Wordplay: The logical in zoological
Pteropus poliocephalus is a smelly bugger. Your nose will crinkle minutes before reaching the park, inhaling that weird camembert whiff of wild animals. The bats hang from river gums, squeaky and restless, every branch a leather chandelier. I visit the hideaway whenever I can, the colony a hike from home, my bid to reconnect with nature, stench and all.
Wing-foot grey-head is the literal translation, which adds up once you meet the flying fox. The logic is the brainchild of Carl Linnaeaus, a Swede desperate to rank the rankness of nature. Taxonomy itself means order-naming, and that was Carl's ambition, his radical system of 1725 usurping the facile Greek ladder proposed by Plato and his ilk.
Because nature isn't neat. Hyenas don't queue; mosquitoes shirk at mustering. When's the last time you put a squid in a box? It's not easy. Linnaeaus ditched the ladder for a web, his Latin binomials the expandable template that fauna and flora demanded, an incomplete crossword for future biologists to fill.
Each binomial serves as a signpost. First is the genus (the species group with its capital letter), then the lower-case generic, specifying the species within that group. For instance, Ailuropoda melanoleuca (or cat-foot black-white) is the giant panda – not just poetic, but systematic. Acrobat little-head? That's the sugar glider, with every other glider joining the Petaurus nest, each variant a distinct "surname" to delineate the cousin further.
Ladders are limited. Reindeer parasite alone can boast a 1000 subspecies, and here's where a web can sprawl. Mirroring an IKEA catalogue, the Linnaean system is a paragon of warehousing, bound by geometry and grammar, where the phyla of animals, plants and fungi are the equivalent of tables, beds and throw cushions.
Mind you, the system can strain. In 2005, a new Bolivian monkey copped the tag of Callicebus aureipalatii (or gorilla-golden-palace), after a US casino won a bidding war to brand its own primate. Then there's the uxorious naturalist named WE Leach, devotee of his beloved Cornelia. On one field trip, let loose among crabs, Leach christened each new species with the likes of Conilera, Lironeca, Nerocila and Olencira.
Away from infatuation, the naff can strike too, from a jellyfish called Tamoya ohboya, a moth named Heerz tooya and a spider claiming Apopyllus now. John Wright, a fungus fancier from West Dorset, charts the logic, and occasional high-jinks, in his The Naming of the Shrew (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Wright tells of a tropical snail in Queensland called Crikey steveirwinii, plus a bootylicious horsefly that Australia's own Bryan Lessard (or Bry the Fly Guy) observed in 2012. With its golden rump and twerking prowess, the fly was tailor-made for Scaptia beyonceae.
Though perhaps the most mortifying tale belongs to Gerard Smets, a Belgian fossil-hunter. One day, noodling in a quarry in 1888, Smets unearthed the jawbone of Aachenosaurus multidens (Aachen-lizard-with-many-teeth), the first relic of its kind. Small wonder, as other scientists later identified the bone as a petrified stick. The "nomen dubium" (or dodgy name) was exposed in a paper called The Wooden Dinosaur. Truly, taxonomy can be taxing.
Even Carl Linnaeaus erred, the father of order rummaging wetlands in southern Sweden, back in 1728. Ow! Something bit him. A worm he surmised, claiming the invisible annelid to be Furia infernalis, or "fury from hell", and returning to his bog duties.
Except the worm was no worm. Carl's wriggler was a whopper. The actual culprit belonged to the Tabanidae family, alias the horsefly, as consequent detectives figured from the trip's field notes, the demon worm hailing from a different phylum altogether. Since nature tends to scorn exactitude, or blind conjecture: just ask the smelly wing-foot grey-heads hanging round my place.
davidastle.com
Twitter @dontattempt
Hyenas don't queue; mosquitoes shirk at mustering. When's the last time you put a squid in a box?