Latin terms to name new species are turning into nonsensius

AI creates random labels as scientists can’t keep up with discovery backlog

LATIN nonsense could be used to label tens of thousands of new bacteria species, as scientists can not think of enough names to keep up with the rate of discovery.

The ancient language has been the crux of scientific nomenclature since the time of Carl Linnaeus, who invented the binomial system more than 250 years ago.

Still used today, the system involves two words that refer to the organism’s genus and species.

But scientists are struggling to keep up with the many thousands of new species, especially of bacteria, being discovered and the traditional method has left a backlog of 50,000 species that are given automatic placeholder tabs made of random numbers and letters until a name is found. At the current rate, the backlog would take 50 years to clear.

But while Latin labels usually have a relevant meaning to the species – Homo sapiens means “wise man”, for instance – new examples include Dupisella tifacia for a bacterium from the sheep gut, Hopelia gocarosa for a bacterium in Swedish groundwater or Saxicetta apufaria from a Russian lake.

The Latin-sounding names have no actual meaning, and have been generated automatically by an AI-powered computer system built by researchers at the Quadram Institute in Norwich.

The computer system, which was disclosed in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, was taught the grammatical rules and syntax of the classical language and tasked with putting letters together in faux-Latin.

Engineers use a handful of rules to ensure no swear words or offensive terms, in any language, would be produced by the algorithm.

“The front ends of the names are just strings of letters put together reflecting the phonetic rules of Latin, whereas the back ends of the words are suffixes used in Latin that mean the names can be defined as Latin nouns,” said Mark Pallen, study author at the Quadram Institute and professor of microbial genomics at the University of East Anglia.

The Latin-faking system has been described by its creators as “radical”, but they say it maintains the familiarity and gravitas of Latin, even if the names lack any meaningful pedigree.

“I was a member of the working group that gave us Greek letters for Covid variants, which were rapidly adopted by the scientific community,” Prof Pallen said.

“I hope that the names proposed here are also rapidly adopted and used widely. This is just the first step. The age of microbial discovery is far from over, but it will be easy to create future names en masse using the principles we have established here.”

The concept of using fake Latin names with no meaning has puzzled some experts. Stephen Hunt, a Latin language expert at the University of Cambridge, said: “I wonder if assigning Latin names at random also goes against the idea of categorisation. So, weird. Unnecessary in my view – just give them a code.”