Lady Gaga: Newly Discovered Bug Named After Pop Icon

There are some interesting perks to being a talented celebrity. They get to share their art, go to [...]

By Jamie Jirak

There are some interesting perks to being a talented celebrity. They get to share their art, go to exciting events, and more. However, there's one thing about being a famous superstar that people probably don't warn you about: sometimes people name bugs after you. Just last month, the Bronx Zoo named a cockroach after Star Wars legend, Mark Hamill. In the latest celebrity-bug news, it appears a brand new insect has been named after singer/songwriter/actor Lady Gaga. According to CNN, the official name for the bug is Kaikaia gaga, and "she's every bit as otherworldly as the pop diva." "She wears a pair of devilish horns on her head, and she's unlike any other species in the forest," CNN writes. "The ruddy insect, with her pointy horns and unique body structure, more closely resembles 'Old World' species endemic to Asia, Africa, and Europe. But she's native to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua."

"Kaikaia gaga is a newly identified species of treehopper, an ostentatious but little-known insect group that populates most forests on Earth. A paper detailing her discovery was recently published in the journal Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on animal taxonomy," CNN shared. "But treehoppers have never gotten their due, according to Brendan Morris, an entomology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studied and named the new insect. K. gaga is poised to change that."

"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 said in a university news release. "They're unlike anything you've ever seen before." He added, "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." You can check out the full article here and follow Morris on Twitter here. You can check outs some of Morris' tweets about Kaikaia gaga (including a photo) below:

What do you think about Kaikaia gaga? Tell us in the comments!

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