Greeny News

Until we learn that all species are important â€" not just those with a catchy name â€" England's rate of extinction will remain woeful

The genesis of the Guardian's species naming competition was the recent news that more than two species a year in England are going extinct, and hundreds more are under threat â€" a picture of decline reflected around the world.

How does a country whose two biggest membership organisations are conservation groups, a nation of self-professed animal lovers that has a web of laws and spends millions of pounds a year protecting the natural world, still drive the once ubiquitous common eel to the margins of survival? Guardian commentator George Monbiot has suggested: "It seems to me that one of the handicaps conservationists suffer is that few of these species have common names. It is hard to persuade people to care about something they can't pronounce."

Natural England, the government's countryside agency and authors of the gloomy report on the state of England's natural world, has now joined the Guardian and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History to launch a competition asking the public to choose common names for 10 "lesser-known Latins" which until now have struggled for public recognition with only their scientific nomenclature to identify them.

The 10 beetles, bee, jellyfish, shrimps and lichens are all on the UK's list of 943 "species of principle concern", alongside more famous co-strugglers like the red squirrel and the grey plover.

"The things we value most are the things we connect with through our everyday lives and everyday language," says Tom Tew, Natural England's chief scientist. "We want to remind people of the importance of all species, because each of them has a role to play in sustaining the health of the ecosystems upon which we depend."

The report of the Natural England Lost Life described a decline in plants, insects, birds and sea life in and around England that is familiar around the world. Although extinction is a natural part of life, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has warned that the rate of plants and animals dying off is now 100-1,000 times the "background rate" before humans, dubbing it "the sixth great extinction".

Some scientists warn against relying on limited fossil records for such comparisons, but that there has been a widespread loss is hard to dispute. The IUCN also estimates one third of all amphibians and fish, one in five mammals and one in eight birds are under threat.

Some of England's threatened species have caught the public's attention â€" pollinators like the shrill carder bumblebee, the grey plover and kittiwake, the common skate and the northern bluefin tuna. Others' plight have gone largely unremarked â€" a problem the naming competition hopes to address.

\\ "Research needs of the severity and stability in Latin names, but they can seem rather cold and clinical,", says George McGavin, an entomologist at Oxford University Museum of Natural History and one of the competition judges. "For most people a more memorable common name can fire the imagination. It's much easier to care about a moth called the Kentish Glory than Endromis versicolora, and who wouldn't want a Brindled Beauty rather than Lycia hirtaria in their garden? Even the Bedbug sounds a bit cosier than Cimex lectularius."

The history of common names appears to have begun with species which were useful to humans â€" things we ate (deer), or might eat us (wolves), says Tew. In the past two centuries scientists and collectors began cataloguing species for the sake of it, and giving them names which usually fell into three categories: their own name, where they were found (the Dartford warbler), or what they looked like (the lady slipper orchid). Other names have evolved more colloquially and imaginatively: the Armadillidium is also variously known as a woodlouse, gramfy-gravy, pill bug, roly-poly, monkey pea or cheesy bug.

But those that do not have popular names are just as deserving of human attention, being part of the complicated network of ecosystems that Tew likens to the importance of individual rivets in an airliner. "Each of those species has a function in nature, each of which we may not understand, but it's a risky business to assume [that] just because we haven't named them or heard of them, their passing will have no effect," he adds.