Family (biology)

The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks. An order contains one or more families. Intermediate minor rankings are not shown.

In biological classification, a family (Latin: familia, plural familiae) is a taxonomic rank between order and genus. A family may be divided into one or more subfamiles, intermediate ranks above the rank of genus. In vernacular usage, a family may also be named after one of its common members, e.g. walnuts and hickory trees belong to the family Juglandaceae, commonly known as the walnut family.

What does and does not belong to each family is determined by a taxonomist — as is whether a particular family should be recognized at all. Often there is no exact agreement, with different taxonomists taking different positions. There are no hard rules that a taxonomist needs to follow in describing or recognizing a family. Some taxa are accepted almost universally, while others are recognised only rarely.

Nomenclature

The naming of families is codified by various international codes.

• In fungal, algal, and botanical nomenclature, the family names of plants, fungi, and algae end with the suffix "-aceae", with the exception of a small number of historic but widely used names including Compositae and Gramineae.^[1]
• In zoological nomenclature, the family names of animals end with the suffix "-idae".^[2]

History

The taxonomic term familia was first used by French botanist Pierre Magnol in his Prodromus historiae generalis plantarum, in quo familiae plantarum per tabulas disponuntur (1689) where he called the seventy-six groups of plants he recognised in his tables families (familiae). The concept of rank at that time was not yet settled, and in the preface to the Prodromus Magnol spoke of uniting his families into larger genera, which is far from how the term is used today.

Carolus Linnaeus used the word familia in his Philosophia botanica (1751) to denote major groups of plants: trees, herbs, ferns, palms, and so on. He used this term only in the morphological section of the book, discussing the vegetative and generative organs of plants. Subsequently, in French botanical publications, from Michel Adanson's Familles naturelles des plantes (1763) and until the end of the 19th century, the word famille was used as a French equivalent of the Latin ordo (or ordo naturalis). In nineteenth-century works such as the Prodromus of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle and the Genera Plantarum of George Bentham and Joseph Dalton Hooker this word ordo was used for what now is given the rank of family.

In zoology, the family as a rank intermediate between order and genus was introduced by Pierre André Latreille in his Précis des caractères génériques des insectes, disposés dans un ordre naturel (1796). He used families (some of them were not named) in some but not in all his orders of "insects" (which then included all arthropods).

Uses

Families can be used for evolutionary, palaeontological and generic studies because they are more stable than lower taxonomic levels such as genera and species.^[3][4]

See also

• Systematics, the study of the diversity of life
• Cladistics, the classification of organisms by their order of branching in an evolutionary tree
• Phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms
• Taxonomy
• Virus classification
• List of Anuran families
• List of Testudines families
• List of fish families
• List of families of spiders

Compare:

• Family
• Protein family
• Gene family

References