Home / Curricula / Mini-Lessons / Taxonomy

AWAKE Curricula

Taxonomy

Quick Overview

There are seven major categories used for grouping all living things. These categories are: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. The purpose of this quick overview is to explain why these groupings are important.

Have you ever caught a "goggle-eye"? And if you did, was it a warmouth or a rock bass? They both have the same common name (goggle-eye) but are very different fish. Common names vary from one region to another and, therefore, can be confusing.

Sometimes a common name misleads us into thinking something about the organism that is just not true. For instance, the red-tailed hawk is called chicken hawk in some parts of the country, yet it rarely feeds on chickens.

So how can one know which organism is being discussed when the name varies from place to place? Scientists have a special way of naming that identifies each organism clearly, no matter what country you live in and no matter what language you speak. The science of naming things and placing them in groups is called taxonomy. The name used is the organism's scientific name. It is usually a Latin derivative and is always italicized or underlined.

The scientific name is a combination of an organism's genus and species name. For instance, the genus name for the warmouth is Lepomis and its species name is gulosus, so its scientific name is Lepomis gulosus. The scientific name for the longear sunfish is Lepomis megalotis, so you can tell from the genus name that the two fish are very closely related and share some common characteristics. In fact, they are more closely related to teach other than the warmouth is to the rock bass, which bears the same common name but belongs to the genus Ambloplites.

Organizing things into groups is a very useful tool. It can highlight both similarities and differences.

Sometimes an eighth group, called subspecies, is added to denote small differences within a species grouping. For instance, the midland water snake is a subspecies of the northern water snake because of slight variations between them. The scientific name of the northern water snake is Nerodia sipedon sipedon and the midland water snake is Nerodia sipedon pleuralis. Notice the third part of the scientific name is the subspecies.

Plant groupings are similar, except the word "division" replaces "phylum", and the word "variety" may replace "subspecies."