tahitensis

Tahitensis is a Latinized species epithet used in the scientific names of plants, animals, and fungi to indicate that the organism was described from Tahiti or is native to Tahiti, the main island of French Polynesia. The term is derived from Tahiti and is part of the common set of geographic adjectives employed in binomial nomenclature to signal origin.

In practice, tahitensis functions as a descriptive geographic epithet. It is typically written in lowercase and appended to the genus name to form the species name. The exact ending can vary to reflect Latin grammatical agreement with the genus, although the form tahitensis is widely used across many taxa.

The epithet tahitensis appears across a range of taxa, including plants, insects, mollusks, and other organisms described from Tahitian material. Its primary purpose is to communicate geographic origin rather than to imply biological similarity among different species bearing the name. As with other toponymic epithets, the authority and year of description follow the species name.

Because botanical and zoological naming conventions differ in details of spelling and agreement, the use of tahitensis is governed by the rules of the relevant nomenclatural codes. In databases and literature, it serves as a concise geographic marker that links a species to Tahiti and, more broadly, to French Polynesia.