99% Invisible - A Beetle By Any Other Name

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

A tiny, unremarkable beetle hiding in the caves of Slovenia has an infamously unfortunate name—one that has sparked heated debates in the scientific world.A Beetle By Any Other Name Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In a valley in central Slovenia, there's a giant limestone cave called Pekel, which means hell in Slovene. If you look hard at the rocks above the entrance, you can just make out the shape of the devil, which is one explanation for how the cave got its name. That is British expat and 99PI's Slovenia correspondent, Will Aspinall. I recently met up with Andrei Kapla from the Slovenian National Institute of Biology. Andrei studies the ecology of caves and today he is taking me spelunking. I'm not naturally inclined to go into caves.

Is it safe? It's completely safe. But there's one caveat in this case, because it was very, very rainy these days, and hopefully it didn't flood. But if it did flood, then we're in trouble. Okay, we're in the cave. The cave is narrow, only about a metre wide in places, but it's like 15 metres high. It's a chasm, and it's flooded. Oh, it's beautiful.

Yeah, it is, but wet. You aren't scared of caves? Never was. Actually, I'm more comfortable in a cave than with people. Andrei and I are not exploring a cave called Hell just for fun. We're on a mission to catch an elusive insect that Andrei studies. A week earlier he left seven traps inside the cave and baited them with a special recipe. It is a nice mixture of beef liver, fish and gorgonzola. You put them in a vial and marinate them for a few days on sun. Absolutely disgusting. I'm trying to like these creatures.

It's easy, they're beautiful. The beautiful creature that we are looking for has only been found in five caves in the north of Slovenia. It's in a group of 51 known beetles called Anophthalmos, Greek for without eyes. These are not very big beetles, nothing special about them. More or less all look the same, so nothing special about the Beatles. Just the name is special. The Beatle is notorious because it is named after, arguably, the worst human being in history. We are hunting for Anophthalmus hitleri, more commonly known as Hitler's beetle.

Despite living in complete darkness in a handful of caves in a tiny central European country, this unremarkable insect is getting a lot of unwelcome attention right now. Hitler's beetle is at the center of a fierce debate raging in the usually polite worlds of botany and zoology. It's a debate about whether we should rename species that are named after objectionable human beings, and even whether we should be naming organisms after people at all. Plants and animals have no say over what we humans call them. But it turns out a controversial scientific name can profoundly impact how a species fares in the real world.

The practice of naming species after humans goes back to the 18th century in a man named Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus was a really interesting character. So he was a Swedish botanist. Sandi Knapp is also a botanist and the author of In the Name of Plants, Remarkable Plants and the Extraordinary People Behind Their Names. He was a Swedish doctor actually, because in the 18th century, which is when Linnaeus lived, medicine was entirely based on plants.

He was also incredibly arrogant and he was convinced that he could just completely reform how we understood nature. Today his arrogance seems justified because he more or less met that lofty goal. Linnaeus found order in the chaos of the natural world by creating a new framework for naming and categorizing every known animal and plant. Before Linnaeus, the names of organisms were really more like sentences. So it would be a thing like, this is the plant that has white flowers with yellow bits in

the middle and leaves which are slightly incised at the edges. So that would be the name of the plant. Linnaeus knew this was really cumbersome, and so he came up with a simpler naming convention. He gave every plant and animal a two-word name, in either Latin or Ancient Greek. To take a well-known example, Linnaeus called human beings Homo sapiens. The first word, Homo, meaning man, is a broad category, the genus. And then sapiens, which means wise or thinking, is the specific name, or the species. Together, the genus and species are combined to create a scientific name that's both unique

and easy to remember. This became Linnaeus' binomial system, and over time, this concise piece of information design was picked up by scientists all across Europe. And I think it took off because essentially it replicates the noun adjective construction of things that we have in most languages. We have bicycles, which is the genus, and we have red bicycles and green bicycles and golden bicycles and little bicycles. But it wasn't inevitable that Linnaeus' binomial system would become the standard. At the time, there were lots of weird and, frankly, confusing alternatives. My favourite is one that was published in, I don't know, about 1760 by someone called

Bergeret in France. In Bergeret's system, each letter of a plant's name corresponded to some aspect of its biology. The idea was that the name could communicate important information about the species, but it looked like a jumble of seemingly random letters. The name of the plant was the combination of those letters, so it was B, R, Q, X, W. You know, I just love it when the B, R, Q, X, W's are flowering in the spring. Is that easier to remember than a tropa belladonna for the deadly nightshade? And you can see why Linnaeus' system caught on.

Linnaeus was also a brilliant teacher, and at Uppsala University just north of Stockholm, he inspired the brightest and bravest young men to go out and explore the natural world. They were called his apostles, but these were his students who basically went out, he sent them out around the world to collect plants in different parts of the world because at that time that was beginning to become possible.

His apostles traveled the world on dangerous scientific missions to Java and Japan, Venezuela and Vietnam. Many of them lost their lives to tropical diseases, and Linnaeus decided to honor their contributions to science by naming organisms after them. To use Stanley's analogy, not only were there red bicycles and yellow bicycles,

but there were now Will's bicycles and Roman's bicycles too. And it wasn't just his apostles. Linnaeus also named plants after scientists he admired. Take for example the magnolia. Pierre Magnol was a botanist who wrote a flora of the area around Montpellier and was one of the people who sort of first came up with the concept of plants having families, plants being in families. And Linnaeus was a great admirer of magnols, so he named Magnolia from Magnol.

But Linnaeus was clear that not just anyone should be given the honour of having a species or a genus named after them. He even wrote down guidelines about what type of person was acceptable. They weren't rules as in you had to follow them, but they were his rules for how things should be done properly. Things like names should not be used to gain the favour or preserve the memory of saints or of men famous in some other art. So his view was that you should name things for people who have promoted the science of botany.

Linnaeus named 12,000 species in his lifetime, and actually very few of those were named after people. But in the centuries that followed, as more and more plants and animals got discovered, the practice became increasingly common. In Linnaeus' guidelines about what kind of people you should name a species after went more or less out the window. Increasingly, scientists began to name species after people they just happened to be fond of. Slovenia's infamous beetle was very nearly given a different name. The insect was discovered in 1932 by a Slovenian naturalist named Vladimir Khodrich in a cave very close to the one I visited with Andrei.

Khodrich thought he had found a new species, but he wanted a second opinion. And so he sent a specimen to an Austrian beetle collector called Oskar Scheibel. Oskar Scheibel was actually very good entomologist. He had money, so he could afford to go to trips. He could afford to buy specimens from people like Mr. Kodric. And he had vast knowledge about this. Scheibel confirmed that the beetle was a new species.

And adhering to Linnaeus's guidelines, he initially agreed to name the new beetle Anophthalmus Kudrychi to honor the discoverer. But then he had a radical change of heart, because in addition to being a world-famous bug collector... Unfortunately, he was a passionate Nazi. And so Scheibel's formal submission of Anaphthalmus Hitleri in a German scientific journal in 1937

combined his two great loves, entomology and Adolf Hitler. This part. The gentleman, the Chancellor of the Reich, Adolf Hitler, as an expression of my association to him. So he gives this species to Adolf Hitler as his devotion to him. Hitler was apparently quite tickled by this gesture. According to some sources, he sent a personal letter to Scheibel thanking him for the honor. Naming a species after Hitler might be particularly ill-advised,

but this kind of thing happens all the time. There are around 2 million known species in the world today. Each year, another 18,000 get discovered. And every new species needs a name. Which has led to some, shall we say, interesting choices? We did so much field work and went to so many different sites that, you know, that those first few months when we first started, we're like, oh, man, look, there's new species. We're really excited. But we just kept finding more and more and more. This is Derek Hennan. He's a diplodologist.

That's the person who studies millipedes. He's a diplodologist. That's the person who studies millipedes. In 2021 and 2022, Derek and two colleagues from Virginia Tech published several papers based on years researching the millipedes of Appalachia. Over that time, they discovered 50 new millipede species, and each one needed a name. When you have 50 new species to name, you're really trying to pull from anything to kind of make them unique and also just to sound different. They named some millipedes for the location where they were found, like Nenaria scholastica,

discovered on the campus of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Others got names related to how they looked, like Nenaria serpens, a millipede with distinctly snake-like features. But with so many new millipedes, place names and simple adjectives wouldn't suffice. And so they decided to name some of them after people. And if you want an obscure millipede to stand out, why not name it after one of the most famous and beloved people on the planet? Yeah, well, first I would say, you know, I was just a fan of Taylor Swift's music

and we'd be driving to these field sites and you know, I would like to play Taylor Swift when I could and so, you know, kind of as a nod to her music keeping me in a good mood when I needed it. I wanted to name a species after her. When Derek named a millipede, Nonariaaria swifti after the world's biggest pop star, he became perhaps the first diplodologist to be featured in the pages of Rolling Stone. Which was great because normally millipedes don't make front page news too often, so it was a fun experience. And I was just glad to have people excited about millipedes.

Taylor Swift wasn't the only human being Derek honored. Famous podcasters, the McElroy brothers, also have a millipede named after them. And crawling around at the bottom of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains is Nanaria Marianni, named after Derek's wife. My wife often goes out with me when I want to look for millipedes. And so that was also just to show her my appreciation for how patient she is goes out with me when I want to look for millipedes. And so that was also just to show her my appreciation for how patient she is to wait for me as I am digging around in the leaves. These days, lots of scientists are pulling stunts like this. There's a horsefly

named Scaptea bayansii and a tiny Mexican moth named Wackia chubaca. Arnold Schwarzenegger has two insects named after him, a beetle called Agra swartzeneggeri and a tiny fly with oversized legs called Mega propodiphora Arnoldi. And not all the names are cute and fun. Some scientists clearly have a political agenda. In 2005, entomologists Kelly Miller and Quentin Wheeler named a trio of slime mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Announced at the height of the Iraq War, it seemed like a subversive act. People thought they were slime mold beetles. He must be kind of making a joke about how awful these people are. No, no, no. Quentin was a great admirer of the Republican administration at the time. And so he named those beet Beatles to honor those men. My first instinct was that these names were mostly harmless. If hardworking zoologists want to shine a light on their relatively arcane work by naming a glow worm after their

favorite podcaster or politician, who am I to judge? But sometimes a name is so loaded that it can cause very real problems for the unfortunate creature. Which brings us back to Hitler's Beetle. Twenty years ago, Andrei Kapler made a grim discovery in the cave where Anophthalmos hitlerii was first found. Poachers had destroyed the fragile cave ecosystem and the ground was littered with beetle traps. It turns out Hitler's beetle is in high demand from far right extremists who are buying up dead specimens

like tiny Nazi trophies. Every specimen is precious because we need it for research, not for showcasing them and boasting around, well look what I have, I have Hitler's beetle. That's stupid. Preserved insects have been pillaged from museums in Germany. And in December 2023, the New York Times reported that specimens of Hitler's beetle were going for as much as $2,000.

André believes that's a huge exaggeration and the real price is a fraction of that. But the poaching is definitely real. In 2004, the Slovenian government introduced a law to protect underground creatures like Anaphthalmos hitleri and the original cave was closed to the public. And while it's unlikely that Hitler's beetle will get poached to extinction by neo-Nazis, it's clear that the insect's terrible name is not making it any safer. OK, now the moment of truth.

André and I are back in the cave called Hell, and we're checking his beetle traps. OK, this is the first trap. This is the first trap. This is the first... Nothing? But sadly, we are striking out. Goddammit. Nothing. André says our struggles on today's beetle hunt have very little to do with neo-Nazis

and everything to do with the heavy rainfall we've been getting. This one got flooded. OK, is that number five? Number five has got water in it. But the others were dry, just didn't have any of Hitler's beetle. OK. This is the last one the last one and it's empty

does that surprise you? no no you have to be extremely patient with the cave beetles so it takes sometimes it takes years and years just to catch one so so it's not a, it's just misfortune. Coming up after the that the name Hitler's Beetle was an unfortunate historical relic, which begs the question, why not just change

it? After all, it wouldn't be the first time. Shortly after World War II, Hitler's name was erased from roads and town squares all across Europe and beyond. Residents of Park Boulevard and Jopank, Long Island might be blissfully unaware that Nazi sympathizers once named it Adolf Hitler Street. So if we can take Hitler's name off street signs, why can't we remove him from the natural world?

It turns out that the international bodies that govern these matters are not big fans of change. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, or ICZN, are responsible for the naming of animals. And they say that they have no power to change a name based on how offensive it is, a stance that's been getting a lot of heat in recent years. It's a remarkably controversial subject, far more controversial than I ever imagined. I've been publishing scientific articles for 30 years now, and this has got the most amount

of interest of anything that I've ever published. Richard Laidle is Professor of Conservation Science at the Federal University of Alagoas in Brazil. He was one of 11 scientists who co-authored an article in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution, arguing not only that offensive names like Anathalmas Hitleri should be changed, but we should also stop the practice of naming animals after humans entirely. Do you want a species to be a living reminder? Because that's what it is. It's a living reminder of something that maybe doesn't deserve to be celebrated.

Richard's main contribution to the paper was to provide some startling data. In Africa alone, a quarter of all vertebrates are named after people. And a large portion of these people are white British men and women from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Europe's grim legacy still grows, walks, flies and swims in the habitats of these once colonized lands. I remember going to London Zoo and seeing Lady Amherst's pheasant, which is just the most amazing looking bird. It's from China. You know, it could be the symbol of China. It's that amazing. It's one of the most beautiful birds in the world, named after a posh English woman. To Richard, the morality of this is pretty clear, but before the paper had even gone out,

he was already getting the sense that not everyone in the scientific community agreed with him. One of the heads of his institution even urged him not to publish. One of the heads of his institution even urged him not to publish. At which time I started to panic, because then I realized that the s*** was really going to hit the fan. When the article finally came out in March 2023, many of his peers were outraged. I was totally stunned how passionate some taxonomists were against this idea. The main argument against Richard's proposal is maintaining scientific continuity. Right now, the ICZN will only change names if further research causes the status of an animal to be revised, from say, a subspecies to a full species.

They're conservative about change because they don't want to disrupt the chain of scientific knowledge that goes all the way back to Linnaeus. For Richard, that feels like an excuse for inaction. He says that too often, scientists regard themselves as being above politics. The fundamental aspect of this, that naming something is a political act and, you know, pretending that it isn't is not particularly intellectually honest. And for any political act, we need to think about the potential consequences, not just now, but in the future. At the very least, Richard thinks scientists should

challenge themselves to get more creative and specific when naming new species. If you have to name 200 new species, that's difficult. Yeah, but it's not that difficult. Get a map out. There are ways to do this. Crowdsource it. Use local words. Use local landmarks.

There's countless possibilities. Richard is not short of ideas. And throughout our lively Zoom call, I have to say he made a convincing advocate for change. Yeah, I really feel we ought to give a bit more respect to nature and especially when we're naming it. But botanist Sandy Knapp is not totally convinced by Richard Ladle's proposal. She believes that changing all the species that are named after people would be a monumental undertaking. There are thousands of names of things that are named for people, thousands and thousands. And it's not like there's one master spreadsheet that you can just edit one time and be done with. Sandy says that going through and trying to change all those names in the countless places they appear would be extremely time consuming and an unnecessary

distraction from much more pressing concerns. Time is a resource and there's way more important things to do than changing all the names. I mean, we're in the middle of a planetary emergency and a biodiversity crisis. And so do we want to find out more about biodiversity and how to preserve it and restore it? Or do we want to spend our time changing the names of things? To me, that's the choice.

Currently, the ICZN have no appetite for taxonomical revolution, but the ICN or the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi and Plants has recently removed some offensive names. And although she isn't a fan of Richard's radical proposal, Sandy Knapp proudly officiated those changes at the 2024 International Botanical Congress in Madrid.

Sandy Knapp, Director, National Botanical Congress of Madrid And one of the proposals that was voted in is to take all of the species names which are based on the epithet, Kaffra. Kaffra is derived from a word that is a racial slur in South Africa. And that, for me, is actually important to recognize that that's something that needs to be changed. It's very, very offensive. It's offensive to a group of people. All of those names were changed. We take the C away, and they become Afra.

To do this, the Congress exploited a loophole that allows scientific names to be corrected if they are misspelled. It gave delegates an opportunity to vote for this one specific change without committing to some groundbreaking new position on naming more broadly. Everyone was very respectful, you know, well if they weren't respectful I would have kicked them out. But they were very respectful. And then we ran it, I ran it as a secret ballot. So there was a, so you just wrote yes or no on your bit of paper and put it in a box. And then it was counted and it was 63%.

It was an historic moment. For the first time since Linnaeus came up with his binomial system, the offensive names of more than 200 plants, fungi and algae were changed. As for Anophthalmos hitleri, I was surprised to learn that Andrei is actually not all that concerned about the name. It's just a name for me. For me it's important what kind of animal it is, where it lives, what it does, what it is, its position in ecology and everything.

Andrei was more interested in the beetle itself. I wasn't able to see one alive, but he had some dead Anophthalmos hitlery specimens he wanted to show me at his lab in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital. Inside, he pointed to five tiny insects pinned neatly in a row, the color of aged bronze. So if you can see, it's a small, unremarkable, nothing to see actually, just a small beetle. Some people say, oh, it's just an ant, but it's not, it's a beetle.

Under a microscope, it was possible to see their slender, almost elegant features. Andrei says that the beetle evolved after an ancient ice age when living above ground became impossible. They couldn't live anymore in the soil, in the gravel or whatever. So they moved underneath. And looking at this creature close up, you can appreciate how it evolved

to suit a life in perpetual darkness. If you live in a cave, you don't need ice, it's just waste of energy to produce ice and they don't have pigment. The colour of them is brownish yellow. Hitler's beetle escaped from the worst conditions nature could throw at it. It adapted and thrived in a new underground environment where it lived out the next two million years.

That's amazing, so two million years of life and then in the last, you know, less than a hundred years, it's named after the worst human in history. Yeah. Well, it's not its fault. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall, produced and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Hayesha. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube,

Jason De Leon, Chris Verjonsson, Vivian Lay, Lash Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of the logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California.

You can find us all on Blue Sky, which is kind of like Twitter, but for people who don't think things should be named after Nazis, we're also hanging out on our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.