Most of the wildlife in Australia is able to kill you. As such, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a way to classify animal and plant species so we know which ones are deadly?
Sadly, this doesn’t exist yet. But we do have a system for naming and identifying wildlife of all kinds. It’s called ‘species citation’. In this post, we’ll explain how it works.
Species citation (also known as ‘author citation’) is a way of identifying species in academic writing. It is particularly common in taxonomy (i.e. the science of classifying organisms), but you will also find it in some zoological and botanical papers.
It is known as ‘author citation’ because references include the name of the person who named a species. In particular, they name the person who first established its scientific Latin name.
The rules for this depend on whether you’re citing an animal or a plant, though.
When writing about animals, the rules are set out in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The basic format uses the Latin name of the species, followed by the name of its discoverer and the year it was discovered:
Atrax robustus O.P.-Cambridge, 1877, is among the world’s most venomous spiders.
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Here, we give the initials and surname of Octavius Pickard-Cambridge, the zoologist who first described the species. After that, we just give the year the Latin name was published.
With plants, the full rules can be found in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. At its most basic, all you need to do is give an abbreviated name of the person who discovered the species:
The strychnine tree Strychnos nux-vomica L. is a source of two poisons…
It is easy to miss the citation here if you’re not careful! It is actually the capital ‘L’ after the Latin name, which stands for ‘Linnaeus’ (i.e. Carl Linnaeus, who named thousands of species).
Most authors will have a longer abbreviation than this, but you can look up the correct names for botanical citations online (e.g. via the International Plant Name Index).
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