Unsurprisingly, numerous species of animal (including a flightless weevil and a parasitic flatworm) are named after David Attenborough – but were you aware of the existence of a Shakira wasp (aleoides Shakira) and the Taylor Swift millipede (nannaria swiftae)?
It’s not just fauna. Spring on middle-aged-lady Instagram is a riot of people posting pics of their Gertrude Jekyll (a formidable horticulturist) roses and there are hundreds of others named for everyone from Judi Dench to Jimmy Greaves. We name the natural world for people we admire and want to honour, and always have; even asteroids, which makes me wonder if anything out there has named us. (The dismissive alien equivalent of “flightless weevils” perhaps?)
But for birds at least, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) has had enough. Late last year it announced that, from 2024, it “will change all English bird names currently named after people within its geographic jurisdiction” and reassess how it attributes new names.
This feels really positive. Sure, the Taylor Swift millepede is getting on with its life just fine without knowing its name, but I think what we call things matters for our relationship with and impact on the natural world. The AOS policy is part of a wider “decolonising” movement in taxonomy. There’s a new acceptance that many eponyms are a legacy of empire and oppression, attributed by or honouring those who “discovered” species already perfectly well-known to Indigenous people.
But how should we name new flora and fauna, assuming we’re lucky enough to still discover biodiversity rather than destroy it? There’s apparently a move to use local languages and reinstate Indigenous names, according to a paper in the science journal Nature, and thank goodness, because in the history of humans naming species, celebrity wasps are the least of our problems. Exhibit 1: the numerous examples of what the internet has termed “birds named by people who clearly hate birds”: “drab seedeater”; “monotonous lark”; “satanic nightjar”. Exhibits 2 and 3: the SpongeBob SquarePants fungus and Hot Wheels spider. What next? An Uber shrew? A Tesla tit? Or just calling everything Species-y McSpecies-face? Make it stop.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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