The whale named 'mouse'

A SONG thrush is singing despite the heavy frost which has coated fields around the upper parishes as I write this feature.

It is the first of March and the bird is responding to the longer days – we had our first 'in like a lion' storm yesterday, marking the spring equinox.

The bird's song is delightful, immortally captured in Robert Browning's poem, Home Thoughts From Abroad:

'That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!'

You might think that Browning influenced those who gave the song thrush its scientific name, Turdus philomelos.

Turdus means thrush and is applied to the whole of the family, which includes blackbird, redwing, fieldfare and mistle thrush.

The specific name philomelos is after the Philomela, in Greek mythology daughter of Pandion, who was violated by her brother-in-law and turned into a nightingale.

Thus the scientific name of song thrush means the thrush that sings like a nightingale.

People often refer to scientific nomenclature as 'Latin names'. While this is true of most, they are made up of words from all sorts of languages and can often tell us much about the species being considered.

The gannets which breed on Ortac and the Garden Rocks off Alderney also nest on the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth.

It is a huge and dramatic colony, one of the largest for this species. Taxonomists, who are responsible for naming all living creatures, thought it was such a feature that they called the bird Morus bassanus, the gannet (Morus) of the Bass Rock.

Another place name to occur among local birds is that of the Kentish plover, Charadrius alexandrinus. This is named after Alexandria in Egypt – site of the habitat most favoured by this bird: 'habitat ad Aegypti ex Nilo canalem,' according to Linnaeus, who set up the naming system around 1750.

He recognised that birds, animals and plants had different names in the various places and countries in which they were found. This made communication between scientists difficult and he devised the system which is used to this day.

Latin was the scientific language of the day, now replaced by English, and he adopted that as the basis for naming every living organism in the world.

Birds, and more often plants, have frequently been named after people. The roseate tern is called Sterna dougallii after physician Dr Patrick MacDougall, who had a practice in Glasgow, close to where the birds were first described.

Occasionally the name refers to a patron who financed the expedition which first discovered the species.

A wader called Calidris canutus (Calidris is the family of shorebirds) was named after King Canute because of their habit of chasing waves down the beach and then running back again when the next comes in.

The bird's common name in the Middle Ages was Canute and this gradually became corrupted to today's name of knot.

The influence of mythology is strong in scientific names.

The wigeon, a species of wild duck, is named Anas penelope (Anas is the family name for most ducks).

Penelope was the daughter of the King of Sparta, who heard a prediction that his death shroud would be woven by his daughter.

Throwing her into the sea, she survived because a duck with purple stripes rescued and fed her. The wigeon took the credit and her name in scientific circles.

One of my favourite stories relates to an orchid and a hawk moth found in Madagascar. The island was visited by Charles Darwin on his world journey on the Beagle.

While researching insect pollination of orchids in January 1862, he received a package from the distinguished horticulturist James Bateman.

Darwin was surprised at the 'astonishing length' of the whip-like green spur forming the nectary of each flower.

He told Joseph Hooker: 'I have just received such a box full from Mr Bateman with the astounding Angaecum sesquipedalia which has a nectary a foot long – good Heavens! What insect can suck it?'

The spur of the flower is 20–35cm (7.9-14in.) from its tip to the flower's lip. The specific name sesquipedale is Latin for one-and-a-half feet.

Darwin predicted that there was a moth with a proboscis long enough to reach the nectar at the end.

Forty-one years later a moth was discovered in Madagascar. It approaches the flower to ascertain by scent whether or not it is the correct orchid species. It then backs up more than a foot and unrolls its 12in proboscis before flying forward, inserting it into the orchid's spur to suck the nectar.

It was described as a sub-species of the African hawk moth and named Xanthopan morganii praedicta. The sub-specific name 'praedicta' was given to mark the fact that Darwin predicted its existence.

Scientists faced with naming the huge blue whale called it Balaenoptera musculus.

It was a taxonomic joke: Balaenoptera is the genus of baleen whales while musculus is the diminutive form of mus, meaning mouse.

Thus the joke is that the biggest animal ever to have lived on Earth, weighing in at 120 tons (three equal the weight of a jumbo jet), was named 'the tiny-mouse-like whale'.What's in a name? People, places, characteristics and even a joke have inspired the scientific names every living creature has been given by taxonomists.