What’s for dinner: sweet or Irish?

by Eric Boa

If you choose sweet, you’ll be eating Ipomea batatas. A similarly shaped but different tasting vegetable to Solanum tuberosum, the common potato. Or Irish potato if you live in Malawi, named after Irish missionaries who first introduced it. Common names are useful in many ways. They are short, memorable and easy to pronounce. They can also be confusing. An alligator pear is neither an alligator nor a pear, but an avocado. What exactly is The Red Fish, sold by my local supermarket? An African plum is more likely to be Dacrydoes edulis, but could be Prunus africana (also known as African cherry).

Scientific names consist of a genus and a species. We’ll ignore sub-species, varieties and other qualifying names for now. The first letter of the genus name is always capitalized and the convention is to italicise both parts. After giving the name in full, shorten the genus name to a single letter, giving S. tuberosum. Journalists take note. I realise that I may have added to the confusion about scientific names, but it’s all in a good cause. I’ll also spare you the arcane rules which govern how scientific names are attributed to organisms.

Scientific names work everywhere. Every living thing has a uniform descriptor that works in Chile, Czechia and China. Beware common names, not only because you could be eating something unexpected but because you could be referring to a completely different thing. In Bolivia “El papá come una papa y adora al Papa” could superficially be translated as “The potato eats a potato and worships the potato” rather than “The father eats a potato and worships the Pope”. Not a phrase I’ve ever heard, but you get my point. It’s easy to confuse meanings, even nouns with accents and different genders.

My mother expressed polite but puzzled surprise when I told her about my PhD on bacterial canker of ash trees. “Oh, that sounds interesting”, she replied in a puzzled voice, expecting something esoteric, but not that I would be doing research on ashtrays. I could have said Fraxinus excelsior, the European ash, yet I doubt this would have helped. Why add European? Well, there’s also the mountain ash, with similar leaves, but not much else. Sorbus aucuparia is in the rose family, or Rosaceae. The European ash is in the Oleaceae or olive family.

Regular gardeners are familiar with scientific names of many common plants. Some trip merrily off the tongue, such as Beta vulgaris, the common beet. Others are a bit of a mouthful, particularly when variety names are included. I’ve just learnt that a treasured houseplant, the ever-flowering Crossandra infundibuliforms is better known as the firecracker. You’ll find scientific names on seed packets and nursery plants and botanical gardens. I didn’t expect to find them on the fish counter in Waitrose, an upmarket chain in the UK memorably described by the late Linda Smith, a comedian, as “reassuringly expensive”. I’m still trying work out why. Does anyone ask for two fillets of Dicentrarchus labrax (sea bass) or plan to batter and deep fry Gadus morhua and enjoy on a Friday night with chips? (Atlantic cod, now you ask).

There are few ways in which scientific endeavours are publicly acknowledged. Having your surname used as part of a scientific name is one of them. It can lead to monstrous constructions, however, as in Brycekendrickomyces, named after an industrious mycologist. David Attenborough is widely known and still going strong at 98. His contributions to natural science will be forever remembered in more than 50 genera and species, including Attenborosaurus, an extinct marine reptile. Another tricky pronunciation, but not insurmountable. My eldest grandson is three and can cheerily distinguish and pronounce around 10-15 dinosaurs, including Triceratops and the more elusive Archaeopteryx.

These musings were prompted by the discovery of common and scientific names on the fish counter in Waitrose. Is this because customers might be confused by a common name alone? Are there allergies to be avoided? If so, then you might expect to read “may contain Arachis hypogaea” instead of peanuts. Scientific names give precision and avoid confusion between similar foodstuffs but there are few compelling reasons to display them in shops, recipes or restaurants. The correct place to use them is in academic publications and in biodiversity assessments, for example.

The world of taxonomy is full of earnest scientists and long lists of daunting names. I have to think hard when saying and spelling Pseudohansfordia. Fortunately, some taxonomists have a sense of fun. My friend Tony Rees pointed me to a 2019 paper on miniaturised frogs from Madagascar. Humour lurks in mysterious corners of academia. The authors of the paper discovered and named a new genus Mini. You may see what’s coming, though it’s not, sadly, Mini cooper. Appositely (these are tiny, tiny frogs) we now have Mini scule, Mini ature and Mini mum.

I vaguely remember a fossil species named Aha aha but sadly can find no trace of it. All is not lost. An Australian entomologist named a new species of wasp as Aha ha in 2017. A big shout out to Linnaeus, the originator of the scientific name system, for Phallus impudicus. Yes, this mushroom bears a close resemblance. It also smells of rotten meat, designed to attract flies which spread its spores. Let’s move on. Rubikia, a micro fungus, has spores which resemble a Rubik’s cube which, according to the namers, “have a complex structure which we have been unable to understand”. Boom boom.

In their purest form, scientific names are tagged with the taxonomist or authority who named them. Linnaeus has the unique honour of being represented by a single letter, as in Zea mays L. This tagging is most useful in taxonomic publications. Quite why an exporter of mango from Peru felt it necessary to include the scientific name of mango (Mangifera indica L.) and the authority is unclear. Vittorio Picco often has his name included in displays of Tuber magnatum, the famous and expensive (white) truffle.

Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Leopold Fuckel was a German botanist and a prolific namer of fungus species. Two genera bear his name: Fuckella and Fuckelina. There have been over well over a hundred scientific names based on his surname. So far so amusing, yet worse is to come. For many years his name was routinely shortened in tags and there are many scientific publications peppered with expletives. Context is all, and a blissful ignorance of English swear words in earlier times delayed the reversion to the full surname.

I mentioned Signor Picco and truffles just now. These are highly prized and priced underground fungi. A few weeks back. the central market in Florence was offering black truffles (Tuber melanosporum) for €700 a kilo. Summer truffles (T. aestivum) are less esteemed and expensive and these and other species are commonly used to flavour foodstuffs. Desert truffles, found in drier regions of Africa and the Middle East, also grow underground and are highly valued. Chocolate truffles have nothing to do with these fungi. Or they didn't until an enterprising company in Tuscany decided to combine the chocolate variety (Theobroma cacao) with true truffles. They have a distinct and unsettling taste. Available at a gourmet store near you for a mere €16.