16 March 2010

Please don’t call her “Procambarus marmorkrebs”

I routinely see people referring to “Procambarus marmorkrebs” on the web. For the record, there is no such species name.

Procambarus sp.” is okay. The “sp.” indicates an undetermined species in a genus. “Marmorkrebs” is okay as a common name; indeed, I recommend it over marbled crayfish. But “P. marmorkrebs” can’t be a species name, because “Marmorkrebs” is a German word, not Latin or Greek.

It’s a grating error to put the two of them together.

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