Exactly what it says on the tin. Are there any species with the same name as you?
There’s an African butterfly called Cephetola mercedes! Im struggling to find photographs of them though, so if anyone has one that’s not the singular sepia-toned pinned specimen I was able to find, definitely send it my way. No iNat observations of them either. I wonder if they’re very rare or elusive, or maybe their habitat is in a small range or very remote, or if maybe no one is even looking for them? If only traveling wasn’t so expensive, I wish I could go hunting for them myself!
That’s a very creative question, that I’ve never asked before! It turns out there are a bunch of them, in different taxa. Here are two from birds and plants:
I’m still hoping that I might be honored some day by some newly discovered organism being named after me but it will probably be a deadly bacteria or a slime mold.
I had to Google this one. It’s not a species name as such but a snail called Jeremy.
Because his shell coiled the opposite way, he was unable to mate with normal snails. Scientists launched an international search to find him a mate who also had a left-coiled shell. They found two other left-coiled snails. However, instead of mating with Jeremy, the two new snails fell in love and mated with each other!
Can you believe that? Imagine being one in a million, they find you two perfect matches from around the world… and they choose each other. Jeremy even got friend zoned in snail world. There’s something very familiar about all of this…
I briefly believed that a small species of predatory sea snail had the name Fuegotrophon annettei, but it turned out to be another AI hallucination. Apparently, the LLM was fine to read “amettei” as “annettei”, until I challenged it. No iNat observations in the genus either way.
There is a dandelion Taraxacum annetteae. (The -i/-ii termination is masculine; epithets honouring women use the feminine form -eae, at least under ICNafp, who are moderately fussy about correct Latin - there are quite a few names which were originally published as -i which are corrected to -eae.)
Also Lilium dexteri and Tillandsia dexteri.
There are rather more cultivars with Annette as all or part of the name, and 16 with Dexter.
If you go to IPNI’s advanced search form and insert your name (you may have to drop a teminating e) followed by an asterix into either the genus or species boxes you’ll get a list, perhaps with false positives like the adamsonii for Adam up thread. For some names there might be some that aren’t found because of the old practice of Latinisation of surnames when used as species epithets, though a cursory investigation failed to find an example.
If I do that I find a tree genus, an umbellifer genus, and an orchid trigeneric hybrid, with 50 or so species between them, a trisectional rose hybrid, about 100 species with my forename in the epithet, and 19 infraspecific plant taxa.
Of you could go to the RHS Plant Database; in my case that adds a score or so of cultivars.
Boo hoo, I can’t find anything satisfyingly close to my last name. Plenty of cultivars with my first name, which is common (mostly roses, which I don’t even like.) Alas, there is no hope for me - no friends or family members who are naturalists, to discover a new species upon which to bestow my name…
Not many share my name, but i did find this: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?subview=map&taxon_id=617660 or ‘Bayer’s Moray’ I doubt i’ll ever see one since they only have 4 observations on iNat and I am a bit adverse to going into the ocean.
But hey! They seem like a cool species!
Dactylotum bicolor bicolor (Jennifer) means that the taxon was first described by a person with the surname Jennifer; the bracket means that they placed it in a different genus. It’s debatable whether that counts as the organism sharing your name.
That’s a pretty cool search page! I found Sextonia, a genus of two tropical trees in the Lauraceae known from northern South America. The genus is named after the botanist A. J. G. H. Kostermans; I’ll let readers do their own etymological search to explain that!
From that search page, I also see about nine species epithets listed as “sextonii” or sextonianus. Looks like those include a variety of epiphytes and cacti, among other things. (None named for my branch of the family.)
I was wondering why a Neotropical genus was named after Kostermans, as I associate him with Malesian botany, but Wikipedia mentions that his these was on Neotropical Lauraceae. Presumably Sextonia was adopted because Kostermansia was already taken.
