Last month, I mentioned a fish called a lumpsucker; some of you might not know exactly what it is. Cyclopterus lumpus is a strange creature that lives in the cooler waters of the north Atlantic. The Latin name can be translated as ‘lumpy circular wing’; which refers to its knobbly, […]
Carl Linnaeus, the great 18th century Swedish biologist, gave scientific names, based on his binomial system, to over 4,000 species of animals (and even more plants). He called the donkey Equus asinus, which is literally just ‘horse donkey’ in Latin. But in English, ‘asinine’, meaning donkey-like, has become a synonym […]
The American zoologist Roger Payne died in June this year. He was the first person to study the sounds made by humpback whales. In 1967, in Bermuda, he met an engineer working for the US navy using underwater microphones to listen for Russian submarines; sometimes other, very peculiar noises were […]