I understand about the idea of matching the “gender” between the 2 or 3 words. I see it would apply equally to species, as well as sub species names. However I for one, can’t understand who or how anyone decides or identifies what is the “gender” of the noun word (I assume this usually or always is the genus name) to start with. I assume many genus names were given historically after the concept of what is male and female was maybe not assigned. This is probably way too complicated to explain and probably way off topic but I wonder is there a simple answer? A quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature and scrolling to the section on Gender Alignment doesn’t really help me, apart from saying with an example on butterflies, that maybe there is no clear agreement or reason for this.
Philip
