Add The New York Post on Google Taylor Swift has officially entered her insect era.
The Grammy Award-winning pop star is the namesake of a recently discovered genus of plant-feeding Australian insects.
“It felt authentic to me as a lifelong Swiftie to honor Taylor in this way, as well as bring attention to the diversity of insects that have yet to be discovered,” said Sarah Schroeder, a UC Riverside doctoral student in entomology.
Schroeder hopes that attaching the insects to T. Swift will foster both interest and conservation efforts.
Schroeder is the lead author of a paper published in the journal Insect Systematics and Evolution that details 12 new species of insects.
Of these newly identified creepy crawlies, one genus has been christened Swiftiephylus, a combination of “Swiftie,” the preferred term for Swift’s fans, and Phylus, the name commonly used for this group of insects.
Further, and to the delight of fans, the genus includes four species whose names are directly inspired by TayTay and her discography: Swiftiephylus taylorae, Swiftiephylus amator, Swiftiephylus intrepidus, and Swiftiephylus poetorum.
In keeping with taxonomic tradition, the names are Latin and translate to Taylor, lover, fearless, and poets.
More broadly, the insects belong to a family called Miridae, which encompasses more than 11,000 species and includes both plant feeders and predators.
As innocuous as the artist herself, Swiftiephylus are not known to bother humans or animals.
Schroeder’s decision to name the insects after Miss Americana is partly aesthetic.
“Taylor Swift’s iconic look is her blonde hair and red lips. These insects are pale yellow with accents of red throughout,” Schroeder said. “In the paper I refer to them as blonde.”
The bugs spend the majority of their lives in Australian she-oaks, highly adaptive trees and shrubs that flourish in tropical forests and coastal dunes and can endure extreme heat.
According to Schroeder, many of these bugs spend their entire lives, from hatching to egg-laying, on a single host plant that they feed from but do not harm.
Translation? Trees don’t need to “shake off” this plant-feeding parasite to protect themselves.
According to the paper, the specimens were collected between 1995 and 2004 during a large biodiversity effort between the American Museum of Natural History and Australian collaborators. This large-scale collection yielded more than 50,000 specimens that have required years of taxonomic work to sort, study, and describe.
Schroeder examined 593 specimens from this mass collection, studying their evolution to better understand how insect species spread, diversify, and develop relationships with plants.
Her ultimate goal is to connect that knowledge to conservation, hence the “actually romantic” decision to name the insects after an artist known and loved the world over.
“If we don’t describe species, we don’t know they exist and can’t conserve them. Honoring Taylor through naming these species after her is a way to honor conservation science and bring attention to all the unknown diversity,” said Schroeder.
These plant-feeding insects aren’t the first to be named in honor of HRH Taylor Swift.
In 2022, a devoted Swiftie scientist named a brown and orange millipede, Nannaria swiftae, after the celebrated singer.
