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New species of fungus identified via Twitter
- kinleyd 6y agoWith hindsight one could say it was only a matter of time.
- appleflaxen 6y agofor the impatient: yes, it's what it sounds like. it's a fungus that lives on the reproductive organs of American centipedes. They noticed it in a tweet, and quickly confirmed it in their museum collections.
- SllX 6y agoYou missed the most important part. They named a parasitic genital fungus after Twitter.
- montenegrohugo 6y ago> the new species has now been given its official name, 'troglomyces twitteri' Academia always seems so mature and serious from outside, nice to know there can be some lighthearted humor there too :) As an aside, do you guys know any other Latin animal names that may have an 'untraditional' origin?
- sgeorge96 6y agoLook up "seenus peenus"
- haneefmubarak 6y agoWhat are we looking for? The top relevant comment on Google is literally your comment / this thread.
- Someone 6y agoIt’s fairly normal for names of things few people are interested in such as insects and fungi. https://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/29/these-are-the-silliest-scientific-names-for-real-living-things/ https://www.gadgette.com/2016/02/29/these-are-the-silliest-s... mentions, for example, Pieza pi and Spongiforma squarepantsii. Google easily gives you more examples, for example https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-strangest-scientific-names-14139154/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-worlds-str..., which explains the rules are not very strict: “The name must not be offensive, must be spelled in only the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and may be derived from any language. In fact, a name need not be derived from anything at all; the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable.”
- conistonwater 6y ago> the rules state that an arbitrary combination of letters is also perfectly acceptable To be honest, I always suspected this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throw_away 6y agoNo length limits, huh? Now, just gotta find a novel bug... edit: heh, you could code some nematode's dna sequence into its name.
- traverseda 6y agoGo through the wikipedia list of illegal numbers, encode them into latin letters...
- nkozyra 6y ago"Spongiforma squarepantsii" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii
- sevencolors 6y agoThere is a chewing louse named after Gary Larson of The Far Side. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoFrank Zappa has a couple (plus an asteroid): https://www.nme.com/news/music/frank-zappa-3-1234673 https://www.nme.com/news/music/frank-zappa-3-1234673 https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/articles/features/7_animals_named_after_rock_legends-40487 https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/articles/features/7_animals_...
- asxd 6y agoStephen Colbert had a spider named after him, Aptostichus stephencolberti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptostichus_stephencolberti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptostichus_stephencolberti
- loopbit 6y agoAnother one, not mentioned here but one of my favorites: Psephophorus Terrypratchetti.
- pvaldes 6y agoThat was terryfic... I'll add another: Gollumjapyx smeagol
- Sebb767 6y agoNeobuthus Factorio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobuthus_factorio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neobuthus_factorio Named after the game Factorio, as the species was discovered by the father of the lead dev.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoAnd it looks a bit like Factorio's conveyor belts, to boot !
- jamieweb 6y agoThere are 4 species of damselfly named after each of the band members of Queen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteragrion_freddiemercuryi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteragrion_freddiemercuryi
- bsaf 6y agoNot Latinified, but a key protein in brain and spinal cord development is called sonic hedgehog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog The oddest thing was sitting through neuro lectures when this was introduced as if it was the most normal name in the world. We were looking at each other like "are we hearing this right?"
- chaos_a 6y ago>It has been noted that mention of a mutation in a sonic hedgehog gene might not be well received in a discussion of a serious disorder with a patient or their family. Imaging being told by a doctor that you have sonic the hedgehog disorder.
- phone8675309 6y ago"I'm sorry, but your son has Sanic's[1] Disease." [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sanic-hegehog https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sanic-hegehog
- jessriedel 6y agoMutations in this genes cause a birth defects called holoprosencephaly that is usually so severe you'd be telling the parents, not the patient :(
- whymauri 6y agoI think there was a small movement to have it renamed, but I don't know if it went anywhere or still exists.
- shpongled 6y agoPretty much all of the proteins that were discovered in fruit flies and have a human ortholog have funny names: frizzled, wingless, piwi, nubbin, etc etc
- twic 6y ago
- NSCFType 6y agoNothing unusual about the origin on this one, but an amusing binomial nonetheless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_blackbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_blackbird
- n3k5 6y agoWhat's so funny about Turdus Maximus? I have a very great friend in Rome called Turdus Maximus.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- uHuge 6y agoSounds/reads just like turd·-retard or dumb person, I assume.
- mattkrause 6y agoIt's a joke, sir. (That and the "In Rome" comment are both references to a classic Monty Python bit from The Life of Brian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_G2a2hL6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx_G2a2hL6U)
- JimDabell 6y agoNot quite what you're asking for, but you might be amused by the etymology of "thagomizer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- globular-toast 6y agoThere are actually so many "humorous" names of species and proteins that it's not really funny any more.
- randoramax 6y agoTafazzin, a human protein named after the fictional character Tafazzi, an improbable wrestler whose super power is to got his own groin therefore causing the opponent to run away in reflected pain.
- unwind 6y agoAwesome thread, really cool to hear there are so many. I only knew about the Atlascopcosaurus [1], from working at Atlas (not in any way related to the lizard which was found in 1989). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlascopcosaurus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlascopcosaurus
- schwartzworld 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigiphilus_garylarsoni
- contingo 6y agoIn the past my research has overlapped a fair bit with alpha taxonomy. Actually, whimsically or unconventionally named species are fairly common. Here are three examples that come to mind. [1] Forget Twitter, when it comes to species literally "discovered on the internet" I don't think you can top this one. In 2005 or so, specimens of a beautiful and striking sea urchin test, in the genus Coelopleurus, started cropping up on eBay as collectors' items. They were eventually confirmed as a new species. No, they were not named after eBay (the eventual choice of species epithet, 'exquisitus', was entirely fitting), but their status as the first new species determined directly from eBay specimens is pretty interesting, especially in bioconservation terms. [2] Spongiforma squarepantsii is a fungus described in 2011. If you've ever eaten a bolete (a cep, or porcini, in foodie speak), then you'll know there are mushrooms where the gills are replaced with a spongey layer of tightly-packed tubes. In its extremely wet habitat, S. squarepantsii has become specialized from bolete ancestors to disperse its spores locally, by rainwater or animal transport, rather than by air, and so the entire fruiting body is reduced to a mass of convoluted sponge. From the Wiki article: "The surface of the fruit body has deep ridges and folds somewhat resembling a brain. It is sponge-like and rubbery — if water is squeezed out, it will resume its original shape... when viewed with scanning electron microscopy, [the spore producing-tissue] somewhat resembles a seafloor covered with tube sponges, reminiscent of the fictitious home of SpongeBob... Although the epithet was originally rejected by the editors of Mycologia as "frivolous", Desjardin and colleagues insisted that "we could name it whatever we liked"." [3] In Borneo the other year I photographed a large, very hairy spider with bright red fangs that turned out to be a male color morph of a species named in 2008 as Heteropoda davidbowie. The linked Nat Geo article has more examples like that. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/aug/17/uknews.taxonomy https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/aug/17/uknews.taxon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spongiforma_squarepantsii [3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/10/explore-animals-famous-names-heteropoda-david-bowie-spider/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/10/explore-...
- bitL 6y agoFinnish NHL goalie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaumatodryinus_tuukkaraski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaumatodryinus_tuukkaraski
- personlurking 6y agoNot sure if this counts: The Puerto Rican tody - a small, colorful bird - has the scientific name of todus mexicanus, even though it's endemic to Puerto Rico (where it's known simply as San Pedrito). Meanwhile, the todus portoricensis is actually a Cuban bird. René Lesson, a French ornithologist, described the birds in 1838, based on information he received from his brother, who had collected some of the species and erroneously noted their provenance. AFAIK, there have been attempts to correct these entrenched errors, but there has been no success in doing so. To further confuse things, there are Puerto Ricans who will refer to the island bird as the todus portoricensis - perhaps as a way of correcting for the error, or just due to the confusion surrounding it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_tody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_tody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Lesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Lesson
- basjacobs 6y agoThis fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaptia_beyonceae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaptia_beyonceae is named after Beyonce. "It was the unique dense golden hairs on the fly's abdomen that led me to name this fly in honour of the performer Beyonce as well as giving me the chance to demonstrate the fun side of taxonomy - the naming of species," Mr Lessard said.
- Jugurtha 6y agoPhallus impudicus[^1]. [^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_impudicus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallus_impudicus
- bonzini 6y agoAleiodes shakirae, so named because "parasitism by this species causes the host caterpillar to bend and twist its abdomen in various ways".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fuzzfactor 6y agoOTOH, some good plants are as traditional as you can get. When Marco Polo got to China, they had some plants & animals that had never been seen back in Europe. When Western botanists followed over the next few centuries, they brought back specimens. Especially medicinal plants before there were drug companies anyway. It would seem there might be something worthwhile about a material which made it into a pharmacopiea over a period of millennia. Eventually people started trying to give every different thing a different latin name, and when Linneaus got around to Chinese ginseng he dubbed it Panax Ginseng, simply preceding the Chinese name with panacea-derived "Panax" to classify the genus itself as the most highly regarded in the Far East for treating the widest variety of conditions. This must have also been considered relative to all the other plants that were known to the West for millennia themselves. American ginseng, known to the natives for millennia on that continent, became Panax Quinquefolius. Literally _plant with five leaves that can cure many things_.
- whymauri 6y agoIIRC, the discoverer of the RING protein domain couldn't come up with a name so they called it Really Interesting New Gene (RING) which duos as a pun for a ring finger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RING_finger_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RING_finger_domain
- andai 6y agoThis one's a protein: Pikachurin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachurin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachurin
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- roberto 6y agoPisenotecus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piseinotecus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piseinotecus The scientist had a dog called "Teco", and he stepped on him by accident. In Portuguese, "pisei no Teco".
- vmception 6y agoI haven't encountered a single serious industry. For example, many terms in finance are satire with a thin veneer of seriousness and professional candor in the name. Its a game of how long can you keep a straight face when you make up the name quantitative easing. Or when you make a derivative called DOOMs to market as an alternative to Credit Default Swaps, and do studies on payout when the company being bet on defaults.
- dan-robertson 6y agoHere’s a website full of “curiosities of biological nomenclature”: https://www.curioustaxonomy.net/index.html https://www.curioustaxonomy.net/index.html
- Myrmornis 6y agoOK, this is HN, so: it most definitely was not given the genus name "troglomyces". That would makes any biologist with an inclination towards taxonomy or systematics shudder with horror. A genus name is always capitalized, and the full binomial is always italicized: Troglomyces twitteri. (My username is worryingly not displayed in italics by HN.)
- truebosko 6y ago> The newly discovered parasitic fungus has now been given its official Latin name, Troglomyces twitteri. It only took me until 35 to realize these official, scientific-sounding names are part useful, part researchers trolling us.
- swyx 6y agothey should have let Twitter name it too in a Twitter poll
- chris_st 6y agoFungy McFungusface.
- smnrchrds 6y agoBigus Fungus
- Izkata 6y agoBut that's not where this fungus attaches - something I'm sure the internet would've picked up on when deciding a name: > The fungi are in a class of their own because they live on the outside of host organisms, and even on specific parts of bodies—in this case, on the reproductive organs of millipedes.
- scollet 6y agoBoaty McBoatface
- athenot 6y agoThat would have likely ended in something along these lines: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty-mcboat...
- sushid 6y ago
- tobr 6y agoMaybe I’m being too dismissive, but this strikes me as an equivalent of existing-invention-but-using-a-computer software patents. I just don’t see how it’s particularly newsworthy or interesting that an image shared on Twitter was involved in the discovery. It allowed for a headline that made me click, though.
- wyattpeak 6y agoI think you might be. Whatever its hype, Twitter (and its ilk) does enable a previously unheard of level of sharing of minor details. This fungus is exactly the sort of thing which would normally go missing in the vaults of a museum because the five people who ever saw it didn't recognise it as anything interesting. This is such a common phenomenon that trawling through museum collections is a non-trivial source of new species identifications. The fact that an image normally only seen by a few people should be shared to thousands, and hence a discovery made based on it, is significant because there were few avenues by which it could happen pre-social media.
- wpietri 6y agoThe word news is literally the plural of new, as in new things. This is an new species discovered using a new method involving a relatively new communications medium. And in particular, it involves one of the strengths of this new medium: letting people share things with others that might be interested. A key difference between social media and older media is who gets to say yes to publication. For this photo to reach this researcher in a previous age, there would have been several people who had the ability to say no. And limited space would mean they'd have a strong incentive to say no. But now it just takes one person to say, "Here's a thing I think is interesting." Every reader also has their own editorial power; they can share and retweet. So for me, this is interesting because it's showing how the "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" adage applies to literal bugs. That the chaotic nature of Twitter is not just providing me with things I find interesting, but leading to actual scientific advance.
- asimjalis 6y ago> The photo shared on Twitter of the millipede Cambala by Derek Hennen. The two red circles indicate the presence of the fungus. I don’t see the two red circles in the picture.
- graphpapa 6y agoThere are two red circles, but there is nothing identifiable to the untrained eye contained within them.
- erentz 6y agoRight. Can someone explain? One of the circles has a white dot in the middle that looks like it could be just dust. The other a faint dark dot in the middle again that looks like maybe just dust or dirt. Nothing really in them that doesn’t just look exactly like what’s around them.
- gimboland 6y agoHence the phrase "her well-trained eyes" in the article: to her, your last sentence would be false, because she's spent years (maybe decades) working in this field.
- treszkai 6y agoIt’s like the Pale Blue Dot: one could mistake the one pixel of the Earth for some noise in the optics.
- erk__ 6y agoThey are towards the top of the image, they are much easier to see if you open the image in full
- peey 6y agoThe title here needs to include "..." in the original article. For a moment, I thought this would be a satirical article, characterizing some group as "new species".
- dang 6y agoOk, we've added fungi to the title above.
- wltprgm 6y agosince the article mentioned this, since when can people in the scientific field simply share their research data without facing any consequences? edit: sorry my bad, I realized my question was not making sense, I actually mean they can publish research data if the authority does not approve of it?
- simonh 6y agoWhat sort of consequences do you mean?
- wltprgm 6y agosorry my bad, I realized my question was not making sense, I actually mean they can publish research data if the authority does not approve of it?
- simonh 6y agoI don’t think there is an authority in Denmark that could stop them, or would even want to. By default in most countries releasing any data is protected under free speech, unless the data belongs to someone else or is protected in some other way, such as if it has military value or is personal data covered by privacy rules.
- rsynnott 6y agoWhat authority?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wiradikusuma 6y ago"I hope that it will motivate professional and amateur researchers to share more data via social media." -- and soon we'll see trolls photoshopping images as "new discovery".
- losthobbies 6y agoThat’s a xenomorph
- kebman 6y agoFor a moment there I thought I was alone, but I see you beat me to it xD Hmm or perhaps it's a little Maker...
- billfruit 6y agoI have a few photographs, (may be most people have too,) of a few plants/fungi and animals/insects I couldn't identify, even after consulting resources like Wikipedia. What is the best way to get a species identification from a photograph.
- azeirah 6y agoNot sure what they're called, but there are subreddits for identifying bugs and plants and stuff
- mkr-hn 6y agoGoogle (or quack) /r/whatisthis and the thing you want to identify. There's a bunch of subreddits like this. Here's a big list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/wiki/links https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatisthis/wiki/links
- JoBrad 6y agoThis is one of my favorite subreddits. I don’t think I’ve ever even posted in it. It’s like real life Sherlock Holmes sometimes. Quite often people will post a piece of a car involved in a hit and run, and it will be solved in minutes. Or someone will post the oddest looking item, and not only will it get solved, but you’ll learn a bit of background that you never knew.
- saadalem 6y agor/whatsthisbug/
- carlinmack 6y agoiNaturalist, their license allows your pictures/data to be used in academic research
- MattBlissett 6y agoAs azeirah writes, subreddits or Facebook groups for people interested in the particular group or location will often help. For general wild plants and animals (and fungi and everything else) there's a computer vision tool from iNaturalist, which can be used independently [1], or when submitting an observation to the site -- by web browser or in the app. I usually start with that, then look at other observations on iNaturalist and Wikipedia pages for the species. If the photos are of ornamental plants, I think PlantNet's [2] model is trained on them. (I work at GBIF[3], where suitable data from iNaturalist[3b] and soon PlantNet is sent, and can then be freely downloaded and used in research etc.) [1] https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo https://www.inaturalist.org/computer_vision_demo [2] https://plantnet.org/ https://plantnet.org/ [3] https://www.gbif.org/ https://www.gbif.org/ [3b] https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425ef4a7 https://www.gbif.org/dataset/50c9509d-22c7-4a22-a47d-8c48425...
- 101404 6y agoTwitter can be useful. But that takes work. My block list is probably 10 times longer than my follow list.
- Myrmornis 6y agoI may be wrong but I suspect that there are many undescribed types of fungi out there and describing a new species isn't that unusual and there is nothing of interest in the fact that the photo in question was on twitter.
- shultays 6y agoPardon me for nitpicking but how fungus on fish is bizzare?
- kps 6y agoWell, this particular fish is a millipede, which you've got to admit is atypical.
- brudgers 6y agothey just found a new type of parasitic fungus via Twitter. Sometimes, snark is thrust upon us.
- gumby 6y agoI love this story on many levels, but in particular what it says about the “trained eye”.
- seesawtron 6y agoNext time some scientist shares a picture of an xx discovery to their colleagues via Email, will the title of this article be "xx dicovered via Email"?