Lady Gaga: Newly Discovered Insect Species Named After Singer

“If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it’s going to be a treehopper because they’ve got these crazy horns,” PhD candidate Brendan Morris says of Kaikaia gaga.
Lady Gaga’s flamboyant visual style has inspired the name of a newly discovered insect species. Kaikaia gaga is a new genus of the treehopper bugs found almost three decades ago near the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, the Fader reports (via Illinois News Bureau).
Brendan Morris, a PhD candidate in entomology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, borrowed roughly 1,000 treehoppers from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History for research purposes — but after studying a female bug under a stereoscope, he discovered some unique features that distinguished her from the others.
In a report via the journal Zootaxa, Morris and his co-author, Illinois Natural History Survey entomologist Christopher Dietrich, described the creature’s “additional m-cu crossvein in the forewing, as well as a frontoclypeal shape and overall appearance similar to Platycentrus Stål,” along with a “narrow, straight shape of the second valvulae.”
“If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it’s going to be a treehopper because they’ve got these crazy horns,” he told Illinois News Bureau. “They have this wacky fashion sense about them. They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.” One might even say they’re horned this way.