Stercorarius parasiticus
© USF&WS Image
Earlier today I was enjoying Chris West's Wisconsin Point photo album and came across a photograph he had taken of a Parasitic Jaeger. He labeled it with the correct scientific name Stercorarius parasiticus. Below it Chris added, "in plain English: The Parasitic Hunter." Well, I know that "jaeger" is German for hunter, but that's not technically part of its scientific name. Its common name translates as Chris indicated, but I became curious and struggled to find a definition for stercorarius. I got a bit of a clue when Google kept returning information on the Dung Beetle – its full species name is Geotrupes stercorarius. There it was again, but I was beginning to think this exercise wasn't going to end well. Anyway, a few more searches revealed an entry from The Latin Sexual Vocabulary under Relating to Bodily Functions:
In the Republic and early Empire stercus was the standard term in technical and formal prose, and it continued to be late antiquity and survives in some Romance languages...These can be compared with the comparable range of derivatives which stercus already had in early Latin (e.g. stercoratio, stercorare, stercilinum, stercorarius in Cato)...Stercus was a very general word, which could indicate the excrement of any animal or of humans.
So...
Poop Parasite? Am I wrong!? Or can stercus also refer to regurgitated items?
5 Comments:
There used to be a reference in the (so very interesting) chilterns seed catalogue to a plant called Sterculia which the blurb identified as being named after "the roman god of the loo"
Stercorarius comes from the Latin stercus, or dung. The story goes that folks once thought birds harassed by skuas and jaegers were voiding their bowels rather then emptying their crops when chased. And the jaegers scooped it right up. Turns out the observers were wrong, but the name stuck anyway.
From "A Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names" by Jobling and Fowler.
N8,
And that just figures!
Thanks,
Mike .
Yeah, I always interpreted it as dung-chaser, but poop parasite is about right. : )
What a great insult! I'll add that my list of mean names to call people.
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