DOI: 10.5061/dryad.fj6q573zg
title: Can species naming drive scientific attention? A perspective from plant-feeding arthropods

description: How do researchers choose their study species? Some choices are based on
 ecological or economic importance, some on ease of study, some on
 tradition – but could the name of a species influence researcher
 decisions? We asked whether phytophagous arthropod species named after
 their host plants were more likely to be assayed for host-associated
 genetic differentiation (or ‘HAD’; the evolution of cryptic, genetically
 isolated host specialists within an apparently more generalist lineage).
 We chose 30 arthropod species (from a Google Scholar search) for which a
 HAD hypothesis has been tested. We traced the etymologies of species names
 in the 30 corresponding genera, and asked whether HAD tests were more
 frequent among species whose etymologies were based on host-plant names
 (e.g., Eurosta solidaginis, which attacks Solidago) vs. those with other
 etymologies (e.g., Eurosta fenestrata, from Latin fenestra, or window).
 Species with host-derived etymologies were more likely to feature in
 studies of HAD than those with other etymologies. We speculate that the
 etymology of a scientific name can draw a researcher’s attention to
 aspects of life-history and thus influence the direction of our scientific
 gaze.
description: To find phytophagous arthropod
 species for which the hypothesis of host-associated differentiation had
 been tested, we performed a Google Scholar search on December 19, 2019,
 for the terms “HAD insect phytophagous herbivorous host associated
 differentiation”. In Scholar, this returns papers including all those
 terms in title or body, but the search is not case-sensitive. We did not
 impose any date limits on the search, which returned about 25,900 results
 ordered by “relevance” (which reflects Google’s search algorithms). From
 this list, we chose the first 30 papers that met two simple criteria for
 inclusion. First, we retained only papers that tested, with genetic data,
 the HAD hypothesis for a phytophagous insect or mite using more than one
 host plant (we disregarded whether the paper’s results supported or
 refuted the hypothesis). Second, we retained only papers that indicated
 the species name of the HAD-tested species in the title or abstract. In
 addition, we removed the genus <em>Euura</em> from our list.
 <em>Euura</em> (Roininen et al. 1993) has complex and uncertain genus-level taxonomy
 (Liston et al 2017), making some of our subsequent data-gathering steps
 impossible. We replaced <em>Euura</em> with
 <em>Nemorimyza</em> since <em>Nemorimyza</em>
 <em>posticata</em> Meigen, 1830 (a leaf-mining agromyzid fly)
 was recently tested for HAD (Mlynarek and Heard 2018) but was not flagged
 in our search. Although “insect” was part of our search string, we did not
 exclude papers that executed HAD tests on other phytophagous arthropods
 (and one such species, the mite <em>Tetranychus</em>
 <em>urticae</em>, was included in our final list). The
 resulting 30 HAD-tested species define a set of 30 genera for which we
 compiled species names and their etymologies. For our 30 focal species, we
 recorded both the year of taxonomic description and the year of HAD
 testing. <br> We took our list of 30 focal HAD-tested species and
 compiled lists of all currently recognized species in each of their
 genera, using online resources and also by directly asking taxonomists
 with relevant expertise. There were 2,739 species distributed across the
 30 genera. <br> We then determined the etymology of the specific
 epithets. Where possible, we based our determination on the original
 species descriptions. When these descriptions did not include etymologies,
 or when they could not be located, we inferred the etymology from the
 linguistic formation (Latin or other root or suffix) of the name. For
 example, we inferred that a name ending in -ensis refers to a place of
 origin or distribution, whether or not this was explicitly indicated in
 the species description. We classified etymologies into seven categories:
 host, behavior, habitat, morphology, place, person (eponymy), or other.
 The “other” category was assigned either when we could not determine a
 specific epithet’s etymology, or when the etymology didn’t fit any of the
 other six categories. We included in the “other” category two names based
 on host common names or cultural references: <em>Aphis</em>
 <em>sumire</em>, where “sumire” is a girls’ name meaning
 violet, and violet is the host; and <em>Phylloxera</em>
 <em>kunugi</em>, where “kunugi” is a Japanese common name for
 the oak species <em>Quercus</em>
 <em>acutissima</em>. We reasoned that although these
 etymologies are ultimately based on hosts, that connection would be
 inapparent to most of the global research community.