An aphid is… a flea, a louse, and even a marine mammal!

Earlier this year I wrote about the debate that rages about the correct way to talk about thrips during which I got distracted and ended up writing about their names in different languages. It turns out that I am not alone in being curious about international insect naming. I have just finished reading Matthew Gandy’s excellent book Moth, where he waxes lyrical about the different names used to describe butterflies and moths around the world.  This, of course, made me wonder what aphid would turn up, so armed with dictionaries and Google Translate, I traveled the world to see what I could discover.

The bronze-brown dandelion aphid, Uroleucon taraxaci – Photo by Jasper Hubert

There are a lot of languages so I am only going to highlight a few versions of aphid that I found interesting or surprising.  According to The Oxford English Dictionary, Linneaus coined the word Aphides, which may (or not) have been inspired by the Ancient Greek  ἀφειδής‎ (apheidḗs) meaning unsparing, perhaps in relation to their rapid reproduction and feeding habits.  The modern spelling of aphid seems to have come into being after the Second World War, although you could still find aphides being used in the late 1940s (e.g. Broadbent et al., 1948; Kassanis, 1949), and it can still be found in more recent scientific literature where the journal is hosted in a non-English speaking country.

Many aphid names are very obviously based on the modern Latin word coined by Linneaus, although in some countries more than one name can be used, as in the UK where aphid is the technical term but blackfly and green-fly are also commonly used.

 

Aphide derived names

Albanian              afideja

English                  aphid

French                  aphide

Hindu                    एफिड ephid

Portuguese         afídio

Spanish                áfido

 

More common are those names that relate to the vague resemblance that aphids have to lice and to their plant feeding habit. The term plant lice to describe aphids was commonly used in the scientific literature up and into the early 1930s (e.g. Mordvilko, 1928; Marcovitch, 1935).

 

Names linked to the putative resemblance to lice and their plant feeding habit

Bosnian                lisna uš                 uš is louse, lisna derived from leaf

Bulgarian             listna vŭshka     vŭshka louse, listna plant leaf

Danish                  bladlaus               blad is leaf, laus louse

Dutch                    bladluis                blad is leaf, luis is louse

Estonian               lehetäi                  leht is leaf, tai is louse

German                Blattlaus               blatt is leaf, laus is louse

Greek                   pseíra ton fytón louse on plant

Hungarian           levéltetű               leve is leaf, tetű is louse

Icelandic              lús or blaðlús     lús is louse, blað is plant

Latvian                  laputs                   lapa is, uts is louse

Norwegian          bladlus                 blad is plant, lus is louse

Swedish               bladlus                 as for Norwegian

 

If you draw siphunculi on to a louse and add a cauda to the rear end you can just about see the resemblance.

Louse with added siphunculi and cauda

 

Names based on the premise that aphids resemble fleas

French  puceron                  puce is flea

Spanish pulgón                   pulga is flea

Flea with cauda and siphunclus, but still only a poor imitation of the real thing.  Even with added aphid features I don’t see the resemblance 🙂

 

In Turkish, aphid is yaprak biti which roughly translates to leaf biter.  There are then a few languages where there appears to be no connection with their appearance or feeding habit.

 

Other names for aphid

Basque                 zorri

Chinese                蚜 Yá

Filipino                 dapulak

Finnish                  kirva

Lithuanian           Mszyca

Tamil                     அசுவினி Acuviṉi

Welsh                   llyslau

Xhosa                    zomthi

 

In Lithuanian, where aphid is Mszyca, which looks like it might be derived from Myzus, an important aphid genus, aphid also translates to amaras which means blight.  In the case of a heavy aphid infestation, this is probably an apt description.  I was also amused to find that whilst the Welsh have a name for aphid, Scottish Gaelic does not.

My all-time favourite, and one for which I can find no explanation at all, is dolphin.  According to Curtis (1845), aphids on cereals in some counties of England were known as wheat dolphins.  I was also able to trace the use of this name back to the previous century (Marsham, 1798), but again with no explanation why this name should have arisen.

The wheat dolphin 🙂

References

Broadbent, L., Doncaster, J.P., Hull, R. & Watson, M.A. (1948) Equipment used for trapping and identifying alate aphides.  Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London (A), 23, 57-58.

Curtis, J. (1845) Observations on the natural history and economy of various insects etc., affecting the corn-crops, including the parasitic enemies of the wheat midge, the thrips, wheat louse, wheat bug and also the little worm called Vibrio. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, 6, 493-518.

Gandy, M. (2016) Moth, Reaktion Books, London

Kassanis, B. (1949) The transmission of sugar-beet yellows virus by mechanical inoculation. Annals of Applied Biology, 36, 270-272.

Marcovitch, S. (1935) Experimental evidence on the value of strip farming as a method for the natural control of injurious insects with special reference to plant lice. Journal of Economic Entomology, 28, 62-70.

Marsham, T. (1798) XIX. Further observations on the wheat insect, in a letter to the Rev. Samuel Goodenough, L.L.D. F.R.S. Tr.L.S.  Transactions of the Linnaean Society of London, 4, 224-229.

Mordvilko, A. (1928) LXX.—The evolution of cycles and the origin of Heteroecy (migrations) in plant-lice , Annals and Magazine of Natural History: Series 10, 2, 570-582.