What is behind a species’ name?

What is behind a species’ name?

I have already discussed both the modern and the traditional tools available to zoologists to describe species (Boero, 2010), but there is another important dimension of species description that is essential to really appreciate the role of biodiversity in the functioning of the ecosystems: species’ ecological roles. In the old times they were studied by autoecology, a rarely practiced discipline nowadays. We use whatever we can to identify species, but rarely the name of a species tells us something about its role. A species is a coherent complex of individuals sharing genetical and morphological traits that are not shared with other, albeit similar, individuals. The many definitions of what is a species are usually based on evolutionary traits. I am speaking about ecological niches, instead. In principle, a species should be at the centre of a unique ecological niche, identifying all its functional traits, throughout its life cycle. The description of a species, thus, should comprise an account about its morphology and genetics, but also about what it does.

We have formally described a small portion of biodiversity, and new species are increasingly named. I am very keen in considering revisions of taxa with descriptions of new species, even though I encourage our potential authors to provide as much information as possible about the new species they describe, considering their autoecology too. As an alternative, we can refine the descriptions by exploring the functional traits of the species that do already have a name.

We can, for instance, learn where these species do reproduce (Munari et al. 2009), or what are their population dynamics and their morphological variability (Isinibilir et al. 2009), even though the key ecological role of species resides in the identification of their position in trophic networks (Follesa et al. 2010; Remonti et al. 2010; Consalvo et al. 2010), not to speak about their behaviour (Potenza and Mancinelli 2010).

A species list, in other words, should tell us not only what is present in a given environment, but also how the members of the communities in that environment do interact with each other, how many species might replace other species in playing a given ecological role, or how many species play unique roles, that would be lost if they were lost. Naming species is just the first step in the exploration of biodiversity. Modern taxonomy should provide complete accounts about species, and most of the work is still to be done, even for the species that we think we know very well.

I greatly encourage our authors, thus, to explore these aspects of biodiversity and to produce increasingly better descriptions of species.

Ferdinando Boero

Editor-in-Chief