Singer's blonde hair and red lipstick inspire scientists to name new group of yellow and red insects in her honor
A new genus of Australian bugs has been named Swiftiephylus in honor of Taylor Swift. The singer joins such luminaries as David Attenborough, Barak Obama and Beyoncé in the exclusive club of people to be immortalized in the scientific names of living things.
Swift lends her name to four insect species, newly classified from a zoological collection and described in research published in the De Gruyter Brill journal Insect Systematics and Evolution . The four insects together make up a new genus of Australian plant bug belonging to the family Miridae, the largest family of true bugs which has more than 11,000 described species worldwide.
Lead author Sarah Schroeder from the University of California, US, named one of the species Swiftiephylus taylorae directly after Swift, and chose S. amator, S. intrepidus and S. poetorum for the other three – names that draw on the singer's albums Lover, Fearless and The Tortured Poets Department.
These Latin versions of 'Taylor', 'lover', 'fearless' and 'poets', conform to the formal scientific convention whereby a new species can be given any name by its finder, provided they use a two-part Latinized name governed by guidelines such as the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature .
Schroeder was inspired to name the insects after Swift as their pale yellow color and striking red markings reminded her of the singer's characteristic blonde hair and red lipstick. The insects' coloring mimics the flowers of the Australian she-oak, thus helping them evade predators.
"I didn't know if I would ever have the opportunity to name a species again, so I wanted to do something both meaningful to science and authentic to me," says Schroeder.
The specimens studied by Schroeder and co-author Professor Christiane Weirauch were collected in Australia between 1995 and 2004 as part of a National Science Foundation-funded biodiversity project 'Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI) for Plant Bugs' that gathered more than 50,000 specimens. Since then, they have remained unstudied in various museum collections.
"I suppose we could say that revisiting these collections and describing hidden species makes them 'vault species', much like Taylor's 'vault tracks' on her re-recordings," Schroder says. "These hidden gems just hadn't quite made it out into the world yet, and it took the right set of circumstances for them to be described."
Natural history museums are an essential part of conservation science, and science as a whole, Schroeder adds, calling them "treasure troves of scientific discovery".
There may be as many as 30 million insect species still undocumented. In that vast, largely unexplored world, a little star power may help some of its smallest inhabitants get noticed, studied and protected.
The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1163/1876312x-bja10090
