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Earlier in December I wrote about a new range of snacks that Selfridges had started to sell, and during a Christmas trip to London I visited Selfridges to buy some. I (and some friends) will be eating them soon to provide you some more photos and to describe how they taste.

Tenebrio molitor lollypops: part of the Selfridges display of invertebrate snacks (Copyright Elizabeth Livermore)

All of the snacks were from edible, an alternative online food shop, and were a little cheaper to buy at Selfridges than from the edible website.

I checked the packaging and found that the species names did not follow the proper protocol for binomial nomenclature: all names were either entirely in lowercase or uppercase, and none were italicised. The class of the scorpion was listed incorrectly as ‘INSECTA’ when it should have been Arachnida.

From left to right: Giant toasted ants, £12.45; Thai green curry crickets, £2.44; and a chocolate covered scorpion, £4.64.

I also investigated the species names (Giant toasted ants: Atta cephalotes, Thai green curry crickets: Acheta domestica, and the chocolate covered scorpion: Buthus martensii) and from my brief searches, A. cephalotes seems correct but the other two are synonyms.

I checked A. domestica in the Orthoptera Species File and it is listed as an unjustified emendation of A. domesticus. I found an entry for Mesobuthus martensii on the UniProt Taxonomy database where it listed B. martensii as a synonym.

I guess edible are not quite as good biologists as you would hope.

Tags: Entomology, Entomophagy, Hymenoptera, Insects, invertebrates, orthoptera, Scorpiones

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 23:32 and is filed under Entomology, Entomophagy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.