So today we're going to talk a little bit about classification of organisms
and binomial nomenclature which is a system of naming
organisms so the reason we have to have a system for naming organisms is that
there's a problem with just using common names
and I'm going to give you an example from my life that will
kind of show why we need to use other systems of naming
rather than just common names so
a little bit after college I got hired as an ornithologist to go study some
birds in Denmark
and the birds that I was working with were called red kites
and they're a hawk-like bird and so we had to go out and try to find red kite nests
in order to be able to do our research so
myself and some other Danish scientists and some other American scientists
went out looking for these red kite nests and as we were walking around
looking at many birds er through our binoculars
many of the Danish scientists kept saying that they were seeing buzzards
they would look at a bird to see if it was a kite and they would say oh no it's
just a buzzard
and I started being really worried because I started thinking that they had
hired me under false pretenses and that
they were gonna soon find out that I couldn't identify birds because
I was looking at those same birds and I wasn't seeing a buzzard
I was seeing what I would call a buteo which is
this bird what I was thinking was a buzzard a turkey vulture
is also sometimes er called a buzzard here in America
so I finally said to them
can you show me what bird in this field guide
you're calling a buzzard because I really was so confused and thought
I didn't know you know what birds I was looking at I didn't know up from down
and that
they were gonna find out I wanna scientific fraud and send me back to
America
and so finally it just became obvious
that they called buteos buzzards
so their common name for this bird was
a buzzard and that they would have just called this
a vulture or a turkey vulture so
in order to have a naming system we have to be able to classify organisms
and we classify organisms according to this
domain system and there are three domains
bacteria archea and eukarya and
within those domains there are five kingdoms within those kingdoms there are
phyla
within those phyla there are classes within the class is there are orders
within each order are families within each family is genius
and within each genus is a species so we can use this
system of classification to differentiate between
different species organisms because they will each have a unique
combination of these classifications
so Carl Linnaeus who was a Swedish scientists came up with a system a
binomial nomenclature
to determine scientific names and that is
that each species should be named called by its genus and species
genus is always capitalized the species is
always lower case and they're always underlined when they're written by hand
and italicized when they're written in typeface
so it can be written long hand like this where the whole genus is written out and
the whole species is written out
or you can abbreviate the genus to just the first letter
of the genus and that gives you the scientific name
of an organism so you can see how that would have been helpful in the system
where I was
looking for a buzzard in that both
both the turkey vulture and the buteo
have the same classification up to their class
Aves which indicates they're birds but afterwards
they're really different and so
if we had just referred to them by their species name and they had
mentioned that they were seeing
buteo buteo. I never would have thought that I was out there looking for
turkey vultures and not seeing them
so other examples of that
misuse of common names or why common names are not a good way
to discuss organisms are things like
pill bugs which can also be called potato bugs
or roly polies depending on where you live so
scientists need a way to differentiate the organisms they're talking about
and the best way the way that we've come up with is Linnaeus's way
of binomial nomenclature