What’s in a (scientific) name
How do you tell a lion’s mane jellyfish from a hair jelly or a giant jelly? You could try by checking the scientific names. The lion’s mane jelly is Cyanea capillata. But the hair jelly also is named Cyanea capillata, and so is the giant jelly. If Shakespeare had waxed as poetic about jellyfish as he did about roses, he might have concluded that a lion’s mane by any other name would still be a lion’s mane: the world’s largest true jellyfish, big enough to eat fish that become ensnared in its 120-foot tentacles. One with a 7½-foot diameter bell washed ashore in Massachusetts in 1870. The Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH), along with institutional partners the Encyclopedia of Life and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, have waded into the sometimes murky waters of names that have been given to creatures, plants, and other organisms. Though the point of naming something is to...