Sarah Schroeder spent years sorting through drawers of preserved Australian plant bugs as a doctoral student at the University of California, Riverside. When it came time to name the dozen new species she and her advisor had identified, she decided to have some fun with four of them.
The paper, published Sept. 9 in the journal Insect Systematics & Evolution, describes 12 previously unrecorded species across five new genera of tiny, big-eyed insects in the family Miridae — bugs smaller than a lentil that feed on the flowers of Australian she-oak trees. One new genus, Swiftiephylus, contains four species Schroeder named for Taylor Swift: S. taylorae, S. amator (Latin for "lover"), S. intrepidus ("fearless") and S. poetorum, a nod to The Tortured Poets Department.
The choice wasn't random. The four species are yellow with red accents, a color combination Schroeder connected to Swift's signature red lipstick, as Science News reported.
"I've been a lifelong Swiftie. Taylor's music has underscored so many of the major milestones of my life."
Sarah Schroeder, UC Riverside, via Science News
Schroeder worked with entomologist Christiane Weirauch, who began collecting the specimens in the early 2000s, long before the species had been formally sorted and described. Fewer than 10,000 plant bug species have been documented worldwide, and Australia's are especially understudied, leaving plenty of room for new finds — and new names.
"It's a dream thing for a scientist to get to describe new species."
Sarah Schroeder, UC Riverside, via Science News
Swift has unofficially joined a small club of pop culture figures with insects or arachnids named in their honor, following a Costa Rican spider and a millipede discovered in recent years. Schroeder has said she hopes the attention paid to Swiftiephylus also draws notice to a less glamorous fact: an untold number of insect species, some vital to their ecosystems, remain undiscovered and unnamed.
