A new insect species has been named after Lady Gaga for its “wacky fashion sense”.
University of Illinois graduate student Brendan Morris named the treehopper species ‘Kaikaka Gaga’ after the ‘Bad Romance’ hitmaker as a tribute to its uniqueness.
Brendan told the University of Illinois News Bureau: “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 added: “Treehoppers include some of the most spectacularly beautiful and often quite bizarre bugs on the planet. And they live almost everywhere humans do, making them perfect candidates for a ladybug – or butterfly-level of appreciation.”
According to a report on CNN, Kaikaia gaga is a newly identified species of a treehopper, populates most forests on Earth. The ruddy insect, with her pointy horns and unique body structure, more closely resembles the “Old World” species endemic to Asia, Africa, and Europe. But she’s native to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.
They’re certainly among the most theatrical of all insects: Treehoppers are splashed with color, and no two species look alike. There are over 3,500 species of them worldwide, and they’re harbingers of the health of forests, Morris told CNN. “It blows my kind 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,” Morris said in the news release.
Lady Gaga has yet to respond to the news, but Morris hopes she’ll take it as a compliment.
