[3]: 93 In 1766, Commerson joined Bougainville on his voyage of circumnavigation after being recommended for the position of naturalist by the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Her gender was only publicly discovered while the expedition was at Tahiti, but she remained with Commerson, nursing him and assisting him in his professional activities until the end of his life.

[6] Commerson was an astute observer of the Tahitian people and culture, thanks in part to a remarkable lack of European prejudice compared to other early visitors to the island.

Commerson and Bougainville together were responsible for spreading the myth of Tahitians as the embodiment of the concept of the noble savage.

Madagascar, I may announce to naturalists, is their promised land; it is there that nature seems to have retreated as into a private sanctuary, to work on different models from any she has used elsewhere: The most curious, the most marvellous forms can be found at every step...Commerson died at Mauritius at the age of 45.

[4] Unaware of his death in 1773, the Paris Academy of Sciences elected him as a fellow botanist just a few months later.

[27] Also in 1801, Scomberoides commersonnianus was formally described by the French zoologist Bernard Germain de Lacépède with the type locality given as Fort Dauphin in the Toliara Province of Madagascar.

[28] The specific name uses the Latin suffix ianus meaning "belonging to" and adds this to the surname of Commerçon, this also being spelled as Commerson, whose notes and illustration were used by Lacépède as the base for his description of the species.

[29] In 1803, Lacépède named a species of North American freshwater fish Catostomus commersonii in his honour.