The “one thing I teach that nobody ever forgets” may be wrong!

Image credit:  “Semele consumed by Jupiter’s [=Zeus’s] thunder”, 1733, Bernard Picart. In Tafereel, of Beschryving van den prachtigen Tempel der Zang-Godinnen, H. Chatelain, Amsterdam.

Recently I blogged about the one thing I teach that nobody ever forgets: the meaning, and etymology, of the life-history term semelparity. If you haven’t read that post, and want this one to make sense, go ahead and read it now (I’ll wait). But it turns out that etymology I explained there might be wrong*.

A sharp-eyed reader (Jon Benstead) alerted me to an alternative etymology, laid out by James Rader in a brief letter to Natural History. According to Rader, “the notion that the semel in semelparity…has some connection with the Semele of Greek mythology looks like a bit of biologists’ folklore”.