Triangle Fish Guy

Custom Aquarium Maintenance and Design

Serving the Raleigh/Durham - Triangle Area since 2010

Scientific Names

(more than just a geek's way to sound cool)

If you have had the chance to read any of the captions in our photo gallery, you may have noticed that some of the critters are listed with both a common name (the easiest to pronounce one) and a scientific name (the one that looks like a gladiator wrote it) and some only have a common name. Yellow TangSo why use both sometimes and not all the time? Well the reasons why we use them at all are part of the answer to that question. Scientific names are Latin descriptive words that literally describe characteristics of organisms. All living things are classified into increasingly more specific groups. Starting with kingdom and moving down to phylum, class, order, family, genus, and finally species. So in the example of the common named Yellow Tang; the full scientific name is

Kingdom=Animalia — Animal, animals, animaux

Phylum=Chordata — chordates, cordado, cordés

Subphylum=Vertebrata — vertebrado, vertebrates, vertebras

Superclass=Osteichthyes — bony fishes, osteíceto, peixe ósseo, poissons osseux

Class=Actinopterygii — poisson épineux, poissons à nageoires rayonnées, ray-finned fishes, spiny rayed fishes

Subclass=Neopterygii — neopterygians

Infraclass=Teleostei

Superorder=Acanthopterygii

Order=Perciformes — perch-like fishes

Suborder= Acanthuroidei — surgeonfishes

Family=Acanthuridae — cirujanos, poissons-chirurgiens, surgeonfishes, tangs

Genus=Zebrasoma (Swainson, 1839)

Species= Zebrasoma flavescens (Bennett, 1828) — yellow tang

Cited from ITIS.gov

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