Ridiculous Scientific Names #10 - The Bilbo Baggins Shrimp & Kamera lens

It's been about 4 months since I made one of those posts, so I think the time has come to make a new one :D

So, today I got for you two ridiculously named organisms, the first is a newly discovered species of shrimp named after Bilbo Baggins, Odontonia bagginsi, and the other is a unicellular, flagellate organism named... Kamera lens!

Now, let's learn more about the two:

1# The Bilbo Baggins Shrimp

The Bilbo Baggins shrimp (Odontonia bagginsi) is one of two species of shrimp described in a new paper by biology student  Werner de Gier, from the Leiden University. The other species is Odontonia plurellicola and both shrimps are tiny and live symbiotically inside tunicates.

Specimens of both species were caught during a project Gier was doing for his bachelor:

 The newly described shrimps were collected during the Ternate expedition to the Indonesian islands of Tidore and Ternate, organised by Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2009. [source]

Much like other Odontonia species, these two fellas are very small, less than a centimeter long and appear to have a symbiotic relationship with the tunicates they were found in, possibly spending their entire lives inside them.

This is a digital illustration of Odontonia plurellicola with its host Plurella sp. (Credit: Franz Anthony CC-BY 4.0)

But why was the shrimp named after Bilbo Baggins? Because..hairy feet:

The species is named “bagginsi”, inspired by the famous Hobbit family name “Baggins” featured in the “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” books. The fictional characters called “Hobbits” possess hairy feet comparable to this species. [credit]

Needless to say, Gier was very excited to both have published a paper and discover two species before even getting his bachelor degree... Who wouldn't?

"Being able to describe, draw and even name two new species in my bachelor years was a huge honour. Hopefully, we can show the world that there are many new species just waiting to be discovered, if you simply look close enough!"  Gier said.

Ok enough with the LOTR folklore, now let's move to the next organism, which imo has the most hilarious and ridiculous name I have featured in the series:

2# Kamera lens

A Manual of the Infusoria, 1880, edited to match Kamera lens (public domain)

Kamera lens is  a unicellular organism and the only representative in the genus Kamera. It's a free-living, swimming, heterotrophic organism with an average size of about 7 to 3 μm, first described by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1773. 

Still, there's much we don't know about it and the species taxonomy has changed numerous times since and even today it's placed as incertae sedis under Eukaryota. First described as "Monas lens", this is how it's taxonomy has changed over the course of time:

• Heteromita lens (O.F.Müller) W.S.Kent (1881)
• Bodo lens (O.F.Müller) Klebs (1892)
• Heteromastix lens (O.F.Müller) H.M.Woodcock (1916)

Finally, sometime in 1991  J. Patterson and M. Zölffel  found all previous descriptions lacking, decided to be funny and created the genus Kamera for the species, hence Kamera lens. It also appears to be "provisionally"  placed in the phylum Ochrophyta which would make this organism a chromist. Chromista is a kingdom containing mainly photosynthetic algae but Kamera lens is a heterotrophic organism, so I guess it's an exception...

To be honest the published literature is really limited and from the little I could access the more I read about the species the more confused I got! Feel free to shed some light about its nature in the comments below if you can! Maybe @mobbs can help too, with his series on evolution I think he is the closest thing steemit has to an evolution expert :P

3# Bonus Scientific Name: Aha ha

So if you've read this far and you haven't scrolled all down to type a spammy variation of "good post"here's a little bonus binomial name. A name that I think is even more ridiculous then Kamera lens.

Meet Aha ha, a small Australian wasp, described by the entomologist Arnold Menke in 1977. Obviously, the name is a form of joke but the exact story behind it is unclear. This is the story as recollected by Howard E. Evans, who claims to be one of the first two people (along with Bob Matthews) to have seen specimens of the species:

 I poured out the cell contents onto a sheet of paper, and  there among the potpourri of flies bees, and wasps, were these tiny beauties, their  Silvery pile glittering in the afternoon sun. "Aha!" I said, and Bob replied "Ha!":  rather loudly, though we had no idea Arnold had heard us on the other side of the world.

But Menke begs to differ:

I think Howard must have been drinking too much Swan Lager when he wrote this.My recollection is that while going over some sphecid material collected "down under"by Howard and Bob, I came upon a cute littie gray wasp with strange tarsal ungues and exclaimed "aha, a new genus". Eric Grissell resident wit, who happened to be standing nearby observing the master, retorted with some skepticism, "ha". 

Whose story is true? I guess we will never know... All I know is I like them both :D

The End

Ok, I think this is enough for today. I wanted to provide more information about the last two species featured in the post but unfortunately the scientific literature is very limited and I couldn't access much of it despite my best efforts. :/

References & Further Reading

  - All references are provided in the form of clickable links in the main body of the post :)

More Ridiculously Named Animals

Didn't have enough? Ok! Here are some more animals with stupid names:  

• Stanley Kubrick's Frog
• A Horseshoe Crab Named After Darth Vader
• Pink Floyd Shrimp And Animals Named After Harrison Ford
• Darth Vader's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Beetles
• Animals Named After Donald Trump
• The Bernie Sanders Spider 
• Tritonia khaleesi, Queen of the Nudibranches and the Sea Slugs 
• A beetle called Hitler