Linnaeus and the Fish of Hawaii

Trumpetfish Autostomus chinensis Linnaeus 1758

     Yesterday we wrote a playful blog about triggerfish and common names.   This morning Sandra and I were looking in Randall's guide at the Lagoon Triggerfish.   I had just read the introduction to Tinker's book, Fishes of Hawaii, in which the departed dean of Hawaiian ichthyology  laid out the history of the fish identification.  Would you be surprised to learn that the first guy to categorize fishes was none other than Aristotle?   The tutor of Alexander the Great described about 100 Aegean fishes, preserved for posterity in his Historium Animalium.  Three hundred and some years later Pliny the Elder, a Roman, added a couple dozen to the list.  And then the science of ichthyology fell silent until the Renaissance.   The dark ages were truly an intellectual wasteland.

Stripebelly Puffer Arothron hispidus 1758  Linnaeus

    At any rate, we were looking at the Lagoon Triggerfish and I pointed out that the scientific name is always followed by the name of the discoverer and the date his discovery and name were accepted by the scientific community.  In the case of the Lagoon:  Linnaeus, 1758.  I have noted his name in Hawaiian fish field guides before with a sense of wonder.  This is the man who devised the binomial system by which all plants and animals are known.  Over the years I have puzzled... just  how was it that he named so many fish?  (He is credited with ten species in Randall's Shore Fishes of Hawai'i.)  With this question in mind, I spent today researching Linnaeus and the Lagoon Triggerfish.
    The story begins in Upsala, Sweden, around 1730. Upsala is home to one of the oldest universities in Europe and here  Carl von Linne, a botanist, was close friends with Peter Artedi, an ichthyologist.  The two shared an idea that they could bring order to all of  natural history with a  naming system that delineated the relationship between progressively similar organisms, be they plants or animals.  In 1735 the two made a pact:  they would work together on this project and if one died, the other would carry on with the work.  A mere ten weeks later, Artedi died in a freak drowning accident in Amsterdam.  von Linne became Linnaeus and we are taught that he devised the naming system we all use in natural history.  No mention is made of Artedi.

Goldrim Surgeon Acanthurus nigricans 1758  Linnaeus

    We are still left with  Lagoon Triggerfish,  Rhinecanthus aculeatus Linnaeus 1758.   The first possibility, and this is what I had presumed, is that von Linne was a traveler and discovered animals and plants all over the world.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In his lifetime, he never made it further afield than  Amsterdam.  Primarily he stayed in Upsala where his fame increased as the binomial system gained acceptance in the scientific community.  He was a talented teacher, surrounded by intelligent students.  The brightest of these students were encouraged to go into the world and do the field work necessary to find, describe and name the plants and animals.  Remember, Linnaeus was a botanist and although he encouraged discovery of all living organisms, he taught botanists and these students, known in an almost sacrilegious reference as Apostles, went into the world as botanists first, but with the mission to find other organisms as well.  At this point in my quest I thought, "Aha, one of these apostles found the Lagoon Triggerfish and sent it back in barrel of rum and Linnaeus got the credit."

Convict Tang  Acanthurus triostegus  1758  Linnaeus

     The first such apostle was Christopher Tärnström, who in 1746 set off with the Swedish East India Company for China.  The ship was forced to stop for the monsoon season on a Vietnamese island and poor Tärnström died in short order of a tropical fever.  There is no indication that any of his work made it back to Upsala.

Spiny Balloonfish  Diodon holocanthus  1758  Linnaeus 

     The second and third apostles became renowned scientists.  Daniel Solander was sent to England, worked under Joseph Banks and those two went with Cook to investigate Australia.  They are the botanists for which Botany Bay is named!   Solander was kept in the shadows by Banks, but he is nevertheless known for making many discoveries of plants and animals.  He is revered in the intellectual history of Australia.  Some of his work is available in The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes, Collected by the late John Ellis, (1786).  This book exists.  My librarian (the lovely, talented and Redoubtable SKG) discovered one at the University of Washington.  None in Hawaii.   The first three pages are available on Google books, so I was able to look at those.  I felt palpably close to the secret which remained just out of reach.
      The third apostle, Anders Sparrman, was working in South Africa when Cook made port in the Resolution, near the beginning of his second (and especially for us in Hawaii) fateful journey.   Sparrman, too, would have had a chance of collecting a Lagoon Triggerfish for the boss back in Sweden.
      At this point, now in the early afternoon, I had the reverse of an Aha! moment.  Cook commanded the Endeavor from 1768 to 1771 and the Resolution from 1772 to 1775.  Solander was only ten years old when Linnaeus claimed the Lagoon Triggerfish!  Sparrman a mere sprat. 

Moorish Idol  Zanclus cornutus  Linnaeus  1758

     So it was back to the drawing board with the new question, "What happened before1758?"    Or to put it another way, what didn't happen?  Wikipedia provides a link at the bottom of its article on Solander: European Voyages of Scientific Discovery.   As it turns out, Linnaeus was just ahead of the ball.  The first two such voyages were by the HMS Dolphin in 1764 and 1768.  This was the first time an organized scientific expedition went to sea.  Clearly Linnaeus's work furthered this cause rather than benefitting from it before 1760.
  So where did these fish come from?  Well, when von Linne's good friend and colleague, Peter Artedi, passed away,  Linnaeus was the recipient of his works, including Biblioteca ichthyologica, Philosophia ichthyologica, etc.  Five original manuscripts containing lists of authors, descriptions of 45 genera of fishes, and so on.  Pretty much the world's accumulated knowledge of ichthyology in 1735. Artedi had devised a system of fish classification that survives to this day!
    And what was Artedi doing in Amsterdam?  Most likely visiting Albertus Seba.  Seba was a wealthy man living in one of the busiest port cities of northern Europe.  He paid mariners  for exotic plants and animals which he displayed in his personal museum.  There exist catalogs of Seba's collection, wikipedia references them, but they are not readily available.  Regardless,  I would not want to bet against Seba having the widely distributed and beautiful Lagoon Triggerfish in his collection, the preeminent natural history museum of its time.

Lagoon Triggerfish  Rhinecanthus aculeatus  Artedi 1758

    Finally, we are left with the magical date of 1758.  The Systema Natura was first published in 1735.  It was revised repeatedly.  The 10th edition was published in 1758, included 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants.  And this edition is the document that cemented the use of the binomial naming system.  All the species now had two Latin names, one for the genus, one for the species.  Anything that occurred before that publication was unofficial.
    When I started my investigation this morning, I had nothing but good feelings about Linnaeus.  He seems to have been an inspirational teacher.  With Peter Artedi he made a quantum leap in the way science deals with classification, setting off a rush to identify the plants and animals of our planet.   However, I can only conclude that he unscrupulously accepted his colleague's work and passed it off as his own.  Wouldn't it be appropriate, even uplifting, to read Lagoon Triggerfish  Rhinecanthus aculeatus 1758, Artedi?

jeff