Most people know animals by their common names like Blue Jay, Monarch Butterfly, Black Bear, etc. However depending on where you live you could call the same animal a different name. One species can be known by many names and at other times many species can be known by one name.

We can see this when people refer to a cougar, it can be called puma, mountain lion, red tiger, or catamount. However, all of these names describe just one species: cougar (Puma concolor). The opposite can also happen in the instance of a blackbird. There are many different species that can be lumped together in “blackbird”: Common blackbird (Turdus merula), Great Tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus), Brewer’s blackbird (Euphagus cyanocephalus), etc.

Binomial nomenclature is the formal system of classifying living things consisting of two names, the genus, and species (Genus species).  Being able to properly describe the organism you’re referring to helps others know which species you’re talking about.

This can also go even further by including the name of a subspecies, trinomial nomenclature. The way to indicate you’re referring to a subspecies is to add a third name to the scientific name of that animal (Genus species subspecies). Indicating subspecies is important because it could be an indication of the speciation of two separate populations.

Tigers (Panthera tigris) have 5 living subspecies: Bengal tiger, Siberian tiger, Indochinese tiger, Sumatran tiger, and Malayan tiger. When talking about tigers and conservation quite a few people just refer to the subspecies and neglect to mention that they are all one species. This can lead to quite a bit of confusion when articles say that Malayan tigers are critically endangered in the wild with estimates that only 200 individuals are left. Yes, all that is true however that could give off the impression we’re about to lose an entire species of tiger, which isn’t true.

Tigers are considered to be endangered in the wild by the IUCN Red List, with 2 of the 5 subspecies critically endangered, the Malayan and Sumatran. I’m not stating that there shouldn’t be protections in place to help tigers in the wild, there absolutely should be! However, there also needs to be very clear explanations of the situation that is happening. By not indicating the correct subspecies then a disproportionate amount of resources could be used on the entire species when in fact one subspecies needs the most direct help.

For example if 1 million is allocated to saving “Tigers” based upon a report that was based on the Malayan Tiger, then those funds and resources could end up being diluted across all tigers instead. When writing and speaking about conservation we need to step back, think about things in context with one another, and do a little digging before worrying about an extinction article seen online.

There are numerous species that are critically endangered and/or extinct in the wild that need more help and funding to bring back to stable populations. There absolutely should be conservation efforts made so that no species (or subspecies) is faced with extinction from humans! However, we shouldn’t mislead people either by scaring them that a species of charismatic megafauna is on the brink of extinction when in fact it is just one subspecies out of the whole.