Name: 生き物にはもっとひどい名前が8つ (8 More Terrible Names for Living Things)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:47:59.000Z
Duration: 13 min 6 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Names are important. They help us identify people and things, and to categorize our world.

And in biology, they can help us understand important details about a living thing, like

where it lives, or what other living things it's most closely related to.

But sometimes, the common names we use for things are just…they're not just bad,

The cool thing, though, is even those names—wrong as they may be—can still show us a lot about

They can reveal what traits of an animal we find most important, or how our understanding

of the relatedness between living creatures has developed over time.

So even the most terrible names for things can be kind of enlightening when you dive

deeper into understanding why the names are so wrong.

Let's start with the mountain chicken, which isn't a chicken. It's not even a bird.

It's a frog. A brown, banded and splotched frog that lives on a couple islands in the

I guess you could say they live in the mountains, though they're found from sea level to about

four hundred meters in altitude, not the peaks of the islands.

There does seem to be a somewhat reasonable explanation for the chicken part, though:

You see, mountain chickens were a prized delicacy for the people of Montserrat and Dominica.

Adult females can be up to twenty-one centimeters long, while the males are slightly smaller.

So each has lots of juicy frog flesh to offer, if you're into that.

And apparently they do taste like chicken.

But the name could also come from their distinctive chicken-like call that echoes through the

People once harvested thousands of these frogs yearly.

But then the fungal disease chytridiomycosis hit Dominica in 2002 and Montserrat in 2009.

That brought their numbers down from thousands to just two.

With the arrival of the disease, each island enacted a permanent hunting ban—in 2003

on Dominica, and 2014 on Montserrat. And since then, the population has steadily risen.

It now sits at around one hundred thirty-two, total, which is more than two, but still so

very few, which is why the species continues to be considered critically endangered.

So we had a chicken that was a frog, and now we've got the horny toad that isn't a

toad, it's a group of spiny lizards in the genus Phrynosoma.

This is one of those cases where the common name is based more on looks than scientific classifications.

See, a couple of features make them stand out from other lizards—and they also explain

why they're named after a puffy amphibian.

For one, their body shape is flattened top to bottom, which gives them a more rounded appearance.

And they're reluctant to run away from predators. Instead, they puff themselves up when threatened,

They're not trying to look like a toad, though—they're making use of their most

These sharp spikes cover most of its body but are particularly big at the back of their heads.

And when they puff themselves up, they basically turn their bodies into big medieval flails.

The idea is to make them look so big and dangerous that predators, especially those that like

to eat their prey whole, will not be interested.

If approached, they'll toss their heads backwards to pierce their attacker and direct

them towards less vital parts of their body, like their tail.

And if the attack continues, these not-toads have one more gruesome trick: They can squirt

They do this by increasing the blood pressure in their head so blood escapes through the

orbital sinus—a little air cavity near their eyeball.

The double whammy of ouch and gross can give them enough time to run away and avoid becoming

True to this list thus far, the slowworm of Europe and Russia is not a worm, despite its

long body and burrowing habits. It's definitely a vertebrate and not some kind of annelid.

Germans actually call them Blindschleiche or shining snakes, which is a bit closer,

but they're not snakes, either. They're actually legless lizards!

Slowworms have several tell-tale lizard features, like their blinking eyelids and ability to

get rid of —and then regrow—their tails.

That tail-dropping ability is what gave them the Latin name fragilis, meaning fragile.

But this lizard is no china doll. Tail-dropping is actually a clever defense mechanism.

By giving a would-be predator a snack or distraction, the lizard has the chance to run away with

Regrowing their tails is a slow process, as only about five millimeters grows over two weeks.

But that's not where the slow in their names comes from.

That's mostly an accident of linguistics. You see, in Old English, they were called slawyrms.

Over time, sla became slow, but in Old English, it doesn't mean the opposite of fast.

We're not a hundred percent sure whether it was supposed to be slā with a diacritic,

which meant earthworm, or sla, without the little line over it, which was a general term

Though we do know wyrm, with a Y, referred to both worms and elongated reptiles—hence

the use of it nowadays to refer to serpent-y dragons.

So you could translate the Old English name to “earthworm-y elongated reptile”—which

Or it may have been “venomous elongated reptile”, which isn't so accurate because

they're not considered venomous, but hey, at least they got the taxonomic class right.

It seems like we call pretty much any long, noodly creature a worm. Take the silkworm

for example, which isn't a worm at all but the larval stage of the silkworm moth.

At least the silk part of its name is right.

When they reach the end of the caterpillar part of their life cycle, these little guys

spin cocoons made of silk proteins. Actual worms can't do that.

And these so-called worms don't mess around when it comes to making silk.

They can spin an average of nine point four to nine point six millimeters of the stuff

That's why around ninety-nine percent of the world's silk supply comes from the mouths

of one particular silkworm species—Bombyx mori.

And that silk is not just for fancy scarves and blouses. There are lots of applications

The reason silk is so useful is that it's a protein polymer that can be transformed

into different materials by dissolving it in a salt solution or adding enzymes.

In fact, we loved silkworm silk so much that we domesticated the species that makes it.

And the species has been so altered by centuries of artificial selection that it can't survive

without our help. The adult moths can't even fly!

You'd be forgiven for mistaking red pandas as pandas because of their bamboo-eating habits.

But they're actually in a class of their own. Or, a family, anyway.

Red pandas belong to the family Ailuridae, which is often classified as part of the weasel

字幕リスト動画再生

生き物にはもっとひどい名前が8つ (8 More Terrible Names for Living Things)

distraction

vital

evidence

accurate