The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name

G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."

Comments

It's not Sophophora yet

[ethogram]

The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) ruling addressed a request to name D. melanogaster as the type species for the genus. Under the rules of nomenclature, another species in the genus has naming priority. As long as the genus (currently more than 1400 species) remains intact there is no name change for melanogaster. However, the biologist who submitted the petition to protect the name D. melanogaster did so because a revision and splitting of Drosophila is long overdue (and is apparently interested in taking on the project). The ICZN did not make this decision lightly, it has been under review for a couple of years.

Re:No surprise

[Monkey-Man2000]

The people upset in this case aren't the "lay people [who] get upset when the limited amount of science that they have been taught changes". It's the scientists that use fruit flies as research models because it will confuse the scientific literature. That is, the biologists are upset at the zoologists who classify the species.