Scientists have discovered more than a million insect species, and they predict there could be six or seven times that on Earth. With that large a number, some of them are bound to be wacky. One recently discovered insect species is so bizarre, it is only fitting for it to be named after an equally unique star who infamously wore a dress made of raw meat to a red carpet event. That’s right: Lady Gaga now has an insect species named after her.
Thanks to Brendan Morris, a graduate student getting his PhD in entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Gaga will forever be memorialized through a treehopper insect. Morris loves treehoppers: “I love outrageous forms and colors,” he said of the insects in an interview with Illinois News Bureau. “It blows my mind that a group that is roughly 40 million years old has so much diversity of form — diversity, I would argue, that we don’t see in any other family of insects.”
To call attention to the interesting insects, Morris decided to honor Lady Gaga. Discovered near the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, Morris named the new treehopper species Kaikaia gaga. “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 said. “They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”
The Kaikaia gaga isn’t the first insect species to be named after a famous musician. According to Billboard, a deep-sea crustacean got its name from Metallica and is known as Macrostylis metallicola. In 2017, the Synalpheus pinkfloydi shrimp was named after Pink Floyd.
