The latest news from the Three Kings Islands Marine Expedition
Q- If you find a new species of fish will you get to give it a name right away? And can you call it anything you like?View Video GalleyView Photo Galley
Our expedition team is back from the Three Kings Islands and ready to answer your questions about what they found and to show you some of the specimens they collected to help build their understanding of the marine environment.
The blog has been a fantastic chance to follow their discoveries but now you can meet them face to face and talk to them about their preliminary findings about marine life in the Three Kings.
In the few days since the team got back on dry land they've already identified that one of the fish they found is likely to be a new species. So who knows what tomorrow will bring.
You can meet four of the team - including University of Queensland PhD student Libby Liggins and one of the expedition's photographers Richard Robinson - tomorrow at 11am at the Auckland Museum. There are some more details of the session below and we've also got some more underwater footagREAD MORE...
A- If we find a species that has never been identified before we will get to name it but it won’t happen right away. The first thing we will have to do is make absolutely sure it is a new species and if it really is we’ll need to write up a very detailed description so we can share that with other scientists around the world.
If it all checks out okay we can give it a name (some species are named after the scientist who found them or the area they were found in) but there are some rules to follow with its scientific name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature to make sure it provides useful information for other researchers that study the fish in the future.
A- If we find a species that has never been identified before we will get to name it but it won’t happen right away. The first thing we will have to do is make absolutely sure it is a new species and if it really is we’ll need to write up a very detailed description so we can share that with other scientists around the world.
If it all checks out okay we can give it a name (some species are named after the scientist who found them or the area they were found in) but there are some rules to follow with its scientific name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature to make sure it provides useful information for other researchers that study the fish in the future.
Hi Stephen, you’re right, I’ll be a bit more careful with my language – I was paraphrasing our scientists, should have copied it down verbatim! Hopefully we’ll discover some previously unknown species!
2 Responses to “Q- If you find a new species of fish will you get to give it a name right away? And can you call it anything you like?”
Stephen Beasley
I hate to be a stickler, but a new species isn’t a so much a new’ species as much it is a ‘previously unknown’ species.
Melanie Cooper
Hi Stephen, you’re right, I’ll be a bit more careful with my language – I was paraphrasing our scientists, should have copied it down verbatim! Hopefully we’ll discover some previously unknown species!