Hacker News Reader

Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> The species was first documented in the 1970s and, being fairly new to scientific observation, has yet to be scientifically described. Because of this, LPSO has no official scientific name.

Is that a joke? It takes over 50 years to come up with a scientific name for a species?

View on HN

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2227516-octopuses-were-...:

“In the late 1960s, Aradio Rodaniche was diving off the coast of Nicaragua when he made the discovery that has tantalised cephalopod biologists ever since.

[…]

The discovery of an apparently social species was so implausible that few believed it and Rodaniche’s story passed into legend. He published a short account of the species in 1991, but hardly anyone had seen the animal and no one could confirm the report”

That takes account of (at least) a few decades.

I also think the issue isn’t coming up with a name but scientifically describing it. That (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_description) can take time.

Finally, the group of people interested in having a species description may not be very large; and the group willing and able to create one even smaller. Nowadays the money in biology is in biochemistry.

> Finally, the group of people interested in having a species description may not be very large; and the group willing and able to create one even smaller.

Perhaps, but the caption on the picture in the article [0] says that it was taken at "an aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences", which sounds like the kind of place where octopus scientists hang out. And the article cited in Wikipedia [1] has quite a few authors, which makes me think that there's something more complicated going on here.

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larger_Pacific_Strip...

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0134152

Huh interesting. I, like most San Franciscans, know the Cal Academy as primarily a public aquarium with a smaller research arm associated with it. I didn’t know they do the kind of research that leads to species description. Would have expected them to be downstream of that.

That may be so, but I would expect the people who work there to be 1) interested in getting a species name for the unnamed species they had in captivity, and 2) certainly know who to reach out to to get a species description even if they were unable or unwilling to do so themselves.

Hey, that's unfair. I'm working through the backlog as fast as I can!

Blame I.T. - they keep resetting my password and I'm not allowed to write it down on a Post-It like back in the old days...

Sometimes, yes. Many invertebrate research is done almost for free, so it takes what it takes.

It’s been thousands of years and there’s still no firm definition of “species”.

There is a firm definition of species that works most of the time, but has been expanded with a lot of complexity and exceptions like rings of species for example.

In short if two animals can mate and produce fertile offspring similar to the parents, they are in the same species,

This means that all extant humans are in the same species (even if some are hybrids and some were isolated for a lot of time. Even if they never want to mate by religious reasons, geography or personal preferences)

Of course things can get messed fast. A tomato with a codfish genus included by humans to stand frost, is not a codmato suddently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com