Short and sweet: an analysis of the length of parasite species names

Abstract

In its advice to taxonomists, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) recommends that scientific species names should be compact, memorable, and easy to pronounce. Here, using a dataset of over 3000 species of parasitic helminths described in the past two decades, we investigate trends in the length of Latin specific names (=epithets) chosen by taxonomists. Our results reveal no significant temporal change in the length of species epithets as a function of year of description, with annual averages fluctuating around the overall average length of just over 9 letters. We also found that lengths of species epithets did not differ among the various host taxa from which the parasites were recovered, however acanthocephalan species have been given longer species epithets than other helminth taxa. Finally, although species epithets were shorter than genus names for three-quarters of the species in our dataset, we detected no relationship between the length of species epithets and that of genus names across all species included, i.e., there was no evidence that shorter species epithets are chosen to compensate for long genus names. We conclude by encouraging parasite taxonomists to follow the recommendations of the ICZN and choose species epithets that are, as much as possible, compact and easy to remember, pronounce and spell.