2023-10-20 15:02:20
The information may seem light, but it is not. Some scientists have indeed taken up the issue in recent weeks, as revealed by the Washington Post at the end of September.
This small beetle measuring a few millimeters in size living in the humid caves of Slovenia is on the verge of extinction and the scientific community has analyzed the reasons for this extinction. It’s neither global warming nor pesticides. It is because of its name that this beetle is on the verge of disappearing from the planet.
His name is : Anophthalmus hitleri.
Discovered in 1937 by Oscar Scheibel, who chose its name as a reference to a well-known personality, namely Adolph Hitler. According to the Washington Post, this is not surprising since the scientist was openly fascist and it was therefore to pay homage to the dictator that this surname was given to him.
Nothing prohibits giving an insect the name of a dictator?
According to the French daily Le Monde, who in 2012 was already talking about our Hitler beetle, “species discoverers have relative freedom to name it […]”. If there is an International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and a normative framework which explains that the first part of the name must refer to a species (homo — for human, panthera — for big cats, Elephas for elephants), the epithet he (the second part of the name) is quite open. We can therefore give this second name to pay homage to a person, describe a character trait or the place where the animal was found.
This is how we already have, to name just a few, the Mesoparapylocheles michaeljacksoni, a hermit crab hundreds of millions of years old but discovered on June 25, 2009 by scientists, the day the King of Pop died. More recently, in 2017, a moth with a funny headdress on its head was named “I hate Donald Trump” by a Canadian scientist with a particular sense of humor.
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#NeoNazis #Extermination #Beetle