Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Use of “common names” in the biological world is not very helpful. Scientists describe all species according to nomenclature rules whereby each organism gets a Genus name and a Species name. Blattella germanica is the German cockroach; “Blatella” is the genus name (with a capital letter) “germanica” is the species name (starting with a lower case letter).There are other species that belong to the Genus Blattella (Blattella orientalis is a good example) and they are closely related to each other. These scientific names are accepted and adopted by all scientist in any language – there is no doubt what we are talking about – this name is connected to one species and one species only.But I’d like to put the use of the vernacular name (common name) in a “confusion basket”: New Zealanders often ask me about Daddy Longlegs… There are three different groups of invertebrates that are commonly called “Daddy Longlegs”The Pholcids: Pholcus phalangioides aka the cellar spiders; cosmopolitan and especially in sub-tropical