Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld the Slime-Mold Beetles

Thursday April 21, 2005 Category: Research Permanent Link

From a recent Cornell press release… Quentin Wheeler and Kelly B. Miller, former Cornell entomologists, discovered 65 new species of the genus Agathidium, or slime-mold beetles. They chose to name three of them after President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular,” says Wheeler.

The entomologists also named some of the new species after their wives and a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, the fictional “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader (“who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head”), Frances Fawcett (their scientific illustrator) and the Greek words for “ugly” and “having prominent teeth” and the Latin word for “strange.” Many of the other names they used for the recently described beetles were derived from various geographic locations, such as California, Georgia and a few states in Mexico, and for various distinguishing features they discovered on the beetles.