In this article on
tropical fish information you will learn about why tropical fish keeping is popular and the scientific naming convention that classifies the fish.
Why keep tropical fish?
People who keep tropical fish in an aquarium (aquarists) are a growing number as its popularity soars and those involved range from school children through to old age pensioners.
Tropical fish need more looking after than cold water fish such as the goldfish and it is this additional caring factor that I believe attracts folk to tropical fish.
Plus the fact that generally speaking tropical fish tend to be more colorful, there is more choice for the aquarist and they are smaller so you can have more of them in your aquarium. And in most cases you don’t have to import the fish from its original habitat as they are bred in captivity especially for you.
Because of the particular breeding that has been carried out over the years it is unlikely that the fish you have in your tank will be the same coloration, size and shape of the original fish from, for example, Venezuela, where the checkered dwarf cichlid originated.
But where breeding in captivity has been unsuccessful then you will have the real wild stock imported.
Naming System
All aquarium species are known by a common name and some may have several names, all of which may be used by aquarists and pet shops on a day to day basis, which may be useful. But if you want a precise identification of the fish then these names are of no use.
Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist (known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology) who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature which is the formal system of naming species.
This system has been used since 1758 and separates plants and animals into groups in a way that their relationship to each other is easily established. Taxonomy is the science of finding, describing and categorizing organisms and it has seven major groupings; Kingdom-Phylum-Division-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species.
But in this binomial nomenclature system a ’scientific name’ is produced and consists only of the genus name and the species name. Although each identification is stated in Latin it could be described as the ‘Latin name’ of the species but biologists like to call it the ’scientific name’.
The branch of zoology assigned to the study of fish is Ichthyology (from Greek: ikhthus meaning fish and logos meaning study). As Ichthyology progresses it has meant that sometimes fish have had to be re-classified. But because not everyone starts to use the new identification name or ever will do, you end up with two names for the same fish.
For example the Chanda lala and the Ambassis lala might be assumed to be different species, but they are not. And you may have more than one genus with several species. For example there is the Colisa labiosa and the Colisa fasciata. If a genus for a fish is known but it can not be properly identified then you would describe the fish with its generic name and the word species tagged onto it.
Speaking of species, it appears that about two hundred and fifty new species are given scientific names every year. According to a comprehensive database of fish information by the beginning of January 2010 there were over thirty-one thousand species.
And if you add up all other vertebrates: amphibians, mammals, birds and reptiles, the total is less than the number of fish species around.
Comments
Post a Comment