What’s in a name?

Not content with Academy Awards? Now you only really know you’ve ‘made it’ when a new species bears your name…But what would Carl Linnaeus think?

“A celebrity these days means someone famous for having done nothing at all. Famous for being famous,” despaired Sir David Attenborough earlier this year. So I can’t imagine the naturalist veteran being most pleased with the increasing trend to name newly discovered organisms after famous people.

Johnny Depp has become the latest celeb to receive this dubious honour as a scientist from Imperial has discovered an ancient extinct creature with ‘scissor-hand-like’ claws in fossil records. The 505 million-year-old fossil called Kooteninchela deppi, which is a distant relative of lobsters and scorpions, reminded palaeontologist David Legg of Johnny Depp’s starring role as Edward Scissorhands – the cult film about an artificial man with scissors for hands.

"When I first saw the pair of isolated claws in the fossil records of this species I could not help but think of Edward Scissorhands. Even the genus name, Kooteninchela includes the reference to this film as 'chela' is Latin for claws or scissors. In truth, I am also a bit of a Depp fan and so what better way to honour the man than to immortalise him as an ancient creature that once roamed the sea?” said Legg.

[caption id="attachment_33401" align="aligncenter" width="180" caption="David Legg named Kooteninchela deppi after his favourite film star"][/caption]

This fossilised caricature is helping researchers piece together more information about life on Earth during the Cambrian period when nearly all modern animal types emerged.

Depp is not alone; a quick glance at the internet (a reliable source, I’m sure…) informs me that there are currently 284 critters named after famous people. It’s clear that scientists get a chance to revel in their musical and film tastes with organisms such as Avalanchurus garfunkeli - a trilobite fossil named after Art Garfunkel, Cirolana mercury, a species of isopod found on coral reefs named after Freddie Mercury, and Avahi cleesei - a woolly lemur named after Monty Python star John Cleese because of his fondness for the creature. There’s a great range of famous people there with singers and actors taking up most of the list, but also a few politicians: a slime-mould beetle (Agathidium bushi) was named after George W Bush, apparently meant as a great compliment from its Republican discoverer... While Barack Obama has had several organisms named after him, including a spider called Aptostichus barackobamai.

Thousands of new species are discovered each year, and each requires a description and a name. Ever since eccentric botanist Carl Linnaeus introduced binomial nomenclature in 1735, the right to name a species has been given to the discoverer. This system which conveys information about the species and its closest relative typically generates long, unpronounceable Latin words. So is it any surprise that coming up with a sensible, traditional name may feel a bit deflating for the excited scientist that has discovered a species never recorded before? And If naming species after celebrities, using silly, faux-Latin, makes the names easier to remember then I might be all for this new convention…

Linnaeus may well have wholeheartedly approved of this tongue-in-cheek approach, though I imagine he would have felt naming a species after a celebrity lacked a little imagination. Linnaeus himself had fun with taxonomy; he relished wordplay, classified many plant species according to their reproductive organs and named a number of clams and mussels for their resemblance to female genitalia, resulting in names that were reportedly “too smutty for British ears”. Besides having a laugh, there is another advantage to this new trend: it’s putting the spotlight back on taxonomy - a discipline with a crisis. It’s estimated that only a quarter of the world’s species have been identified because of a taxonomist shortage. It’s becoming harder to recruit new, young scientists to name new species because it’s a pursuit with a bad PR– thought of as stuffy and irrelevant. So when a scientist names a fly with a golden rear (Scaptia beyonceae) after Beyoncé or a new species of parasitic wasp after Lady Gaga (Aleiodes gaga), the field experiences a surge of media attention.

And while some scientists may use their naming power to honour those they admire, they can instead, if they wish, use the opportunity for derision. And they’d also be following Linnaeus’ example; the pioneering botanist named a small, stinking weed after a rival colleague.

Attenborough (who actually has many species named after him) may well be right that our culture is becoming too celebrity-centric. Perhaps it’s not wholly appropriate for new species to have namesakes that have contributed little to scientific discovery, but I still think Linnaeus would want taxonomists to have a little bit of fun while raising awareness of the field. If you’re successful enough to discover a new species, it’s your right to call it whatever you like – whether it’s for fame, honour or snark.