When Lady Gaga held a Q&A on Reddit for a 2014 album release, there was one question that took the botany world by storm: what’s it like to have a genus of ferns named after you? “Pretty cool,” she responded, “especially since it’s an asexual fern.”
The 19 fern species of the Gaga genus are found from Bolivia to the south-west US, and were named after the singer partly for their G-A-G-A genetic sequence. “All sexless, judgeless,” she added. “How I wish to be.”
The American singer and actor is among thousands of celebrities and figures, real and fictional, after which animals and plants have been named. Uma Thurman has a fringe-toed lizard in Arizona, scientifically described as Uma thurmanae in 2020. A shark found in the eastern Pacific has been named after the Jaws author Peter Benchley.
The former US president Barack Obama has at least nine namesake species, including a bee, a sea slug and an Amazonian bird. Enough organisms have now been named after the Harry Potter characters, spells and objects to generate their own Wikipedia page, including an Australian trapdoor spider named Aragog, a ghostly ant species named after Lord Voldemort and a dinosaur named for Hogwarts.
But scientists are increasingly questioning whether celebrity names really help species conservation. The debate comes amid growing controversy over historical names for plants and animals, some of which are associated with colonialism, racism and violence.
This month, as scientists gather in Madrid for the International Botanical Congress, these questions will be a central focus of debate.
The justification for star-power monikers is that they can raise the profile of overlooked plants and animals, and pay tribute to the conservation work of celebrities. In 2022, scientists at Kew named a Cameroonian tree in honour of the actor Leonardo DiCaprio to highlight concerns about the Ebo rainforest. DiCaprio had campaigned about the threat of logging where Uvariopsis dicaprio is found.
But celebrity links have not always been helpful to the survival of species. In Slovenia’s humid caves, the Adolf Hitler beetle has become a favourite for collectors of Nazi memorabilia – so much so that it is threatening the insect’s survival. Last year, researchers proposed a name change to save it from extinction.
“The sheer act of giving something a name gives it reality in the human world. It’s always real in nature, of course. But [a name] allows people to go out and look for it,” says Dr Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum and author of a book on the history of plant names.
Knapp will oversee discussions at the Madrid summit on how plant species are named. Botanists are encouraged not to name groups, or genera, of species after people unconnected to the field. One proposal before the summit is to extend that norm to the species level in an attempt to rule out future celebrity or offensive plant names.
Then, there is the difficulty of revising names for figures who become increasingly divisive over time. The conquistador Hernán Cortés, the British coloniser Cecil Rhodes and Donald Trump are among dozens of controversial people whose names have been given to species. Once a name is granted, it can be very difficult to take it away – and scientists cannot anticipate how the future might view the stars of today.
“Who is to say that I’m not going to be thought of as an evil bastard in 100 years’ time?” says Knapp. “There are people that are reprehensible,” she says, adding that scientists have “such limited resources” to devote to identification.
Last year, the American Ornithological Society announced that dozens of offensive or exclusionary examples would be renamed – but other bodies, such as the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, have ruled out changes. At the summit, botanists will consider a motion about renaming South African plants with names derived from apartheid-era racist slurs.
Research has indicated that celebrity names can affect the attention a species receives from the public. A paper earlier this year found that species named after celebrities got more clicks on Wikipedia than near-relatives that did not, with the strongest effects on invertebrates, amphibians and birds.
The lead author, Katie Blake, a PhD student at Oxford University, echoed concerns about whether attention was a good thing and said more work was needed about the conservation benefits.
“We do not recommend that species be commonly named after celebrities, but we do believe that eponyms could have great potential to attract attention to threatened species that are generally overlooked by the public,” she says.
For some, there is concern about whether the debate over names distracts from the urgent task of identifying the millions of species still unknown to science.
Prof Alexandre Antonelli, director of science at Kew, says: “If we continue describing species at the rates we are doing now, it will take between 750 and 1,000 years to describe all the fungi. There are millions of names that have to be found and I think it’s a valid approach [to name species after celebrities].
“It’s up to researchers describing new species to science to decide their names rather than trying to micromanage and be too prescriptive,” he says. “But it’s also a big responsibility.”
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