April Taxonomy Fail: The Naming of Pests

30 Apr

I run across so many insect bloopers and taxonomy fails I thought I’d start a little running feature on them to go with my ever enlarging file of Things That Are Not Fire Ants.  I’m thinking monthly?  Biweekly?  Whenever I feel like it?  We’ll see.

Anyway, today’s little gem is brought to you by Aspect Home & Pest, who really ought to know better.  I present to you:

“Ticks”

“But wait!” you say.  “Those are ticks. They are eight-legged dorsoventrally flattened blood-sucking arachnids.”

Yes.  Yes, they are.

But keep on scrolling down the page.  I present to you:

“Fleas”

“Um,” you say.  “Those are still ticks.  Fleas are six-legged laterally flattened blood-sucking insects.”

That is also true.

Whoooops.

Advertisement

One Response to “April Taxonomy Fail: The Naming of Pests”

  1. L.F. July 18, 2012 at 1:34 am #

    The page you link to also has. . .
    An African weaver ant (Oecophylla longinoda) called a harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex sp., noted as especially common in Arizona)
    A Camponotus carpenter ant as a fire ant (Solenopsis). wrong subfamily. . .
    And a Formica ant as an Argentine ant (Linepithema) – again, not even in the right subfamily.
    Nice.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: