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Music

There's an Ant Subspecies Named After Radiohead Because Science Loves Them Too

If you don't have a subspecies named after you does your music even bang?
Lauren O'Neill
London, GB

Once more and we can officially call it a trend. A couple of weeks ago we reported the hard-hitting news that a subspecies of shrimp had been named after Pink Floyd because Dr Sammy de Grave, who discovered it, was just super into them really. However, it now appears that Dr de Grave has started something of a micro-trend among the scientific species-naming community, as another group who recently discovered three new ant subspecies have named one of them after yer da's other favourite band, Radiohead.

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All three species belong to the Sericomyrmex genus. These guys are very smart because they have figured out how to farm their own food, which, obviously, is quite impressive because they're ants. The newly-christened Sericomyrmex radioheadi was collected in the Venezuelan Amazon, and was named for the band because researchers Ana Ješovnik and Ted R. Schultz "wanted to honour their music". The honouring doesn't stop there though: the ant-naming also seeks to "acknowledge the conservation efforts of the band members, especially in raising climate-change awareness".

So basically if you want a species named after you, you can either: a) join a world-famous rock band; b) turn up for climate change awareness like your boy Thom Yorke (although this incredibly convincing fake "cover" of Daddy Yankee's petrol anthem "Gasolina" may suggest that he has changed tack a bit); or c) preferably both.

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(Image via Wikimedia Commons)