New Cicada Named 'Lady Gaga'
A strange cicada with bizarre genitalia and antennae took the name 'Lady Gaga' because of its odd shape, which sounded a bit 'gaudy,'. Illinois entomologist Brendan Morris coined 'Gaga' for it.
This cicada is a plant eater, using a sharp beak to pierce plants and suck out the juice, using twigs and leaves to transmit vibrations produced by its body to interact with each other.
Morris says, 'If there's a Lady Gaga in the insect world, it's this cicada,' its exaggerated antennae and mysterious appearance are all that matter, we've never seen a cicada like this. Cicadas have survived on Earth for about 40 million years, with bizarre shapes and colors, it's the only one of its kind in the insect world, I love its diverse forms and colors, it's a magical species.'
An insect with a 'Queen's' name isn't just this cicada, a giant, rare horsefly discovered in Queensland, Australia in 1981, because its tail has beautiful golden fluff, the beautiful color made it unforgettable for the naming team, the naming team recalled the American pop star Beyoncé, born in 1981, and officially named it Scaptia beyonceae in 2011 to highlight their unforgettable hip performance. There's also a beetle named Agra katewinsletae, named after the star of the Titanic, Kate Winslet.
This cicada was discovered 30 years ago in the tropical rainforests along the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, belonging to a new species discovered in the same region, entomologists borrowed from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to study several thousand insect specimens, to distinguish the species of insects, entomologists relied on differences in head, body size, leg hairs, body hair and genitalia to distinguish, when they observed 'gaga' under a high-powered microscope, they found several different features, like most specimens, its antennae are located at the back of the chest, but this cicada's lip-like area is different, and its genitalia are more like Caribbean cicadas. Next, further research will be conducted to determine why this cicada and more ancient cicadas have the same features.
Because the cicada specimen is 30 years old, Morris couldn't successfully extract DNA from it, he plans to go to the Kaikaia gaga's discovery rainforest in Nicaragua to collect live specimens.
The study was published in the Zootaxa journal.
This article is translated from dailymail, published by translator jasmine based on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC) license.
