8 More Terrible Names for Living Things

[Music] names are important they help us identify people and things and to categorize our world and in biology they can help us understand important details about a living thing like where it lives or what other living things it most closely is related to but sometimes the common names we use for things are just they're not just bad they're wrong the cool thing though is that even those names wrong as they may be he can still show us a lot about how we think about living things SiC and reveal what traits of an animal we find most important or how our understanding of the relatedness between living creatures has developed over time so even the most terrible names for things can be kind of enlightening when you dive deeper into understanding why the names are so wrong let's start with the mountain chicken which is a dead chicken it's not even a bird it's a frog a brown banded and splotch frog that lives on a couple islands and the Lesser Antilles I guess you could say that they live in the mountains though they're found from sea level to about 400 meters in altitude not the peaks of the islands there does seem to be a somewhat reasonable explanation for the chicken part though their tastes you see Mountain chickens were a prized delicacy for the people of Montserrat and Dominica adult females can be up to 21 centimeters long while the male's are slightly smaller so each one has lots of juicy frog flesh to offer if you're into that and apparently they do taste a lot like chicken but the name could also come from their distinctive chicken like call that echoes through the steep sides of the valleys where they live or were they used to live anyway people once harvested thousands of these frogs yearly but then the fungal disease cat Rydia mycosis hit Dominica in 2002 and Montserrat in 2009 that brought their numbers down from thousands to just two with the arrival of the disease each Island enacted a permanent hunting ban in 2003 on Dominica and in 2014 on Montserrat and since then the population has steadily risen it now it's at around 132 total which is more than two but is still very few which is why the species continues to be considered critically endangered so we had a chicken that was a frog now we've got the horny toad that isn't a toad it's a group of spiny lizards in the genus fry no soma this is one of those cases where the common name is based more on looks than scientific classification see a couple of features make them stand out from other lizards and they also explain why they're named after a puffy amphibian for one their body shape is flattened top to bottom which gives them a more rounded appearance they also have short bent legs and they're reluctant to run away from predators instead they puff themselves up when threatened making them look even more toad like they're not trying to look like a toad though they're making use of their most striking feature their spikes these sharp spikes cover most of its body but they are particularly big at the back of their heads when they puff themselves up but they basically turn their bodies into big medieval flails the idea is to make them look so big and dangerous that predators especially those that like to eat their prey whole will not be interested if approached they will toss their heads backwards to pierce their attacker and direct them towards less vital parts of their body like their tail and if the attack continues these knot toads have one more gruesome trick they can squirt blood directly from their eyes they do this by increasing the blood pressure in their head so blood escapes through the orbital sinus a little air cavity near their eyeball the double whammy of ouch and gross can give them enough time to run away and avoid becoming a meal true to this list thus far the slow worm of Europe and Russia is not a worm despite its long body and Burling habits it's definitely a vertebrate and not some kind of annelids actually call them Blin slash' or shining snakes which is a bit closer but they're not snakes either they're actually legless lizards slow worms have several telltale lizard features like their blinking eyelids and the ability to get rid of and then regrow their tails that tail dropping ability is what gave them the Latin name for jealous meaning fragile but this lizard is no China Doll tail dropping is actually a clever defense mechanism by giving a would-be predator a snack or distraction the lizard has the chance to run away with it's vital bits intact regrowing their tail is a slow process as only about five millimeters grows over two weeks but that's not where the slow in their name comes from that's mostly an accident of linguistics you see in Old English they were called flowers over time slab became slow but in Old English that word doesn't mean the opposite of fast we're not a hundred percent sure whether it was supposed to be slab at mint earth warm or slaw without the little line over it which could just be a general term for venomous bite II or sting II things that we do know that worm with a Y referred to both worms and elongated reptiles hence the use of it nowadays to refer to serpent d dragons so you couldn't translate the old english name to earthworm e elongated reptile which is actually pretty accurate or it may have been venomous elongated reptile which isn't so accurate because they're not considered venomous but hey at least they got the taxonomic class right it seems like we call pretty much any long noodley creature a worm take the silkworm for example which is not a worm at all but the larval stage of the silkworm moths but at least they got the silk part of its name right and they reach the end of the caterpillar part of their life cycle these little guys spin cocoons made of silk proteins actual worms cannot do that these so-called worms don't mess around when it comes to making silk they can spend an average of nine point four to nine point six millimeters of the stuff every second that's why around 99 percent of the world's silk supply comes from the mouths of just one particular silkworm species Bombyx mori and that silk is not just for fancy scarves and blouses there are a lot of applications in chemical and medical fields to the reason silk is so useful is that it's a protein polymer that can be transformed into different materials by dissolving it in a salt solution or adding enzymes in fact we loved silkworm silk so much that we mesta gated the species that makes it and the species has been so altered by centuries of artificial selection that it can't survive without our healthy adult moths can't even fly you would be forgiven for mistaking red pandas as pandas because of their bamboo eating habits but they're actually in a class of their own or a family anyway red pandas belong to the family Allura day which is often classified as a part of the weasel super family must alloy dia classifying red pandas based on who they're most related to has proven difficult because they share a lot of physiological features with other groups the common name panda was suggested when the animal was presented to the Western scientific community back in 1821 because they eat bamboo and they also have other panda ish traits for example they have a pseudo thumb a lump of modified wrist bone which helps them grasp bamboo like their giant panda counterparts so they look very different from pandas in other ways like the shape of their head and teeth and their stripey tail and those are why in 1825 they were officially classified as part of the raccoon family but having similar physical traits doesn't always mean two things are closely related so about a century and a half later with the help of DNA evidence red pandas were lumped back in with bears again and still that placement wasn't quite right additional genetic evidence now suggests they're more closely related to weasels but are probably distinct enough to be their own family and that makes sense because they have some really special features that don't show up other places like there's super flexible ankles and rotating fibulas or shin bones that let them climb headfirst down trees animals aren't the only living things that we are terrible at naming lots of plants also have bad names like for example strawberries they're not straw and they're not berries botanically speaking CEDA botanists categories of fruit like berries have strict definitions based on what parts are fleshy and how the fruit forms on the texture front berries need to be squishy throughout that is the three layers that surround this seed the endocarp meso carp and EXO carp all have to be soft and that is true of strawberries so at least they meet some berry criteria but what makes them not berries is how they form all fruits form from the ovaries of flowers which sit at the base of the female reproductive organs called pistol slants can have different numbers of flowers or multiple pistols in each flower but berries by definition are a simple fruit meaning they develop from one ovary in one flower strawberries come from flowers that have many ovaries in them making them an aggregate fruits are basically like raspberries which are also not berries so what do count as true berries you got blueberries grapes and weirdly enough wait for it bananas and of course none of this changes what we should call these things and it's not gonna change what I put in my berry muffins either on the subject of culinary misnomers let's talk about walnuts yes you guessed it they are not nuts there and also not walls I guess remember how berries had to be fleshy throughout well nuts by definition aren't fleshy at all they're dry fruits characterized by a super thick hard EXO carp and they're into his'n t' meaning they don't open up to shed their seeds walnuts are a different kind of fruit sometimes called a drupe where the endocarp is hard the EXO carp is thin and the meso carp in between is fleshy or fibrous I know what you're thinking that does not really sound like the whole walnuts you can buy at the store that's because those walnuts are actually just the hard endo carps on the tree walnuts have a fleshy soft casing we just don't see it most of the time because that casing is removed before they get to supermarket shelves so I guess the lesson is you shouldn't name a nut by its cover or the exterior you see at the store anyway last but not least we have the snake Lily which is a pretty nice name it's definitely nicer than some of its other names like Devils tongue or its Latin name which translates to miss shape and penis all these names come from its distinctive spadix the floral spike in the middle of the flower which kind of resembles a snake or other things trouble is plant is neither a snake which she would have expected nor a lily lilies are flowers from the genus liliom which were originally classified based on their many scale like leaves and their upright stems and flowers snake lilies might have gotten lumped in with true lilies because of how similar they look to another Foley the peace lily in fact peace and snake lilies are part of the same family the array CA or Erin plants which all have that unique spadix the snake lily is actually the same genus as the smelly corpse flower Amorphophallus titanum and it uses a similar smell to attract carry and eating insects for pollination and it might just be me but it seems unfair that one gets to be a cool sounding snake Lily while the other is called the corpse flower names are supposed to help us sort the things around us into useful groups but they're not always great at that some names can give you an idea of what a living thing looks like but often the utility's stops there and some like the mountain chicken don't even tell us that much instead they say more about us from our palates to our linguistic errors perhaps it is time to reconsider some of these misleading names though I guess like berry flavored red aggregate or nutty tasting droop don't really have the same ring to them thanks for watching this episode of scishow if you liked learning about misleading names you'll probably love our other list show of bad names where we explain how Jack rabbits aren't rabbits and mountain lions aren't lions in fact I bet you'll love a lot of our episodes so why not just subscribe all you have to do is click the little red button that says subscribe on and then it's forever until you click it again like that's a veil that's an option that's available to you so there's it's really a win-win do you understand subscriptions been doing this a long time I don't know where everybody's at [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 360,515

Rating: 4.9480186 out of 5

Keywords: Hank, Green, Scishow, Science, Biology, Education, names, common names, mistake, taxonomy, mountain chicken, endangered, Leptodactylus fallax, Montserrat, Dominica, chytridriomycosis, Phrynosoma, horny toad, horned lizard, blood, spikes, orbital sinus, slowworm, fragilis, silkworm, Bombyx mori, red panda, Ailuridae, Musteloidea, pseudo-thumb, DNA, Strawberries, berries, endocarp, mesocarp, exocarp, ovaries, flowers pistils, aggegate fruit, indehiscent, drupe, learn, walnuts, snake lily, corpse flower, spadix, Lilium

Id: stUNPVMLHg4

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 13 2019