A jellyfish naming contest with a scientific twist

By Beth Daley, Globe Staff

Ever wonder how the Stupidogobius aurich fish got its name? Or the Chaos chaos protozoan?

They all are real names of species and now, it’s your turn to give the rarely seen and studied Bonaire Banded Box Jellyfish a scientific name.

The bands of color on the tentacles helped give the jellyfish, a strong swimmer, its common name. (Marijke Wilhelmus/NOAA)

Here’s the back story: Vicki Carr, a visitor to Bonaire in the Caribbean in 2001 was able to videotape the colorful animal – and showed the images to a Florida science teacher. Soon, it seemed everyone wanted to find out if this bizarre jellyfish was a new species.

Now, Allen Collins of the National Systematics Lab in Washington – part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration’s Fisheries Service - and colleagues have collected the bell-shaped, oddly colored jellyfish with a large stomach. They did it carefully, however: The strong-swimming animal has a nasty, dangerous sting.

After years of detective work searching for clues in scientific articles, preserved jellyfish in natural history collections and even extracting DNA from the Bonaire jellyfish to compare to other jellyfish species, scientists are convinced it is a new species and part of the genus Tamoya. Now here’s your part:

Go here to learn about the scientific process of naming organisms and then submit a potential species name. A scientific team will pick their top 5 favorites from those submitted, which will
then be up for vote by the public June 19 through 21. The winning name will be
announced after June 23.

Here are some basic hints from the website: Species names come in two parts, Genus name, species name. The genus name is capitalized, whereas the species name is not. When written, both are italicized. The public is choosing what is known as the species epithet.

Names have to be in Latin letters (not Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). No accents, apostrophes, or hyphens, etc. The name has to be more than one letter long. The name can be a word, name, in any language, and even just mixed up letters (but what would be the point of that?).

Sometimes scientists choose a name that describes a unique feature or behavior of the organism, or where the organism is found. Sometimes the name honors a person, or sometimes they are just plain silly. Stupidogobius anyone?

And if you are feeling vain – there is no rule about naming a species after yourself. But you are probably not going to make it into the finals.