Common names for moths

[Seabrooke Leckie]

Would it be possible to update the common names for moth species to reflect those used in the Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America? Since this is the guide most moth folks will be using to make their IDs prior to submitting to the site, I feel it would make uploading observations easier. I've found myself numerous times trying to type in a name from the guide, but it's listed under something different here, or hasn't been given a common name at all.

I know this would be a big job. I'd volunteer to do it, but have a lot on my plate at the moment as we wrap up preparation of the new field guide (PFG to Moths of Southeastern North America). But I might be able to slowly work through it later in the summer, once the book is done, if no one else is up to the task. Is there someone I should talk to about this?

[Scott Loarie]

Hi Seabrooke,

Anyone can add/manage common names under Names in the Taxonomy tab on
a species page, eg
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_id=seabrookeleckie&verifiable=any

But as you say its tedious.

If you can provide a CSV file structured like this:

Scientific Name, Common Name
Lymantria dispar, Gypsy Moth
...

We can batch upload it

Best,

Scott

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Scott R. Loarie, Ph.D.
Co-director, iNaturalist.org
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr
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[Seabrooke Leckie]

I can absolutely do that. As we've worked through both books we've tracked all our bits and pieces with an Excel spreadsheet, so I've already got it all there. Just need to turn it into a CSV for you. Where should I send it?

I did not know that about adding to common names. Thanks for that tip, that's helpful!

--Seabrooke

[Scott Loarie]

Sure - Excel is fine too!

[Charlie Hohn]

hi Seabrooke! This is the same Charlie who you just emailed and who will respond soon :)

One thing I wanted to mention is that adding common names is incredibly valuable but be careful about removing them. As you know there aren't really any standards for common names, in fact it is that way by definition. If a common name is causing problems, like it seems like someone made it out of the blue, it's dramatically wrong (like labelling a rosy maple moth a monarch butterfly), or it is heavily redundant (a moth where someone entered the common name of 'moth'),, it might be worth deleting, but in most cases it's best to leave them be. You can click on the common name to edit, if you are a curator, and it will show you who edited it last. If it was a human (and not UDigBio or something) you can message them and ask.

I only mention this because another new curator came in a deleted a bunch of common names that weren't used in their region (but were heavily used elsewhere) and caused problems. If you are just importing a CSV it probably won't delete anything. But not surprisingly, a comon name that is heavily used one place might never be used elsewhere. They are really neat cultural 'handles' that attach to species, This is especially true with taxa like plants that have been heavily used and addressed in culture for centuries.

Welcome!

[Tim. Reichard]

It would be great to include the common names from the Peterson guides, BugGuide, and Moth Photographers Group.  I have been adding them as I've spotted missing ones.  Many were already included a few years ago.

It's tougher to decide which common name should be the primary one.  There aren't any criteria to decide if the Peterson name is better than the BG or MPG name where they differ. And there's no guarantee that someone wouldn't later change the primary name to a different common name.  Black-dotted Glyph has not stuck, for example, even though it's the only fully English name: http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/211012-Maliattha-synochitis

Tim 

[Charlie Hohn]

there isn't even such thing as a primary common name on iNat is there? You can however set a name as the default for the place. Works well for regional differences.

[Scott Loarie]

The position of name under Global Names sets the primary common name
(outside of any preferences that might give a particular place name
priority). This is under Manage Names which you can get to from a
species page -> Taxonomy Tab -> Names section

[Seabrooke Leckie]

Thanks for the caution, Charlie. It's a shame that names haven't been officially standardized for any group other than birds yet, though butterflies and some other vertebrates are pretty good. It just makes discussions so much easier. I know a lot of people, particularly older folks who have been in the hobby a lot longer and their knowledge pre-dates recent guides with common names, advocate for knowing scientific names for this reason, but I'm afraid my brain just doesn't work in Latin. English names feel familiar and stick easily, in a way that Latin/Greek-based names don't. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

When we prepared the field guide to northeastern moths we made the conscious decision to ensure that every single species in the book had a common name, for this reason - making it easier on beginners. We coined a lot ourselves as a result (incidentally, Charles Covell coined lots for his landmark guide, too, since even fewer had established common names then). If a name already existed on BugGuide/MPG or elsewhere on the web, 98% of the time we went with that. So hopefully in most cases the PFG guide should match up with what's online. The only exception is we've dropped "moth" from the end of a lot of names (we don't call it a "Yellow Warbler Bird", right?).

As an aside, your example of Black-dotted Glyph, Tim -- This is one where we adjusted the name slightly (also fan-foots and snouts, among others). In the case of the glyphs, they'd gone through so many taxonomic revisions recently that the common names were all over the place and often didn't match up with the current genus (eg. you can find old online records for Black-dotted Lithacodia - Maliattha synochitis). Giving them an English group name tidied all that up and got around any future revision. (In the case of the fan-foots, this is the group's name in the UK, and who can pronounce Zanclognatha, really?) I suspect the reason Glyph hasn't stuck for a lot of people is you tend to use the name you learned the species as when you were first learning, even after things change. I call them all glyphs, but of course, I wrote the book... ;)

I will work on tidying up and exporting our project spreadsheets so they can be uploaded for use here. Who should I email it to?

[Seabrooke Leckie]

there isn't even such thing as a primary common name on iNat is there? You can however set a name as the default for the place. Works well for regional differences.

Oh really? I'm assuming this has to be a defined place, like a park, though? I couldn't do it for my own backyard, for instance.. :) 

[Charlie Hohn]

I actually personally think that 'standardized common names' is an oxymoron. Common names are cultural handles tacked to a species, with different cultures and even different regions of the same country using different ones. They aren't MEANT to be Linnaean and in fact many were created long before Linnaeus. I may call something black cherry and someone else in a different part of the US  call it Rum Cherry and both have stories, cultural context, traditional uses, etc mixed in. In some regions, they call aspen 'Popple', a corruption of Poplar i guess. Why? I don't know. Sometimes a plant is referred to by the product it produces, other times what it smells or looks like, other common names make no sense at all. Animals have all kinds of bizarre common names Some of them, like 'killer whale', are probably better abandoned, but others are aazing glimpses into how humans interact with animals.

Not that I think you don't know any of this, of course, but rather I just think it's worth noting in this discussion as a reason not to force one common name on everything. Someone tried to do this with New England plants and tried to match them with Linnaean taxonomy. It was dumb. A bunch of names got forced that didn't make any sense and no one uses (oe 'white walnut' for Butternut because it was a Juglans), to me and others it came off as arrogant and dismissive and just plain obnoxious. 

If you want Linnaean consistency, you really have to use scientific names. It's unfortunate that scientific names aren't consistent either and are always changing and being messed with. I think all the changes d a disservice, and the creation of ridiculously long names like 'Schoenoplectus' shows a naivete to those that do field work or outreach. No one wants to write that crap on a data sheet. But I digress here... 

The work you have done on moths sounds amazing! I just don't think a similar approach works well for plants and mammals, for instance. Moths are awesome but have historically been underappreciated as you know. Plants and mammals, well maybe they are also underappreciated but they aren't unnamed.

That's my take on it all anyway, as just one iNat user. I think the common names should be left alone and not standardized, unless there are duplicates or a species and a genus given the same name (for instance a bunch of different sphagnum species used to be called sphagnum, that causes lots of user error when people don't mean to classify to a species). I don't object to standardizing moth names i guess but i just don't know them well. i look forward to knowledge you bring about them :)

[Scott Loarie]

Common names can be 'global' or associated with any place (country,
state, back yard). If there are multiple common names in the same
language and place (including global) then the one that is displayed
is the on in the primary position. As folks mentioned in this thread,
when this happens there's no great way for objectively deciding which
is in the primary position other than good old fashioned discussion

[Seabrooke Leckie]

This is a great point, Charlie. I hadn't really ever thought of common names as a reflection of local culture, though I of course knew that many varied by region. There are definitely some colourful names, and often descriptive.

I agree that there is value and interest in maintaining all of a species' common names, to reflect and preserve its cultural history. And perhaps regionally people could use whichever they prefer. However, I think this starts to create problems when it comes to citizen science. Professionals with biological training understand the scientific nomenclature and how to track changes there and are comfortable using that as a primary reference. But the average nature-watcher, while aware of scientific names, probably doesn't use them much. I could give you only a handful of scientific names for birds, for instance (Tyrranus tyrranus! Troglodytes troglodytes! So helpful when they repeat themselves). But that's not a problem, because in North America we have one set of standardized names, so when I tell you Eastern Kingbird, you know exactly which species I mean.

This is not so much the case for others with many names. The issue was really driven home for me in working on these two field guides. In the species accounts we include host plant info, and most of the time we use common names because they're more immediately recognizable than Latin (also shorter). But with so many names for things, which one do we choose to use? Related, what about when the same name is used for multiple species? A particular bugbear is the species group that includes hop-hornbeam, hornbeam and ironwood. I can tie my brain in knots trying to sort those out.

Also, we drew our host plant info from multiple sources and some might use one name while others used another. When we weren't familiar with the plant in question and didn't recognize the names, we would sometimes inadvertently use two different names in the text. Our copyeditor had the job of combing through the accounts and finding all the spots where we'd done that. Then she'd send me the list and ask which one we wanted to use. I usually went with what the USDA plants database, or otherwise what the general consensus of Google was amongst its search results.

I was uploading a bunch of my moth pics from this spring the other evening and tried to label Grieving Woodling. No such species came up in the iNat results. I knew it was a species of Egira, though couldn't remember the specific name, so I searched that, but none of those looked right either. I finally had to google the darn thing to get the species name. Turns out in the iNat database it's called Lined Black Aspen?? Never heard that name. The front-page image for the species is incredibly pale, much more than any we get around here, so I didn't recognize it when browsing the results for Egira.

So, tl;dr - I think preserving the regional variation in names is important, but I think for the purposes of citizen science it would be useful to try to have a single set of names that would make it easier for people to learn species and record and submit data. Whose names do we choose? Worth discussion, but I feel field guides, the things citizen scientists will be using when making their identifications, should be among the frontrunners.

Good conversation on this topic!

[Paul Bailey]

When we prepared the field guide to northeastern moths we made the conscious decision to ensure that every single species in the book had a common name, for this reason - making it easier on beginners. We coined a lot ourselves as a result (incidentally, Charles Covell coined lots for his landmark guide, too, since even fewer had established common names then). If a name already existed on BugGuide/MPG or elsewhere on the web, 98% of the time we went with that. So hopefully in most cases the PFG guide should match up with what's online. The only exception is we've dropped "moth" from the end of a lot of names (we don't call it a "Yellow Warbler Bird", right?).

 What's the policy on entering common names into iNaturalist? I didn't realize that we could use self-coined names for species that didn't have an established common name.

I ask because these days I'm mostly making observations of insect and spider species in South Korea, and while I have encountered a few English common names there are also many that have only a scientific name and Korean name associated with the species. As a result, a decent chunk of my insect and spider observations only have scientific names. Do I get to (or perhaps it's better to say, "Am I allowed to ...") create English common names for these species in iNaturalist?

For example, there's the jumping spider Evarcha albaria, which is known as 흰눈썹깡충거미 in Korean. If this species were introduced to the United States or some other English-speaking country someone else would be coming up with a common name, so why not start using an English translation of the Korean name ("White-eyebrowed jumping spider") so at least it's present for any other English speakers who encounter this species? I would prefer that over some abstract name like "Smith's jumping spider".

[Charlie Hohn]

my understanding is we aren't supposed to make up our own common names, but translating the meaning of one from one language to another seems fine to me. Anyone else?

[Scott Loarie]

I don't think we have an official policy, but ideally names should be
widely used and be sourced.

The only time I can think that I've made up a common name is when a
genus has like 5 members all of them with common names except one and
they all have the same format, e.g. XXX's glider & the species
epithets are all from people's names, so e.g. I might make up Hohn's
Glider for the missing one if the species name was Charlius hohnius or
something

[Charlie Hohn]

Hahahaha because that species is definitely gonna exist :)

[Paul Bailey]

We "aren't supposed to make up our own common names" and "names should be widely used and sourced" -- so how does that work with all these 'new' names that were coined simply to have common names in the moth guide that are now going to be added to iNaturalist? Those seem to go against both requirements/suggestions.

[Charlie Hohn]

if it's in a popular field guide that would be 'widely used and sourced'.

[Paul Bailey]

Thanks for the clarification. I misinterpreted that line to mean the original common name rather than the guidebook.

[Seabrooke Leckie]

Paul, my takeaway from the comments here is that in your situation, it would be fine to add the English translation of the Korean common name for the organisms you're observing. You're not making a name up from scratch, simply transporting it from one language to another. Somebody's gotta do it! Might as well be you, if you're using the site in that capacity anyway.

I think the reservation being expressed is regarding someone just creating names here that are not being used anywhere else - it would likely be more confusing than helpful. In the case of the Peterson guides (both Covell's and my own), we created names with the expectation that the book would launch the common name into more widespread and accepted usage, and respected pre-existing names when possible (even though I think some of them are dumb). A common name created for and appearing in the guide will be used by everyone using that guide; whereas a common name created for and only appearing on iNaturalist will be used by only a handful of people, most likely.

I actually had a conversation about creation of common names with one of the guys at the Canadian National Collection of Insects, because I had some reservations about being the one to do it for the book (what makes me more entitled than others?). His comments essentially boiled down to: someone has to do it eventually, and it usually falls to the people creating official reference material that will be widely used and cited (commercial field guides, NGO national checklists, government reference/info documents for species, and academic research papers).

[Charlie Hohn]

I dunno the way inat is growing a common name created here MIGHT become widespread. but i agree we probably shouldn't make them up, fun as it sounds.

[Mark Rosenstein]

There is one kind of name that I have created here a couple of times.  There are several pairs of very similar species which occur in different parts of the world with the same common name.  For instance, Peacock Flounder is Bothus mancus in the Pacific and Bothus lunatus in the Atlantic.  When I have seen people repeatedly choosing the wrong one because they don't know the difference and just pick the first one that comes up, I have renamed both with the region in the name, i.e. Atlantic Peacock Flounder and Pacific Peacock Flounder.  I leave the less specific, but more commonly used, names as additional names too.  I've been tempted to do this with some butterfly species, such as White Admiral, but haven't yet.

-Mark

[James Bailey]

Paul,

This is a general rule to stop people making up names.

There is not really such thing as names being widely used and sourced. These days, if it is in a book, or on a popular website (like bugguide), that's usually enough to qualify as "wide use". Not everyone likes me for it but I am notorious at making new common names for species that don't have any (for instance, for species in a genus that are otherwise all given common names). If we call bugguide "wide use", then adding them on iNaturalist is similar. The editors on bugguide do not consult anyone when they add their common names, they just make them. So I occasionally do the same, if I see a fit scenario to do so.

James

[Paul Bailey]

James,

That's what had me confused about the issue. It seems common names are going to be entered into iNaturalist using the reasoning that they appear in a guidebook, but those common names were created specifically for the guidebook and my understanding is that nobody was using them before that. Wrapping my head around that lead to my question about what qualifies as widely used and sourced. The common names may become widely used and sourced after people begin using the guidebook, but those common names were not widely used and sourced before that because they didn't exist. However, I suppose this doesn't mean anything in the greater scheme of things, since they will eventually become commonplace.


Paul

[Charlie Hohn]

I don't think having too many common names matters too much except when there is redundancy/overlap. Problems come up when you have two 'red cedars' or when you call a specific pine species 'pine'. If Bob wants to name Pinus ponderosa 'Dinglewomble Tree', it doesn't really matter as long as it isn't the default name.

[James Bailey]

To widely source a common name, it must first be created. If you are not allowed to create common names because we "only use widely sourced" ones, then you have now formed a barrier to creating all future common names.

Common names are created when someone creates a common name, and it is then used by someone else, and then someone else, and so on.

My 2 personal guidelines are as follows:

-If there are already well-founded names, there is no reason to make a new name unless it makes sense to do so (for instance Pink-barred Lithacodia, a moth, isn't even in Lithacodia anymore, and "Lithacodia" is hardly a common name. If we wanted to use Lithacodia, we'd just use the scientific name).

-If there is no name for that species, and it isn't unreasonable to make it (for instance in a genus of 100s of identical dull species), especially if many other species in the same genus already have a common name.