"Lady Gaga" Wasp ‘Aleiodes Gaga’ Named After Singer

Lady Gaga has the honor of having a newly discovered parasitic wasp named after her by researchers at the University of Thailand.

The music diva has been immortalized by researchers who have named a recently discovered parasitoid wasp Aleiodes gaga in honor of the singer. Why they would name the wasp after Lady Gaga? We don’t exactly know, but critics say the researchers are just “seeking attention — in which case the name is wholly appropriate.”

The species was just one of 178 others in the first ever “turbo-taxonomic study” based on a new DNA coding technique called “COI barcoding.” In the new process, scientists use a fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene to dramatically increase the time it takes to identify and prove the existence of a new species. With some thousands of samples already discovered in tropical locales, the COI barcoding technique is proving to be “revolutionary.”

Even so, Lady Gaga’s name might not stick with the parasitic, as some researchers have expressed reservation over the accuracy of the new technique. According to biologist Quentin Wheeler, naming a new species based merely on “the nucleic acids at particular bases” just isn’t enough.

“The aim of describing species is to recognize, describe and name the results of evolution,” he writes at The Guardian, “not to proliferate the number of names in reference to ephemeral shifts in gene frequencies or, in this case, in nucleic acids.”

Wheeler contends that “arbitrary measures of genetic distances as an inferior substitute for explicitly testable theories of species based on unique combinations of complex characters,” though he does see importance of turbo-taxonomy to the field. He just thinks that it doesn’t excuse thorough investigation. Still, he does say that turbo-taxonomy and COI barcoding are here to stay, so if the parasitic wasp is indeed a new species, Lady Gaga’s namesake is likely to stay with it, though we’d still like to know exactly why.