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Earth Matters: When is a trout a salmon and what difference does it make?
Published: 1/2/2021 1:41:10 PM
When I was fly fishing for pink salmon some years ago in the Pacific Northwest, I hooked an enormous steelhead, which is a sea-run rainbow trout. That steelhead was twice the size of the five-pound salmon I’d caught, but I wondered why one was called salmon and the other, trout.
How do fish get named? For that matter, what about other animals and plants?
The biological sciences employ a worldwide army of namers, called taxonomists, who spend their lives categorizing plants and animals according to a convention concocted by an 18th-century Swede, Carl Linnaeus. We all meet the Linnaean system in introductory biology when we memorize this hierarchy: kingdom > phylum > class > order > family > genus > species.