Botany enters the 20th century, and maybe the 21st, in 2012

This summer in Melbourne Australia the Phactor attended the XVIII international botanical congress, which are held every 6 years. One of the highlights of the meeting are the nomenclature sessions where the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature is discussed, debated, and amended. This is the official rule book for naming botanical organisms, a real page turner recommended to cure insomnia. However as of January 1, 2012, botanical naming is going to ditch Latin! Now before you faint, please rest assured that nothing is happening to Latinized binomial nomenclature. Scientific plant names will remain the same, but what has changed is the requirement that anyone proposing to name a new species supplies a detailed description of the species in Latin. Presumably when this requirement was initiated any well-educated person would have studied Latin in school (it was still available when the Phactor was in high school), and it provided a common language of science. However, de facto, English has become the language of science. In another startling move the Code will allow electronic publication. This is important because of the principle of priority by which the first validly published name is deemed the correct one in the case of multiple namings starting at Linnaeus. So don't forget the time/date stamp on that electronic publication; it'll be important. Somehow the Phactor missed all the nomenclature sessions in favor of seeing fern gully (Those are all tree ferns!) and other sights. HT to Culturing Science for reminding me to blog about this.

On the road some more - Heading down under

While not even recovered from the botanical meetings here in North America, the Phactor & phamily are off in a day or two to Australia for the international botanical congress in Melbourne. An international congress occurs every six years, and the Phactor has attended them in Berlin, Sydney, Vienna, St. Louis (yawn), while having missed Moscow and Tokyo. This is one of those things where the actual travel is brutal, but after you get there it's fun. From 1980 to 1990 the Phactor spent more than 1/10th of his time in Queensland doing research in the wet tropical forest. Unfortunately the congress is way down south and we like going way up north, so this will be like arriving in Washington DC, going to Boston, and then going to Miami. Who knows how many blogs from down under can be posted; depends upon when and where connections are available, and frankly it's one of those things that wasn't critical in booking that beach house. But we'll go looking for some great plants, and maybe we'll see some platypus or cassowary or bush tailed possums. One is actually probably, one is a maybe, and one would take both effort and luck. Maybe you can guess.