Question: As you work with all sorts of animals do you have to remember Latin or Scientific Names?
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In bacteriology very few actually have common names and so there is no choice. This is probably due to most micro-organisms being identified after the common naming system Dustin mentioned above (called Linnaean Taxonomy). If they do have common names they are often just simplifications of the Latin, for example Streptococcus pneumoniae becomes the pneumococcus.
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It is actually a lot easier remembering scientific names, as they describe how different organisms are related to each other. I have to remember quite a few different ones because there are many well known cytochrome P450 enzymes from different bacteria, fungi, plants or animals and it is often easier to explain how certain enzymes are similar/related to each other using the scientific names of the organism they come from.
Hi pnemonoultramicroscopicsillicovolcanoconiosis
Yeah, but it is no more difficult than remembering the words for other things. In fact, it can be easier.
The scientific name (or the binomial scientific name, binomial meaning “two part”) can give you a lot of information.
For example, let’s pick two snake species the “King Brown Snake” and the “Eastern Brown Snake”.
These common names might make us think that these two species of snake are related, but they are not.
Their scientific names are Pseudechis australis and Pseudonaja textilis. The first word in each of their names is their genus, or their generic name; and the second word is the species or the specific name.
So now we can see that they are not that closely related. But what about the Red Bellied Black Snake, its scientific name is Pseudechis porphyriacus.
What we see is that the “King Brown Snake” is actually related to the Red Bellied Black Snake as they have the same generic name, but are different species so different specific name.
So the scientific names of things give us a lot of information that normal names cannot. You can think of it like how we have two names. My name is Dustin Welbourne, so i am a Welbourne, specifically Dustin. My brother is a Welbourne, specifically Jamie.
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