This week, Nature published a short Correspondence from Giovanni Strona, a biologist “mainly interested in theoretical ecology”, with a positively shocking revelation: taxonomists are selling the naming rights to new species.
I knew having a fainting couch installed next to my lab bench would pay off one day.
A public service announcement:
Not all “Bugs” are created equal. (Both images in the public domain, via Wikipedia)
The colloquial use of “bugs” to refer to bacterial microbes by a bioremediation specialist in Bozeman, Montana lead to a spectacular Taxonomy Fail on the local nightly news.
Watch the video from KBZK News here.
In case they remove the video (which I actually hope they do), here’s a screen cap demonstrating the problem.
So. Much. Fail.
I think it’s safe to assume that Bed Bugs (Eukaryota: Animalia: Arthropoda: Hemiptera: Cimicidae) are not being pumped into the groundwater of Bozeman to clean up dry cleaning chemical contamination, but rather Bacteria (which belong to an entirely different Domain of life). While certainly an extreme example, this is why it’s important to use the correct names for organisms, and what happens when we off-handedly use common names or terminology that we think is colloquial: vitally important details can be lost in translation.
In case you’re wondering, mistaking Bed Bugs for Bacteria represents a Taxonomy Fail Index of 403, a new world record! Yowza.
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This story was brought to my attention by Dr. Michael Ivie of Montana State University on the Entomological Collections Network email listserv.