More naming thoughts

English is currently the language of science. It wasn't always so; Latin and German have held the title at various times.

But since English currently rules the roost, why do I advocate using "Marmorkrebs" in the scientific literature instead of "marbled crayfish"? Doesn't my recent story about why I registered a new domain name favour using an English name?

The main reason I advocate using "Marmorkrebs" is precisely because it isn't an English word. Hence, it is distinctive and unique. This reduces confusion, because there are no doubt many species of crayfish that could be described as "marbled."

"Marmorkrebs" also greatly facilitates web searches (increasingly a consideration), because it is a single word. If you type in "marble crayfish," you'll get pages about crayfish. You'll probably also get pages about marble, both the mineral and the kids' toys. You will also get the combination, of course, but you have a lot more chaff to sort through.

Deep questions on parthenogenesis

Flacco is one of those cultural icons who defies easy description. He's an Australian comedic and satirical observer. Sort of. He's a creation of Paul Livingston.

Flacco wryly asks many questions about parthenogenesis on this week's Science Show, courtesy of the Australian Radio National. You can listen to the audio online now – but hurry, as the audio files don't stay up indefinitely. A transcript should be up soon.

Additional: Here’s the transcript!

oday I'd like to discuss parthenogenesis. Many creatures are parthenogenetic. That is, they have no need to be fertilised. The common aphid, for example, is a parthenogenetic miracle. All aphids experience virgin birth, which makes one ponder. Perhaps Joseph’s wife Mary was parthenogenetic. Does this mean that Joseph was in fact sexually excited by aphids, certain wasps and jellyfish? Was Mother Mary a crustacean? Certain Christians don't like eating fish on Fridays. Now we know why.

And some bacteria are also parthenogenetic. These bacteria could reveal a whole new frontier if we could study their ways and perhaps adapt to parthenogenesis ourselves. Imagine if we were all self-fertilising. How do parthenogenetics fall in love? Do they date themselves before self-fertilising? Is there dinner involved? A movie perhaps? Are they monogamous? Is it possible to be jealous of yourself? Does a parthenogenetic creature mate for life? And if not, how would they cope with a divorce? Who gets the mouth?

What if you are a parthenogenetic swinger, a real parthenogenetic party animal? You throw yourself a party, accept your own invitation, then you go to the party suppliers where you purchase a packet of ice breakers, a round of introductions, two kilos of small talk, some idle chatter, a lengthy anecdote, a hearty laugh, a faux pas, two quips and three uninvited guests. And if you do get lucky and manage to get yourself drunk and crack onto yourself, you wake up in the morning, realise you’ve made a mistake, you try to creep quietly out of your own bed, you leave a note saying ‘I’ll call’ but you’ll never call back, with the result that you never see yourself again. Well, all I can say is, you only have yourself to blame.

Making something great

There's a thoughtful post on the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) blog about the difficulties in creating an ambitious project like EOL.

Now that EOL is live and people have had a chance to look around, it is striking that 76% percent of visitors don’t return, and 44% of all visitors left in under 10 seconds. After the initial launch where, if anything, EOL was too popular, interest seems to have dropped off markedly. One possible reason for this is the relative lack of content. As I noted elsewhere, for many pages EOL compares unfavourably with other sites(.)

The blog mentions an interesting project called iSpecies. It's a sort of species-based multi-search. Luckily, it work from common names as well as scientific names. For Marmorkrebs, it brings up the English Wikipedia article (no surprise), but also several pictures.

ZipcodeZoo also looks interesting, although it's highly geared towards plants and vertebrates. But then, its target is naturalists, not scientists.

So despite the current content problems, Encyclopedia of Life still looks to have the best shot at becoming the point of call for scientists looking for research information on a species.

But I digress. The EOL project is struggling with high expectations and the curse of the internet age: impatience. People want a lot done instantly. I have to wonder if the prospect of spending years to make even a small dent in the problem of generating even a fraction of webpages needed could mortally wound the EOL venture. I think researchers need to see progress before they're willing to come on board in a significant way.

In many ways, the problems of the highly visible EOL project are much like those facing the fledgling Marmorkrebs community. With this website, I am deliberately trying to raise expectations about Marmorkrebs as a model organism. But if progress is too slow, people feel their expectations are not met and lose interest. It's a fine line to walk.

Panorama

Marmorkrebs were recently been featured in our campus annual magazine, Panorama.


I was also the subject of some dodgy photo manipulations.



Despite the large amount of photoshopping, I will admit that the geek T-shirt with the TARDIS on it was what I actually happened to be wearing. (The picture was taken during our break; I normally don't wear it to work.) The crayleks influence maybe?

A new road home

I was directing a colleague to the Marmorkrebs home page to show him what I had done, and had something of an epiphany. When I told him, "Go to marmorkrebs.org," he didn't get it. I had to spell out the entire word. letter by letter. I suppose there are lost of variant spellings that someone hearing "Marmorkebs" might try. "Marmorecrebs," "marmerkrebs," "marmurcrabs..."

If you want to direct people to this site, you might have an easier time telling them to visit:

MarbledCrayfish.org!

This redirects to the regular Marmorkrebs.org home page. I may update the masthead to reflect the double domain name.

What's in a name?

One of the many ways in which Marmorkrebs is an oddity is that it's extremely unusual for an organism to be the subject of multiple scholarly research papers... but have no name. It's even more unusual that nobody, as far as I know, is in any sort of hurry to give Marmorkrebs a proper scientific name.

Scientific names for organisms are also known as Latin names. Carl Linnaeus (pictured) started the naming scheme used in biology to today, with a few modifications. At the time, Latin was still a fairly dominant language of scholarship. So Linnaeus gave plants, and later animals, names in Latin. I think names based on Greek are also acceptable.

Today, for animals, the rules for names are handled by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). There are similar but separate organizations for plants and microbes and, I believe, fossils.

I'm going to do my best to summarize other people's arguments about giving Marmorkrebs a scientific name. (Some of these are based on half-remembered conversational snippets from conferences, so forgive me if I make errors.)

Marmorkrebs seems to belong in the genus Procambarus. The major crayfish taxonomist who described many of the members of this genus was a man with the wonderfully alliterative name of Horton H. Hobbs, Jr.. He based many of his species descriptions on the basis of the male sex organs... which Marmorkrebs, being all females, do not have.

The next plan of attack might be to use genetics. But there really isn't a lot of precedent for describing species on the basis of genes alone. I am not sure whether the ICZN code allows it. Regardless of whether it is permissible, there are strongly established traditions in taxonomy, and formal species descriptions are supposed to have detailed morphological descriptions, designate a type specimen for safekeeping in a museum, and so on.

And as you consider the problem of whether to give Marmorkrebs a scientific name, it leads to a very core question: What is a species? This is a question that has resulted in a lot of ink being spilled in scientific papers, and simply put, there is no consensus on how to define a species.

Based on some comments Keith Crandall has made, Marmorkrebs are genetically extremely similar Procambarus alleni... so following some species concepts that revolve around morphological separation, this might qualify as putting Marmorkrebs in with P. alleni.

But because Marmorkrebs reproduce asexually, they do not interbreed with sexual species... so following species concepts that revolve around interbreeding, this would suggest that Marmorkrebs should get its own species name.

As the preface to the latest edition of the code of zoological nomenclature notes:

One should always keep in mind that an important function of classifications is information retrieval.

So maybe it's not really critical to have a scientific Latin name immediately in these days of search engines and databases... but what is definitely important is to have a consistent name, one that can be found in databases.

For obvious reasons, I suggest "Marmorkrebs" be that name for use in titles and keywords.

Great moments in crayfish research: Electrical synapses

If neurons are separate, how do they communicate?

The first early decades of the 20^th century saw two major ideas emerging, which the great comparative physiologist Ted Bullock characterized as “soups versus sparks.”

Bullock’s “soups’ were chemicals released by neurons, which are now called neurotransmitters. Bullock’s “sparks” were electrical signals, which were thought to transmit directly from cell to cell.

Otto Loewi provided strong evidence for chemical neurotransmission between nerves and the heart. Loewi considered the matter conclusively proved. After he won the Nobel prize for his experiments, one might have reasonably considered the matter settled in favour of the “soups” camp.

So it was a bit of a surprise when two neurophysiologists, Ed Furshpan and David Potter, working on giant crayfish neurons found evidence for neurons communicating through sparks – electrical synapses.

Furshpan and Potter were studying the giant neurons involved in escape responses. In particular, they were examining the connections between the lateral giant neurons and the motor neurons that go on to connect to muscle. Work on chemical synapses had shown short delays whenever there was a synapse between two neurons: the time needed for the chemicals to diffuse between the small gap between the cells. Furshpan and Potter found the delay between the crayfish neurons to be much, much shorter – a small fraction of a millisecond (picture). But it was easy to see how such connections could be advantageous when the neurons were responsible for a rapid escape response.

Although some may have thought this would be peculiar to invertebrates, they were soon shown to be in vertebrates, too.

Thus, crayfish provided the first conclusive evidence for the existence of a different way that neurons could communicate.

References

Furshpan EE, Potter DD. 1957. Mechanism of nerve-impulse transmission at a crayfish synapse. Nature 180(4581): 342-343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/180342a0

Furshpan EE, Potter DD. 1959. Transmission at the giant motor synapses of the crayfish. Journal of Physiology 145(2): 289-325.