Lady Gaga Inspires Name of Newly Discovered Insect
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51 A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign grad student recently discovered a new insect, and named it after Lady Gaga.
That’s right, a new treehopper species from near the Pacific coast of Nicaragua is now known as Kaikaia gaga, according to the discoverer Brendan Morris, who is a PhD candidate in entomology.
Morris found the insect while looking through roughly 1,000 treehoppers from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History for research. The female bug, Kaikaia gaga, had unique features that distinguished her from the others.
“If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it’s going to be a treehopper, because they’ve got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them,” Morris told The Illinois News Bureau, who first reported the news. “They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”
The treehopper is not the first species to be named after a famous musician. Last month, a deep-sea crustacean got its name from Metallica and is now known as Macrostylis metallicola. In 2017, the Synalpheus pinkfloydi shrimp was named after, you guessed it, Pink Floyd.