The Little Cephalopod In Need Of A Common Name
This has nothing to do with the mantis shrimp directly, but it does have to do with life in the sea, and so I thought I’d drop a little plug for it. A little plug… hmm. I’ll hold onto that for a second.
I was going to call this a little squid, and it does belong to the Decapodiformes, the group that includes squid and cuttlefish. However, this animal is not exactly a squid, and it isn’t a cuttlefish either. It’s a round squiggly dot known by the scientific name Stoloteuthis leucoptera. If we had to give its group of cephalopods a name, we might call them, scientifically, the sepiolids.
Scientific names lack something when it comes to the imagination, however. We don’t all spend time in wood-paneled lounges at the headquarters of the British Geographical Society.
So, I’d like to hear people’s ideas for a common name for this little animal. Personally, I’d like to see the genus it belongs to given the common name of “little plugs”. This one in particular might be called the stumpy plug.
You can find out more about this animal at the tree of life.
Date: March 12, 2008
Categories: science
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