Comments on: Psychotria poeppigiana: Hot Lips of the Coffee Family

By: nuytsia

nuytsia — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:30:35 +0000

Hmmm… well you can still build on your descriptions with a few suffixes or prefixes so that gives you a bit more play. There nothing like a good psuedo-x, x-ioides or x-issimus to give you a bit of room.
One thing that’s caught my attention is the duplication of Genera names between plants and animals.
So Prunella is a labiate and a bird, Arenaria is a Caryoph and a wader and Wilsonia is a tiny bindweed or a Warbler.
So a little source for confusion there….

By: miconia

miconia — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:15:13 +0000

Bad choices, no doubt. Also, there is a limitation imposed by our vocabulary. I have not been able to find out how many words there are in either the Greek or the Latin languages, but Ask Oxford suggests there may be 250,000 words in English, which possibly has the most words of any language.

Wikipedia estimates the number of flowering plants to be 250,000 to 400,000. I’m assuming these are named flowering plants and of course this number does not include Gymnosperms or mosses or liverworts, etc.

Naturally, not every word could possibly be used in a plant description – most pronouns and verbs, I would think, would be out. This is probably a fruitless tack to take, but sort of fun to think about.

By: nuytsia

nuytsia — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 06:28:30 +0000

Part of the problem with the names given to a species is the specimen and the data recorded for it. If the taxonomist have little info on the specimen but recognises that it’s new it probably hard to attach a meaningful name. In the rush to get names out quite a few bad choices were made… I think?

By: miconia

miconia — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:42:28 +0000

Yes, indeed, family is “key.” And thanks for the pointer to the Family Recognition site…really fine, and fun.

I’m finding, to my dismay, that just as I’m getting acquainted with families in one taxonomic system – the Cronquist – the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group is reworking everything! All my books use Cronquist. Wikipedia uses APG. I’m sure it’s necessary, but it’s a confusing time for a beginning botanist! All this to say…your “not wholly legitimate botanising” which now may be the method of choice for web images, with no plant at hand, may even become the method of choice for all plants in the future. I don’t know.

As far as plants named after people – yes, it’s a problem. I’ve even heard of a plant named after someone’s dog. I guess the descriptive names have long been used up, as you suggested. For example, I learned that there’s a Psychotria pubescens, which to me would be a perfect name for Psychotria poeppigiana because so much of the plant is covered with fine hairs. Without having looked it up, I’m guessing that P. pubescens was named first. Sigh.

By: nuytsia

nuytsia — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:52:05 +0000

Hi!
Great post! Have to agree on the family sentiment. It’s crucial and I’m always happy if I can get something to family. Genus is great and species is very good, but family is key.
Have you seen this by the way? It’s rather fun!
To my (slight) shame my ID of this was not wholly legitimate botanising!
My immediate assumption was that this was Rubiaceae and I can’t really say why other than the overall feel of the plant. With the intrapetiolar stipules not clear in those original shots it was just gut feeling. I had a little browse through the genera, got nowhere quickly (there are SO many genera) and then decided to go with a hunch. I searched for panama lips on flickr (or something like that and variations) and eventually drew up hot lips as the common name for the plant. I then googled this and voila!
This is the second time when an obvious common name description has led me to ID something on Flickr. First time round it was seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia).

One of my great bugbears is plants named after people. The latin is supposed to describe the organism after all. What feature of the plant tells you who originally collected it? My favourite(??) bad plant name is Sinowilsonia henryi. Fabulously descriptive of the plant? I think not!
I was told a story a few years ago where a botanical expedition to Indonesia discover a huge number of new species of legumes (70 odd, I think) from within a single genus on a single mountain.
As the species description unfolded they did began to run a bit dry on names and one of the last few went down as incredable or some variant of that.