In a translation I did the other day I found a reference to Caenorhadbitis elegans
I didn’t like the look of it. I was suspicious of that -db- in the middle. Somehow it didn’t look like a part of a scientific name but it did look very like how a Spanish-speaker might mispronounce a word. I checked with Google and, sure enough, it offered me 466 hits for Caenorhadbitis and asked if I meant Caenorhabditis , for which there are 803,000 hits including Wikipedia. I decided that my original had got the scientific name wrong. I always check these things but not everybody does. My Spanish text had originally been written in Catalan, so obviously the Catalan-Spanish translator had just let it go without checking. But I have found so many mistakes that I look for everything. Especially, I check as a matter of course that these scientists have actually managed to get the names of their own research institutions right!
And, as you’re obviously wondering, Wikipedia tells us that Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living, transparent nematode (roundworm), about 1 mm in length, which lives in temperate soil environments.
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