Monday, October 30, 2006

How to spell Myrmicinae


So I got an email the other day from James Trager pointing out that I had misspelled Myrmicinae all over my webpage. Yikes! He's right. I've been spelling it Myrmecinae and it is supposed to be Myrmicinae. From his email:

"There are two related but different roots from Greek that have entered the language of ant taxonomy, namely "myrm-" "myrmec-". The name Myrmica and its derivative Myrmicinae, rather confusingly, are based on the first root plus the suffix "-ic", so people make the error in spelling the subfamily Myrmicinae quite often."

I did a quick search on google and found out that it is really true. There were over 1100 pages that used the wrong spelling, including Wikipedia and several articles published on scientific journal webpages (although I don't know if they were duplicated in print versions). Anyway, I think I have now changed everything on my research webpage to the correct spelling. Thanks James!

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