An amphibian
whose response to danger is to bury its head in the sand has been given the
scientific name Dermophis donaldtrumpi to commemorate the US president's
response to climate change.
Thousands of
species, both living and extinct, are scientifically described each year. Many
are named after scientists' friends, families, mentors, or people they wish to
honor. Other names reference the location at which they were found or a
distinctive feature.
Other
scientists see opportunities to fund the continuation of their work, selling
off naming rights to their discoveries, with 12 species' names recently sold to
raise desperately needed money for the Rainforest Trust.
The Trust
buys and protects threatened rainforests across the tropics. The species were
all first identified in their reserves in Latin America – the best hope for
tens of thousands of species given the newly elected Brazilian president's
intentions towards publicly owned parts of the Amazon.
The auction
as a whole raised an impressive $182,500, enough to buy quite a few of the
30,000 hectares (70,000 acres) of rainforest destroyed each day. Bidders might
have been expected to give the most love to the four frogs or the forest mouse
whose naming rights were up for sale, but the big money went to a 10-centimeter
(4-inch) caecilian, a type of legless amphibian.
Meet
Dermophis donaldtrumpi, defender of its habitat. The Rainforest Trust
Native to
Panama, D. donaldtrumpi didn't attract $25,000 from Aidan Bell because of its
beauty or charm, quite the opposite. Rather, Bell, who heads the sustainable
building materials company EnviroBuild blogged; “Caecilians is taken from the
Latin Caecus meaning “blind”, and [they] have rudimentary eyes which can only
detect light or dark. Capable of seeing the world only in black and white,
Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is a hoax by the Chinese.”
Bell also
saw similarities between the caecilian's unusual way of feeding its young and
sensory tentacles, and the nepotism and web of corruption Trump has introduced
to the White House.
Peer-reviewed
descriptions of all auctioned species are yet to be published.
The Trust
claims the event, timed to coincide with their 30th anniversary, was the
largest public auction of species naming rights ever held. The idea dates back
25 years when Trust CEO Paul Salaman sold the rights to name a songbird he
discovered for $75,000, allowing the Trust to buy Colombian land threatened by
coca farms and return it to the area's Indigenous people.
If you think
you could have come up with an even better name for a visionless caecilian, or
would have liked to give your partner the ultimate romantic gift of an entire
species of orchid, don't despair, the Trust plans future auctions of rights to
species discovered as their reserves grow.
This
Colombian member of the Lepanthes genus is one of four orchid species you've
missed the chance to name. The Rainforest Trust
[H/T: The
Guardian]
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