Talk:Old wife

names

 * A fisherman's name, Old wife (plural: Old Wives), refers to the sound it makes when caught, caused by it grinding its teeth.[1][2] The vernacular names include Bastard dory, derived from the french doré (golden), and Zebra-tail or -fish.[3]

The derivation from dore was certainly not in source [3], and more likely comes directly from the general fish name dory (which has its own article which is the better place for tracing the term right back through the romance languages). It's hardly as if this species has the particularly gilded look about it.

"Old wife", is hardly just "a fisherman's name" but rather the standard name as explicitly asserted by the natural museum of Australia.

What [3] does point out is that zebra-tail is a solely US name. And hence innappropriate for an article about an Australian fish, unless we're also going to make a fuss about the Chinese and French names for it (given by the same source).

The scientific names, like enoplosidae, also lack explanation. When was it established to be a unique family? Clearly it was originally taken to belong to one particular variety (Chaetodon) of butterfly fish. The enoplosus appears to be attributed to white by Lacepede, but that is unclear (and still doesn't address enoplosidae)..


 * named and described these in a journal called Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales, which was published in 1790. John White included 64 drawings of the animals and plants he observed (these drawings are thought to be done by Thomas Watling, a Scottish convict artist who was transported for forging a bank note). In Dr White’s species description of the fish, the word armatus refers to this fish’s armour, the venomous long spines on the dorsal fins that can cause pain, swelling and discomfort if a person is stung with them. This fish was renamed Enoplosus armatus in 1802 by the French scientist Bernard Germain de Lacepede and this scientific name has remained since that time. 


 * Lacepede quotes the name Enoplosus from White. We have not seen this paper, and the name may have been first printed by Lacepede.

Turns out that enoplos is greek for weapon (and thus is probably a reiteration of the species name, since armatus is latin for armor/soldier/armed-man. Maybe what Lacepede meant is that he was giving the name White chose, but giving it in a different language in order to place it in an original genus for the first time. Although why not just call it armatus armatus?). Another issue this raises is the venom of the barbs, which sources seem to vary in their mention of. Did someone on White's ship happen to be injured by this fish? Cesiumfrog (talk) 05:38, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

The original illustration is also very odd. There seems to be some dispute over who the artist was (owing to a disrepency among relevant dates). Also, notice that: the black stripes fail to continue across the eye and gill cover; relative lengths (and shapes) of the two dorsal fins do not match the article descriptions; relative lengths of the dorsal spines (particularly the third) does not match White's description. This low accuracy and poor quality of the drawing does however look consistent with the other slides of that voyage journal. Naively, I think it is plausible that the slides were produced at a different date than the text and possibly drawn from imagination (rather than directly from specimens), or the artist was extremely inferior to the task of natural scientific illustration. Cesiumfrog (talk) 02:10, 16 May 2012 (UTC)