The father of taxonomy would be proud. The first genetic analysis of one of Carl Linnaeus's own specimens has revealed a long-standing botanical error: Scientists have been calling a marine alga by the wrong "Linnaean" name.
The unlucky alga was the sea lettuce Ulva lactuca, which Linnaeus collected and christened in the mid-18th century. Sea lettuces are notorious for invading polluted waters and gunking up ships' hulls. Christine Maggs and Frédéric Mineur, both of Queen's University Belfast in the U.K., got samples of the "type specimen" for the species from the Linnean [sic] Society's herbarium in London and finished mapping its genome this month. The results showed that somewhere along the line, naturalists accidentally renamed the alga U. fasciata and gave the name U. lactuca to a similar species. Now the original U. lactuca has its name back, and the misnamed latecomer needs a new one.
Although Linnaeus typically took meticulous notes, for his Ulva's geographic range he wrote only "in oceano." Maggs says this could have contributed to the confusion. But Linnaeus more than made up for his oversight: Whereas his contemporaries left drawings, he preserved DNA. "We can exploit that," Maggs says. "Linnaeus's specimens have undreamed-of value 250 years later."
