10/27/2022
NAME OF THE WEEK
Micropterus nigricans (Cuvier 1828)
Black basses (genus Micropterus, family Centrarchidae) are the most popular recreational gamefishes in North America (and introduced for this purpose around the world). But I’ve always wondered about the common name “black bass.” Why are they called “black” when their predominant color is dark olive or bronze? Yes, they may have dark or black markings on their bodies, but they do not seem black enough to justify the adjective.
Thanks to a recent revision of Micropterus (more on that below), I believe I found the answer in the original description of a newly reinstated species: Micropterus nigricans, proposed (as Huro nigricans) by the famous French anatomist Georges Cuvier in 1828.
The Latin adjective “nigricans” means swarthy or blackish. But Cuvier did not describe a swarthy or blackish fish. He wrote (translated from the French):
“The color of this fish, which we have only seen dried, seems to approach that of the carp. Its back is a greenish-brown, fading at the sides, and passing under the belly to a silvery-yellowish-white. A grayish line follows the middle of each longitudinal row of scales.”
So why the “blackish” name?
Cuvier described the fish from a specimen from Lake Huron, one of the five Great Lakes of North America, shared on the north and east by the Canadian province of Ontario and on the south and west by the U.S. state of Michigan. According to Cuvier (again translated from the French):
“The English [speakers] of the vicinity of this lake call it black-bass or black perch, because it indeed resembles rather in habit [i.e., shape] and tints another fish that bears the same name in the United States, and which we will describe further in our centroprist genus to which it belongs.”
The “centroprist” species is the Black Sea Bass, Centropristis striata (Serranidae), which is indeed black.
Cuvier ended his description with an etymological sign-off: “We will give this species the epithet it bears in its native country, Huro nigricans” (Huro referring to Lake Huron).
I now have the answer I sought: Black basses are called black basses because people in early 19th-century America thought Micropterus nigricans looked like a sea bass that occurs in the western Atlantic Ocean over 1100 km away.
I should note for the sake of completeness that Dwight A. Webster, a fisheries professor at Cornell University, proposed a different explanation 42 years ago. Writing in the March-April 1980 issue of Fisheries magazine, Webster suggested that the name “black bass” refers to the resemblance of the Largemouth Bass to a different Atlantic species, the Tautog (Tautoga onitis, Labridae), also known as “blackfish.” While the two fishes do share a superficial resemblance, and it’s feasible that early Americans conflated all three species (bass, sea bass, tautog) under one vernacular, Cuvier’s explanation, explicitly linking Micropterus nigricans to Centropristis striata, is impossible to dismiss.
As mentioned above, Micropterus nigricans is a newly reinstated species. According to a recent genomic analysis by Kim et al. (2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11743-2 , the scientific names M. salmoides and M. floridanus have been incorrectly applied to Largemouth Bass and Florida Bass, respectively, over the past 75 years. Based on their analysis, Kim et al. reveal that M. salmoides is the accurate and valid scientific name for the Florida Bass, whereas M. floridanus, traditionally applied to that species, is a junior synonym of M. salmoides. The oldest available scientific name for the Largemouth Bass is therefore M. nigricans, hence the elevation of that long-forgotten name.
M. nigricans is not the first species of the genus whose scientific name reflects a local name that compares the fish to an unrelated species. In 1802, Lacepède named M. salmoides, meaning “salmon-like,” based on an illustration of a specimen collected near Charleston, South Carolina. Lacepède selected the epithet because the specimen was labeled “trout,” its local name in Charleston.
IMAGE: Color plate accompanying Cuvier’s description of Huro (now Micropterus) nigricans. Unfortunately, it’s a poor rendering that scarcely resembles a Largemouth Bass.
