An insect with a “wacky fashion sense” is on the edge of glory: It’s been named after flashy pop star Lady Gaga.
Brendan Morris, a graduate student studying entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, zeroed in on features of a new genus of treehopper bug — the newly-christened Kaikaia gaga — that are distinctive from other treehoppers hailing from a Nicaraguan tropical rain forest where they were first collected 30 years ago.
“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 told the university’s Illinois News Bureau. “They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”
Morris’ fascination with the bug isn’t just stupid love. The particular female insect has peculiar characteristics that separate it from other treehoppers, including a horned section of its thorax, leg hairs and a face-like frontoclypeus. He explained that it’s unique to see an insect variety — like the treehopper — born this way.
“I love outrageous forms and colors,” said Morris. “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.”
Morris and his co-author, Illinois Natural History Survey entomologist Christopher Dietrich, first shared their findings in the journal Zootaxa. Morris, who found the Gaga bug among about 1,000 he studied from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said he wants to go to Nicaragua to look for more of the unusual insects.
“Treehoppers are wacky, and I think that makes them especially suited to be ‘spokesbugs’ for the wide range of habitats they use,” he told Illinois New Bureau.
Lady Gaga is still showing off her own wacky style these days. The “Bad Romance” singer and “A Star Is Born” actress recently released a comeback single, “Stupid Love,” and announced plans for The Chromatica Ball Tour, which celebrates her upcoming album and kicks off July 24 in Paris and includes an Aug. 19 stop at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
