A new species of water beetle found clinging to a sandstone rock in a fast-flowing stream that leads to a waterfall in Malaysian Borneo has been named after the actor Leonardo DiCaprio.
The tiny black insect, which has a partially retractable head and slightly protruding eyes, was named after the star of Titanic and The Revenant for his environmental activism.
Citizen scientists who took part in an expedition to Borneo’s Maliau Basin recovered the first known specimen of Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi from a shallow stream about a kilometre above sea level. The 3mm-long beetle was rather battered and lacked a front leg and antenna.
The field trip to Borneo was arranged by scientists at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and a Dutch firm, Taxon Expeditions, that trains paying members of the public in the scientific techniques used to capture, study and identify new species. The beetle was named after DiCaprio after the citizen scientists and staff at the Maliau Basin Studies Centre voted at a ceremony at the end of the trip.
The DiCaprio beetle is only the latest new species to be named after a prominent figure. Earlier this year, a particularly beefy fly from the Brazilian Amazon was named after Arnold Schwarzenegger, while last year the discovery of a moth with yellowish-white scales on its head was named after Donald Trump. Kate Winslet, who starred alongside DiCaprio in Titanic, already has a beetle named after her, as do George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Adolf Hitler.
“In this case, we didn’t name the beetle because it looks like Leonardo DiCaprio,” said Iva Njunjić at Taxon Expeditions. “We wanted to highlight that even the smallest creature is important, such as this tiny beetle that nobody knew about before now.” A second new species of water beetle discovered on the same trip was named after the Dutch astronaut André Kuipers, according to a report in the journal ZooKeys.
