Dealing With Those Confusing Fish Names

By Kevin Thurston
From CAS Newsletter and Aquarist, Colorado Aquarium Society
Aquarticles.com

If you are like most people, you tend to have a little frustration around the names of fishes and not just the scientific names. Why is a kribensis called a kribensis, or even more confusing; a krib? Well it's because it used to be known in the hobby as Pelmatochromis kribensis (krib is short for kribensis) and the name stuck even though now it is known as Pelvicachromis pulcher. Scientific names can be easier to change than common ones. So why do scientific names get changed?

In order to understand that question we must first understand how scientific names are assigned in the first place. Joe Scientist will be out collecting fish and collects something he's not familiar with. He packs up a few specimens and labels them as thoroughly as he can concerning collecting location, colors of the live specimens and anything else he can think of that will help in identifying the fish. Then (surprisingly enough) he will send it to another scientist with expertise in fish taxonomy. That scientist then tries to identify the fish. If he fails in this, he will suspect that he has an unnamed specimen, but he has to do a thorough check through the literature to make sure. Once he is satisfied that he has a previously undescribed species, he may then describe it (again as thoroughly as possible) and publish his description. In that description he will pick one specimen that is designated the holotype and the rest will be called the paratype. The holotype is hopefully the most representative of the collection, or in other words the most average. The paratypes are used to illustrate variation in the species. In this publication he may name the fish anything he wants as long as it conforms to the rules of nomenclature.

For example: if he wants to name the fish for the guy who collected it the rules specify that if the naming is for a man, then the last name is used with an i appended to the end and ae for a woman. The name is pronounced just as the person would pronounce their own name with a long i sound at the end (in both gender cases strangely enough). Therefore Pristella riddlei (as Innes pointed out long ago) is pronounced rid-el-i not rid-ly-i. Likewise the moorei in several cichlid names is pronounced moor-i not moory-i. Fish that are named after Ethelwyn Trewavas have a species name pronoumced treh-wah-vas-i (not transposed to treh-vah-wah-say as has been heard many times). That's assuming I have the last name pronunciation correct. She may pronounce it troo-a-vass for all I know. Some names from the French give English speakers trouble. Tropheus duboisi is frequently pronounced doo-boys-y, which is obviously wrong Some have partly corrected it to doo-boys-i, but the person's name is probably pronounced doo-bwah which would make the correct pronunciation of the species name: doo-bwah-si. Similiarly, marlieri is probably pronounced mar-lee-ay-i (how would Marlier pronounce his last name?), not the horrble mutilation frequently heard pronounced mal-er-i. The name brichardi is not pronounced brichard-y. I don't know how P. Brichard pronounced his last name, but being French it was probably something like Breechahr which would mean that the pronunciation would be breechahr-i. . Think if someone named a fish for former Avalanche goalie Patrick Roi, Haplochromis roii. Now you know a lot of people are going to pronounce that as roy-e-i, locals may be savvy enough to try wah-ey, but the correct pronunciation would be wah-i (with a long i). An even worse case would be to name a fish after a guy I used to know whose last name was Voglei and pronounced Vogel-i. If a fish was named for him, it would be pronounced vogel-i-i (with two long i sounds). In the case of Corydoras evelynae, (notice that it is not Coryadoras, four syllables is plenty thank you) the convention was not followed and the first name was used. This fish was named for H. R. Axelrod's wife, Evelyn. According to the rules this fish should have been named Corydoras axelrodae (as opposed to the previously named Corydoras axelrodi). The person who described it was probably trying to avoid confusion, but there shouldn't have been any due to the name ending.

I previously used the word thorough to describe the procedure that the scientist goes through before a name is published. Whoever publishes the description first has precedence on naming. So if our scientist wasn't thorough, his name has to be thrown out and the name from the previous description must be used. This causes a lot of name changes in the world of taxonomy. Also consider the case of the honey dwarf gourami (the word gourami has a convoluted history that I won't go into here, but if you knew the story you might be hesitant to use the word). A collection was made consisting of entirely one sex and the fish was described based on that collection and named Colisa sota. Later somebody made a collection consisting entirely of the other sex and named them Colisa chuna. The name Colisa chuna was the one that was recognized in the hobby and has been known by that name for many years. When somebody finally figured out that the descriptions were based on sex segregation, it was realized that the name C. sota had precedence and should be the one to be used. The hobby has been slow to accept that change. Don't even get me started on the mess with Cichlasoma!

Scientific names have their value in providing a uniform, standard identity to an organism. I have heard certain generic names applied to several different kinds of fish, such as "rainbow fish" being applied to fish that the hobbyist would not normally consider associated with the name "rainbow". It is very handy to know the scientific names of the fish you keep, not just the African cichlids.

The plural of species is species and the plural of genus is genera. The genus name should be capitalized while the species name is lower-case.

There is no single definition of the word species that works in every case. Therefore we should be wary when people start wanting to erect subspecies. If they can't really tell what a species is, how can they tell what constitutes a subspecies? Consider the discus genus Symphysodon. There are probably two legitimate species Symphysodon discus and Symphysodon aquefasciata. As far as the subspecies are concerned, you can probably find, in almost every collection, fish that are intermediates between the subspecies. In this case the common names of blue, green and brown discus convey just as much information as the subspecies name. This brings up an interesting question: are fancy discus hybrids? Not likely. A hybrid would have to have some S. discus in them and very few breeders have been able to inject that blood into their stocks.

One of the problems with handling the names has to do with the way people read. Most people read by word recognition. By this I mean that they don't parse every letter in a word, they just recognize the general form of a word and assume that the word they see is the one they recognize. This doesn't work very well in the world of scientific names because few people recognize them when they see them and just give up. Some they alter to suit their perception. Consider that there is no l in Tubifex, yet so many insist on pronouncing it as Tubiflex. The way to overcome the difficulty in reading scientific names is to go back to your first grade teacher's admonition to sound it out. It may seem embarrassing, but it is far better than mangling the name in the horrid ways that have resulted in a major label calling their product Tubiflex.

For future publication, I'll be working on a glossary of terms to help with names. Then you'll be able to answer questions like: "What's the difference between a fish that is compressed and one that is depressed? What's the difference between a fascia and an ocellus?" Won't that be exciting?