Talk:Steller sea lion

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Steller Sea Lion

There is virtually nothing on here about the habitat or biome. I'm pretty sure most Wikipedia articles include more information. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.216.7.193 (talk) 04:31, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

How does this differ from the Steller's sea lion and the Stellar's sea lion? -- Zoe

It doesn't! - Steller's sea lion is the correct spelling - the animal was named after the German explorer George Steller (1709-1746), I'll move the page to Steller's sea lion. - MPF 16:10, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Made minor edit to correct viewpoint neutral ('Most likely' changed to 'Many researchers believe'). -Hansnesse 04.30, 16 November 2005 (UCT)

Someone changed it to "certainly due to." I think this is not a settled point among scientists. See for instance, the National Research Council 1997 report, the rancor over Springer et al 2003's suggestion that the decline was due to Orca predation, or debated over nutritional stress in Fritz and Hinkely's 2005 paper cf. Trites and Donnelly's 2003 work. Since this is not a settled issue, I think the correct (that is viewpoint neutral) wording is "Many researchers believe" or "many researchers also believe." Objections?

Page title

Is it Steller's sea lion or Steller's Sea Lion? The article location / intro. sentence / infobox contradict eachother.--Commander Keane 04:42, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

• Conventionally wikipedia articles about mammals follow the same rules as birds and capitalise species, so it should be Steller's Sea Lion. Sabine's Sunbird 09:04, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
• The scientific literature is virtually universal (as far as I have read) on the use of Steller sea lions. I believe this is an English convention on animal nomenclature, but don't have a reference.
• I concur, the lowercase Steller's sea lion or Steller sea lion is correct. --TeaDrinker 21:55, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Feel free to read the extended and somewhat testy arguments about the subject here. Sabine's Sunbird talk 07:47, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

The accepted nomenclature for the common name is Steller sea lion. See Rice, D.W. 1998. Marine mammals of the world - Systematics and distribution. Society of Marine Mammalogy Special Publication Number 4, 231 pp.

The overwhelming majority of papers in the primarly literature use the nomenclature 'Steller sea lion'. Changed page to reflect that. No reason was given for adding the apostrophe s on 23 November 2006 by user stavenn. See also above ref posted by someone else. Nowreally 09:51, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Please see also United Nations Website: Steller's, WWF Website: Steller's, BBC Website: Steller's, IUCN Red List Website - Both name used here regarding the species. & if I'm not mistaken, the original page was Steller's Sea Lion created by User Graham on 3 July 2002. The reason I put ' is to match the species name's on title and content. --Stavenn 00:22, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for explanation, your matching the content to title was well meant. Nowreally 01:32, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Your moving the page was well meant too. But, since nothing is wrong with original page' name, the references given for Steller all are U.S.-based references (not International), the species is not exclusively-American/U.S. endemic and original retained priority (I think), should it moved back ? though both names are fine with me. Also, pay attention of double-redirect when moved any page(s). --Stavenn 02:34, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikipedia mammals would do well to use scientific names as page titles after all.

Not to belabor this point, but the only native English speaking countries where E.j. occurs are the US and Canada, and 'Steller sea lion' is the accepted usage there. Papers in English international journals also mostly use 'Steller'. Note well I didn't change E.j. pages in other languages. For some perspective, this is a different issue from the international common seal / harbor seal name debate on the Phoca vitulina page. If nomenclature is still a problem for anyone, have at it and explain here... Nowreally 17:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Page title, again

Page title moved to "Steller sea lion" from "Steller's sea lion" to bring page in line with the commonly used and widely accepted (2007) English nomenclature for E. jubatus. I'm not touching the capitalization, although Wikipedia seems to have a strange idea about that too. See other references and commentary on this page for more info. Other examples include: (a) http://stellersealions.noaa.gov, the official page for Steller sea lion information by the US management agency, (b) any number of notices published in the US Federal Register, (c) many dozens of papers (one online source for some papers is http://research.alaskasealife.org). Yep, for birds it's Steller's. Links seem to be working OK, let me know if I broke anything. Nowreally 00:13, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Marine Mammal Center

An anon removed a section of material on research on Stellers going on at the Marine Mammal Center, which Sabine's Sunbird restored. I reverted the restoration. The section sounds as if the Marine Mammal Center are a center of Steller research, which is not remotely the case. There are a great many labs which work on Stellers, such as the National Marine Mammal Lab (NMML) in the US, Russian and Japanese groups, as well as groups at research universities. The citation was not especially an important (to my eye, at least) work on Stellers, and does not exmplify current trends in research. Thoughts? --TeaDrinker 21:18, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

• In this situation perhaps a modification and qualification of the information in the article would be more approrpiate just cutting it out. I wasn't aware when I reverted the edit that while the info was true it might be misleading in the way TeaDrinker describes. I simply assumed that it was POV editing or vandalism - in situations were a chunk of infor is removed from the article it is helpful to leave a note in the talk page explaining why this was done (as TeaDrinker has indeed done). The obvious solution is to write an expanded section on research and then put the contribution of the Marine Mammal Center into the correct context, assuming they are important enough to warrant inclusion (something I at present know little about. Sabine's Sunbird talk 02:59, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Northern Fur Seal which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RM bot 02:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Withdrawn by proposer.  Obsidi♠n Soul 14:13, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

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Steller sea lion → Steller's sea lion — Whatever the incorrect common usage in popular media (probably affected by Wikipedia itself) in the United States (which is itself systemic bias), the correct name is Steller's sea lion. It was named after Georg Wilhelm Steller. Steller itself is not an adjective (and can likely be confused with "stellar") and should be in possessive as evidenced by the other animals which are named after Steller. The page should be moved back to the original name this article was created under.  Obsidi♠n Soul 15:33, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

• Oppose. Steller sea lion is the most common name in not only the "popular media", but also in scholarly works. A google scholar search for "Steller's sea lion" gives 3,870 results, compared to 350 for "Steller's sea lion". Jenks24 (talk) 09:35, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Discussion

Any additional comments:

• Google books give a bit more hits for "Steller sea lion" than "Steller's sea lion" (roughly 40,200/38,200). Both counts are high, thus it doesn't seem like a spelling mistake. Common usage often beats logic. Weddell's seal is very rarely used for Weddell seal. Materialscientist (talk) 09:49, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I withdraw the request. The Weddell seal example convinced me I guess. Article is still inconsistent though and I think, given the numbers of the search results, that both variants of the common name should be mentioned in the lead.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 14:11, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

What's in a name

If we must stick with the name Steller sea lion to comply with a semi-literate scientific community, then we should add 'also known as Steller's ..'. In fact, I will do this shortly.

A quick internet search has shown that wikipedia uses the apostrophe for: Steller's sea eagle/sea cow/eider/jay; Pallas's cat/sea eagle/sandgrouse/warbler; Darwin's fox/bark spider; and Père David's Deer.

Grammatically correct english would use the apostrophe and the s. Omitting them is somewhat akin to using Wallrus or "Fir seal": it is just wrong; as wrong as me saying that a dolphin is a type of shark. [Mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, ultimately, all evolved from a fish - but not a shark - so cladistically, aren't we all "fish"?]

From personal observation, having studied 100's of school books dating from my parents' and grandparent's times, correct grammar seemed to be important in all subjects; whereas in the 80's, my science, history and geography teachers were more concerned with the subject they taught and generally left grammar to their colleagues in the english department. As for my sons's teachers, I'm sure one believes that grammar was his late father's mum!

NowReally suggested using the scientific name, but this is not without problems. The brontosaurus, so beloved by generations of schoolchildren, is now known as apatosaurus: apparently, due to the size difference in the original (partial) skeletons they were thought to be different species; later someone realised that the apatosaurus skeleton merely represented a younger, and smaller, animal; as apatosaurus was described first, its name took precedence (a rule not always followed). As more, and more complete, fossils have been found, other name changes have occurred.

Even with living animals, their have been significant changes - the lion was originally Felis leo; more recently, some lemur subspecies have been promoted to full species, the family dog has been relegated to a subspecies of the grey wolf and several former members of the civet family have been promoted to new families.

Recent research indicates that the Caspian Seal, Pusa caspica, is closer to the Gray Seal, Halichoerus grypus, than it is to the other Pusa species; and the Brown Fur Seal, Arctocephalus pusillus, appears to be a more distant relative of the other Fur Seals than the New Zealand Sealion, Phocarctos hookeri. If other research supports this, then at least two species are likely to change genus. And as more research is done,

Slightly off point, but saying, for example, "The Steller's sea lion is threatened with extinction." just sounds wrong; I think cutting out the 'the' makes it so much better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Glevum (talk • contribs) 20:01, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Bad links

So many of the links at the bottom of this page are bad, it's hard to know where to begin. Someone who's an expert on Stellar Sea Lions should redo these links. Wearman 03:57, 13 June 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wearman (talk • contribs)