Emil­ia­nia hux­leyi : Past, Present and Fu­ture

by Roberto

Christoph re­cently brought to my at­ten­tion a re­source for any­one in­ter­ested in a brief in­tro­duc­tion to coc­col­ithophores, with par­tic­u­lar em­pha­sis on Emil­ia­nia hux­leyi. Christoph knew well that I, as a fan of this mi­croalga, would en­joy the site. This got me think­ing about Ehux (its en­dear­ing name that many use) yet once more. By the way, Ehux was named to honor Thomas Hux­ley and Ce­sare Emil­iani, two key in­ves­ti­ga­tors in the early stud­ies of the coc­col­iths found in ocean sed­i­ments. Long-time STC read­ers will know that we find Ehux fas­ci­nat­ing; there are so many past posts on it that I will not try to list them here; just google "small things con­sid­ered emil­ia­nia" and you'll see. How can one not be fas­ci­nated by Ehux? Aside from the beauty of the cal­cium car­bon­ate coc­col­iths that en­case it, its roles in the car­bon and sul­fur cy­cles make it a cur­rent player on Earth's cli­mate and its relics help in the re­con­struc­tion of past cli­mates. The last few decades have wit­nessed a huge in­crease in Ehux re­search which in turn has led to an enor­mous growth of in­ter­est in it by the pub­lic. There's now a large amount of read­ily ac­ces­si­ble in­for­ma­tion for any­one to learn as much as they want about Ehux.

Fig. 1. A scan­ning elec­tron mi­cro­graph of a sin­gle G. hux­leyi cell (Emil­ia­nia hux­leyi). Source

Thus, it was with very mixed feel­ings that in a re­cent pa­per I read the fol­low­ing state­ment: "...our phy­loge­nomic re­sults sup­port the use of the species name Gephy­ro­capsa hux­leyi in­stead of the com­monly used Emil­ia­nia hux­leyi as this lin­eage is nested within the Gephy­ro­capsa genus. Hence, we here­after use G. hux­leyi in­stead of E. hux­leyi." Good­bye Ehux, hello Ghux?? I do not ques­tion that this new pro­posed tax­on­omy ac­cu­rately re­flects phy­logeny. But it does bother me enor­mously that if the new name is widely adopted, fu­ture stu­dents may not ever study the very im­por­tant knowl­edge de­posited un­der the name Emil­ia­nia. Searches for Gephy­ro­capsa hux­leyi may not yield the wealth of in­for­ma­tion as­so­ci­ated to Emil­ia­nia hux­leyi. For a mi­crobe with such hugely im­por­tant im­pli­ca­tions in the cur­rent cli­mate change cri­sis, it would be shame to have its past for­got­ten in the fu­ture be­cause of the present name change.

 

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