names for various uses, and came across this interesting post by Podblack Cat on Podblack Blog. The author explores the interesting variants of species names of interesting species...
What about a spider called Draculoides bramstokeri? Or the sand-crab Albunea groeningi, named after Matt 'The Simpsons' Groening? A big winner in terms of nomenclature nods would have to be Frank Zappa, who has at least five different species named after him... one because the orb-weaver spider, Pachygnatha zappa, features abdominal marking that resembles his mustache. Oh, and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has... yeah, you guessed it, an endangered rabbit named after him.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
In the forests of South Africa lurks an arachnophobe's nightmare - Nephila kowaci, the largest web-spinning spider in the world. The females of this newly discovered species have bodies that are 3-4 centimetres in length (1.5 inches) and legs that are each around 7.5cm long (3 inches).
This new…
A loose spider on a space station.
Technorati Tags: humor, 'snakes, on, a, plane', spider, spiders, 'space, station'
Apparently the missing orb-weaver spider is gone from it's cage and can't be found anywhere.
And for the record, I don't know what kind of spider is in my photograph. It's a spider…
I'm sure by now you've heard of the ginormous spider web that was spun in Texas. The thing was huge -- 200 yards long -- and it was spun by multiple different species. That interspecific collaboration got Bill Poser thinking, so he blogged about it at Language Log:
The web covers hundreds of…
As promised, I will gather here (and update a couple of times during the day) some of the most interesting posts from around the blogosphere about the celebrations of the 300th birthday of Carl von Linne aka Carolus Linnaeus, the guy you cussed at when, back in high school, you had to memorize the…
Link?
Link is here - thank you!
http://podblack.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/the-specialness-of-species/
I'm pretty sure that my linking to podblack's blog is cursed somehow. This is my second run at it.
But now everything should be just fine...
Only a species? I have whole classes of frogs named after me :)
No seriously, it may well be an urban myth that the "discoverer" of a species solely gets to choose the name, but it still impresses me that so many discoverers still choose to honor their own strange creative interests instead of just amending their own names.
Sorry, I can't help pointing out that Draculoides bramstokeri (named by my PhD supervisor, as it happens) is a schizomid, not a spider.