Viscount Scrabbleton II of FlangeA, Iris AndromedaB and Günther SchlonkC
Abstract: When one really hates one’s day job, and the hours pass like turtle turds floating on a turgid stream, the mind can go to strange places. In extreme cases, one might even spend hours ruminating on the names of sea creatures…
Introduction
We in the Esteemed Fraternity of Honourable Etymologists have long found the use of “common” names in species nomenclature a tedious and tiresome imposition, a sop to the unwashed masses whose plebian tongues lack the dexterity to shape words like Tripinnabrevicorporolatafacilongonaso ichthyosupercilii. Alas, in this intellectually arid age, our budding scientists devoured vapid fripperies in place of the classics. There is a price to be paid for trading Works and Days for Thorns and Roses, and now today’s graduates wouldn’t know a phallus from a falsus.1 With such lamentable Latin literacy now the norm, we are compelled to use vulgarisms when discussing the myriad species of the natural world.
Even if such common names are bereft of a systematic and logical derivation, some standards of accuracy must be maintained. It is notable, in our opinion, that erroneous appellations such as “koala bear” are becoming less frequently encountered, since the fact that these creatures are not Ursidae became common knowledge. This is encouraging. There is an area, however, in which marked inconsistencies exist in the common naming of species, which we feel should be addressed. We refer, of course, to “sea” creatures.
That is to say, we refer not to every inhabitant of Neptune’s domain, but specifically to those creatures whose common names are defined as oceanic derivatives of terrestrial counterparts. For example, we have been reliably informed that the Sirenia, such as dugongs and manatees, are frequently being labelled as “sea cows”. This is occurring despite the fact that dugongs lack many of the defining feature of a cow: they make poor draught animals, their milk doesn’t go at all well in tea, and they don’t go moo.
Furthermore, the Sirenia are far from the most egregious example of this phenomenon. While perusing a copy of New Scientist, June 1962, we noticed that Artemia salina (brine shrimp, Figure 2) were being marketed as “sea monkeys”! There exists no hallucinogen potent enough to make this quarter-inch crustacean resemble a marmoset, at least in our experience.
Imagine, if you can, that you have never laid eyes on a brine shrimp. Imagine that your sole point of reference for this creature’s appearance is the name “sea monkey”. You would, presumably, expect such an organism to be an aquatic mammal, or at the very least to have four legs and eat bananas. When confronted with the critter itself (which looks like Wile E. Coyote ran over a prawn with a steamroller), you would likely enquire of your interlocutor if they’d recently suffered head trauma.
To highlight the inconsistencies in these names, we have tabulated the most frequently encountered “sea” creatures, alongside a breakdown of the similarities and differences between them and their terrestrial counterparts. In this analysis, we have included a score of between 0 and 10 arbitrary units of similarity, to facilitate the ranking of each species (Table 1). In order to make these results more accessible to the kinds of people who devise these names, we have also condensed our findings into a collection of pretty little pictures (Figure 3).
It is quite evident from the data in Table 1 that such “sea creatures” bear wildly variable similarities to their terrestrial cousins. In some cases, such as that of the sea snakes, the common appellation is most apposite. In most cases, however, the “sea” identifier is misleading at best, and deranged at worst. Apart from a vaguely similar head shape, sea horses bear almost no other resemblances to the majestic mustangs of Arizona. We found the term “sea urchins” particularly confusing, as these spiny invertebrates have almost nothing in common with homeless children of the Victorian era.
Our data clearly demonstrates that just because an animal has the word “sea” at the start of its name, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will look anything like its land-based namesake. However, why should we stop at definitive data, when we still have capacity for hyperbole?
We propose that the only reason people can use these names straight-faced is that they’re introduced to them at an early age, and never really stop to examine them (a bit like Catholicism). To demonstrate this, Figure 4 contains images of hypothetical sea creatures of varied similarity to existing organisms.
None of these creations is inherently more ridiculous than the existing sea creatures, and yet PNAS used them as grounds to reject our paper. Furthermore, why should it be the sea creatures who must always adopt the derivative name? Why aren’t “flying fish” called “swimming birds”? Sharks and lions occupy comparable ecological niches in their respective habitats, and yet sharks predate the big cats by around 448 million years. To make things fair, we propose that lions be renamed “landsharks”. A collection of further terrestrial soubriquets is listed in Figure 5.
Alas, the only example of such a term we have found in common parlance is “landwhale”, and our research on 4Chan seems to indicate that this term is not intend for scientific use.
Conclusion
In this article, we have laid out a number of inconsistencies and injustices in the common nomenclature of sea creatures. The obvious solution to this problem is to have the entire populace learn Greek and Latin again, because scientific names are always logical and mutually consistent.2 Alternately, we suggest a committee be formed to standardise all such names.
Author Contributions
IA prepared the illustrations (not AI). IA. and GS spent an evening drinking wine and discussing Table 1. GS prepared the manuscript. VSF supplied the sass.
Notes and references
1. Note: Of course, Works and Days was written in Greek, not Latin, but the comparison was to fun to ignore.
2. “Where Animals’ Scientific Names Come From” S. O’Nella, 2022, J. You. Tube. 1, 0.01–9.40. DOI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKRW1zgkCVc
About the Journal
J. Immat. Sci. is an open-access, beer-reviewed satirical journal, welcoming submissions from all scientific fields. Readers are encouraged to download a template and send their manuscripts to goodenough.immaterial.science@gmail.com.
Communications should be addressed to the Imperial Editor in Perpetuity, Demeritus Professor Günther Schlonk.
Template download: https://lab.to/jimmatsci_template
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