[Music] so kids in school used to make fun of my name shasta and i'd imagine that that's something i have in common with plenty of you in the audience yeah i don't imagine that being teased is an experience which is unique to people with unique names because as far as i've seen people are equally capable of making the wrong decision as we are empowered to make the right decision and this is a theme that we're going to brush up against over and over in my presentation because i want to talk to you about the history
of science specifically the history of my branch of science which is taxonomy and taxonomy is the science of naming things now i've also observed how people view scientists as just a breed all of our own eccentric white men in white coats and that is not entirely untrue but scientists are a product of the society which create us and so that stereotype is actually due to the very humanity of science for example in 1753 when carl linnaeus was devising his binomial system of naming plants and animals education was for wealthy european boys and so they did
grow into those white men with white hair now that binomial system is the one that taxonomy still rests on today and i know that you have heard and probably even said some of these binomials in fact you even have one yourselves homo sapiens or how about boa constrictor rattus rattus or tyrannosaurus rex these are binomials and there is some taxonomic code on screen that i want to teach you to interpret today so those two names are the genus followed by the species genus is always capitalized species never is together the two are in italics and
this tells us that we are looking at a species name they're also followed by what's called the naming authority the name of the scientist and the year that that description and the name was published now all of this formatting and much much more is all summed up and bound into the big taxonomic rulebook the international code of zoological nomenclature now i'm in a position to be naming species because i'm also an entomologist and insects are the single least well named group of animals on the planet consider in the 250 years since linnaeus started writing the
big book of rules 90 of mammals have been given species names compared to only 20 of insects which is why i can confidently tell you that naming an insect is exactly like having sex yes it's very gratifying but it's not actually all that uncommon now i started practicing taxonomy when i attended a three-month internship at the smithsonian museum of natural history in washington dc and getting ready to go away on this trip everyone wanted to know was i going to name a species after myself and you can bet that the big book of rules has
more than a few things to say about that so firstly the genus is usually already established and so you have no say over that part in dc i was working on a group called hypoptera these are little fingernail-sized beetles which come down out of the canopy of the amazon rainforest secondly the book says that it's actually kind of frowned upon to name a whole bunch of species after oneself it's kind of like taxonomically tacky bigger yet than my image in taxonomy the question at the forefront of my mind was which one is which the humbling
reality that i couldn't even tell the name to species of heboptera apart informed how i decided i wanted to name any new species we've already seen some evidence that a well allocated species name can remain unchanged for well ever and in a hundred years time my name was going to be less than irrelevant to the student entomologist facing the same conundrum trying to remember one name out of a million possible species names i wanted them to be able to look at the organism in their hand and be reminded kind of like a mnemonic and this
is actually already very common practice in taxonomy so the first species i named was heboptera lucida in the middle of the top row and i named it after the two pale patches on its wing covers they're not actually pale they are transparent so i named it lucid which is clear in latin and now it's next in line there to hypoptera dilutor the palest most diluted species in the genus but there are so many species that need names this is far from the only approach for instance my supervisor whilst naming 300 of the 600 named species
of the genus agra started writing jokes to entertain himself on that long journey you can see up here agrophobia agra cadabra aggravate aggravation he was also bilingual so he named agradable which means nice in spanish and of course is a much more appropriate language to be naming south american species in but you can see here how every scientist has a group of experiences a background a history a philosophy which is being woven into our scientific product the countries that we come from the languages we speak the communities who surround us are being put into our
scientific practice and in the same way it reflects our strengths woven in are also our weaknesses i was satisfied with my personal philosophy to name every species in a practical and helpful way which is probably why i made a mistake i was incredibly surprised when my supervisor named a species after me this is heboptera shasta more than just surprised i was utterly taken aback and i forgot that that name the name i'd fought other children in the schoolyard over isn't just my name shasta is taken from the shastan group of northern american indians from what
is now northern california most people first come across the name as it is associated with mount shasta a landmark which was named by the same colonists who persecuted the shasta indians off of those lands and many of them out of their lives i could have changed the paragraph that links herboptera shasta to the intern working on the project but i didn't i didn't see a pathway forwards and it might sound like a pretty trivial footnote in the taxonomic literature and i guess maybe i agreed with you because i didn't make that change until i learned
that native languages local languages have been explicitly excluded from taxonomy since the rules were written even more so by the unwritten rules the societal norms of the 1700s that said that non-european languages were barbaric and unfit for the scientific discourse those racist beliefs are perpetuated in modern taxonomy as taxonomic traditions and native languages and local species descriptions are noticeably absent from the record to this day so yes not tying the name shasta back to the shasta indians felt like a mistake one that still bothers me today so you can bet that it was a mistake
i wasn't going to make a second time the next species i had the opportunity to name was this charismatic cockroach from the central highlands of tasmania they are the color and patina of beaten bronze statues they're flightless which is quite common in the alps so they run around on the ground because it's cold they come out during the daytime and bask in the sunshine these are not your creepy under the kitchen fridge variety of cockroaches it was also destined to be a simple solo project for a fledgling scientist like myself because they were already well
known as unnamed and clearly fit into this group polly's austeria from mainland australia and i learned a couple of really interesting things about this group as i was diving in to this project when i say well known as unnamed i mean really really well known the first specimen entered the museum in 1941 so people have been taking notice of this species for over 80 years picking it up showing it to their friends recently this means more and more and more social media photographs people wondering what its name is for over 80 years the next interesting
thing we discovered was when we combined their biogeography their current location with their dna barcodes in answered a really interesting question how did a flightless cockroach get onto an island so during glaciation tasmania is a peninsula of southeastern australia and the nearest sister species from lowland southeast australia would have had free range to walk wherever it willed but then the glaciers melted sea levels rose and a population was isolated on tasmania it was ten thousand years ago that this last happened so in that time that isolated population has become more and more unique become an
individual species and crucially for us a species that needs a name now it's only been a couple of minutes since you heard about the naming of hip hop dara shasta so forgive me it's been several years and i honestly considered naming this species in latin for a long time it would mean that it matched the other 15 species in the genus and it would also mean that i didn't have to take responsibility for making change but i kept thinking about all of those community members who had noticed it fishermen and hikers who'd picked it up
taken photographs showed it to their friends and i was thinking about the land bridge that allowed animals and people to walk to tasmania during our glacial history it finally dawned on me i wondered how many palowa tasmanian aboriginal people would have noticed this species picked it up and shown it to their friends in nearly 40 000 years of cohabitation far from being unnamed it dawned on me prior to colonization there were 16 or more aboriginal languages spoken in tasmania so this species wasn't unnamed it would have had more than one aboriginal name in the past
and i was in a position to see that it got one again in the future so i reached out to the tasmanian aboriginal community and the palawa khani language program i told them what i've just told you all about this species habits and personality and i asked them if there was a a word in the records a description or a color that clearly fit the bill the record is quite fragmentary so there wasn't an obvious name we agreed that yingina the dual name of the great lake which forms part of the cockroach's well that'd be
a great name for a cockroach this is called naming a species after its type location and is already actually very common practice in taxonomy so common that there are already some tasmanian insect species which have aboriginal place names as their species names much like mount shasta though some of those place names were designated by colonists being misspelled misunderstood even misascribed in their geography so polly's osteria yingina not only received a tasmanian aboriginal species name but one that was given to it by the tasmanian aboriginal community and that might be a first well soon after the
publication of this paper i learned about another species with a similar story a pygmy pipe horse from new zealand isn't it cute this is cylix tupareo manaya now that maori translates to the garland of the mania which means both seahorse and also a seahorse-shaped god-like ancestral being so not only has cylix tupare o manaya been given a very beautiful and complex name in maori what is most remarkable is the naming authority short and trinsky are scientists but ngati wai are ewi a tribe this is the first animal whose naming authority includes an entire tribe of
people who speak the language that it was named in now you're seeing what i saw i could have done that with polly's osteria yingina palawa certainly deserves to be in the naming authority but given that that was a world first i didn't have an example from my community to follow i made another mistake because as i've been trying to oppress upon you scientists are equally as capable of making mistakes as any other kind of real human person but in the same way we're also open to continual improvement in fact it is the greatest strength of
science it was designed to continually progress based on the influence of new information and that information can come from lots of places including you my community the protests that you attend the content that you create the conversations that we've had are all filtering into my world view they're being channeled down into the scientific record for that entomology student to find in 100 years time so yes i made another mistake but you know that it's a mistake i'm not going to make a second time [Applause] you
