When you look at a list of animals by their common names, it will generally start with aardvark and ends with zebra (or zorse…). But when it comes to scientific names, the extremes of the alphabet get a little more extreme. And at least in a few cases, their positioning in alphabetical list is quite deliberate. So today we’re examining alphabetical extremes in species names.
From A to Z is actually pretty competitive
Aaaaba
This genus of beetles was originally called Alcinous in 1865, but since there was already a species of marine arthropods called that back in 1812, it needed to be renamed. In 2002, the species was thus renamed to Aaaba. Except oops, that’s already a genus of sponges! There a lot of species out there and sometimes not all of them are in the most common databases, it’s an easy mistake. This time Bellamy opted to just stick another a in there renaming the genus to Aaaaba and bumping it further ahead in any alphabetical lists. He even admits that getting his area of study to the front of lists of animal species was the goal of adding the extra vowel.
He really cares about beetles okay
Zyzixia
The name of this shrub name was chosen for utterly practical reasons. Strother had nearly finished a rather sizable monograph on a bunch of sunflowers. While he was examining his data, he realized that some of the specimens were actually part of a completely new genus. Since each genus was described in alphabetical order, adding a new one in the middle was going to require extensive changes to the typesetting (a problem you may recognize as a reason to give a cat authorship). So he picked a name that would be at the very end of the list. And since he was doing that, he figured he might as well pick a name that was going to be at the end of any list.
However, he wasn’t counting on…
Aaadonta and Zyzzyxdonta
From the biologist who brought us the Ba humbugi snail, we have deliberate extreme ends of the alphabet. While the first specimen of Aaadonta was described by Semper in 1875, it wasn’t known to be a unique genus until the work of Solem a century later.
When Solem noticed that a new genus of snail exhibited many traits that were the exact opposite of Aaadonta, it was clearly time for wordplay. And so he paired the name with Zyzzyxdonta so that they would be found at the extreme ends of any list of snail genera.
Aa
But at least I found a picture
It would be impossible to write this post without at least mentioning this incredibly simply named orchid genus. The name Aa quite easily claims the beginning of alphabetical lists. The only problem is that I was not able to find anything about why Reichenbach picked this name. Wiktionary suggests that it was either in honour of Pieter van de Aa or simply an effort to always be first on the list. Of course, van de Aa may be the official line when the real motivation was the latter.