What is this?

The marine environment led to the development and maintenance of a wide diversity of lower forms, whereas the terrestrial environment (with its influence of the more rigorous habitats) has produced less diversity (with the exception of the rooted, flowering plants and the insects) of form but a higher type of complexity.

Systematics.

A. Definitions:

1. Systematics is the science which establishes the phylogenetic (evolutionary) relationships of different and similar groups of organisms.

2. Taxonomy is the naming and classification of organisms; as such, it is only a part of the general science of systematics.

History of modern taxonomy.

1. A primitive urge to name everything, whether or not the organism has any value or if it is rare or abundant or common.
2. Many problems associated with the use of common names--regionality, duplication, imprecision.

3. Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, published the Species Plantarum in 1753, in which he listed all the known plants, and the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, a catalog of all species then known, both plants and animals, in 1758.

4. He set up a system of naming species by using the genus name (considered a proper noun and therefore capitalized) and the species name (considered an adjective and thus not capitalized) in combination to make up the one name for each species of plant or animal.

5. The official language adopted for the conformity of names was Latin or classical Greek, both of which are languages that have not been used for a long time so that word definitions are not in a dynamic state. Thus, the meaning of words will remain constant over time.

6. The published International Codes of Zoological Nomenclature and Botanical Nomenclature firmly
affixed acceptance and permanence in permanence in science to Linnaeus’ system of binomial nomenclature.

a. All will adhere to the codes and any name in variance to the codes will not be recognized.

b. No two kinds of animals or plants can have the same name, and no one kind of animal or plant can have more than one name. in either event, the:
1). animal or plant species having had the name the longest (starting with
Linnaeus) keeps the name and others having the same name receive new names.

2). older name has priority if the animal or plant has more than one name.

Therefore, the full citation of a scientific name is made up of 2 parts, the generic name (capitalized) followed by the species name (not capitalized). Both parts are either italicized (in print) or underlined (when italics are not available. The names are then followed by the name of the person who discovered/named this species, the year of publication of the original description. The following is an example of this:

Millepora alcicornis Linnaeus, 1758. A species of fire coral that is very common in the Bahamas.

If the discoverer initially described the species under one genus, and the species subsequently placed under some other genus, the author citation plus the year are parenthesized.

Herpetoglossa simplex (Gardiner, 1905). A species of coral that prefers soft substrates or semi-protected sites in the Indo-Pacific realm.