Prologue

Hong Kong is home of millions of people, so as many other living things. Some species were named after Hong Kong, meaning their first discovery by modern scientists were in Hong Kong. Don't you want to hear their stories?

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Our centre collaborates with Little Woods Nature Education to launch a new series of posts, introducing species named after Hong Kong. But first maybe we shall learn about how species names work?

We should always look at the latin name, instead of the common name.

Take Hong Kong Primrose as an example, it was discovered in Hong Kong in 1847, however its latin name is Lysimachia alpestris the latter word is neither hongkongensis nor hongkongense, therefore technically it is not named after Hong Kong.

Swedish naturalist, Carl von Linné (English: Carl Linnaeus), a.k.a. the father of modern taxonomy, invented binomial nomenclature to unify species naming. Before Linnaeus' theory, the same species could have different names in different countries and areas, which is not facilitating the communication between scientists at all, a complete nightmare for researchers. Binomial nomenclature allowed same language between scientists, and act as a base for organisation, taxonomy and communication.

Until now, all published species, especially animals and plants, have a unique scientific name (or latin name) created with the binomial nomenclature theory. Take Lysimachia alpestris as an example, the first word is "genus name", the second word is "species name". Genus name is decided by the genetic identification, "species name" is usually decided by the first person who discovered or published the species. Most importantly, each name is unique and not to be duplicated. Therefore, not all species that were first discovered in Hong Kong was named after Hong Kong, maybe due to someone already used the name under the same genus, or purely because the person who discovered it wanted to use another name.

Lysimachia alpestris is the scientific name/latin name

Hong Kong Primrose is the common name

Sometimes scientific names and common names have the same meaning, sometimes not. Some species may have many common names.

In earlier records, some species used "hognkongensis" and some used "hongkongense" for naming after Hong Kong. International Code of Botanical Nomenclature，ICBN suggested all new species should use hongkongensis, but the ones that were confirmed can keep hongkongense.

*Taxonomy is the practice of classifying all living organisms into hierarchical categories, currently broadly categorised into seven divisions, kingdom > phylum > class > order > family > genus > species.

e.g. Human: Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae > Homo > Homo sapiens

**Sometime you might see scientific names with more than 2 words, with the name of the scientists who named the species. Sometimes there's a x, meaning it's a hybrid. In general, it's just genus + species name.