ROMAN MARS: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: That is British expat in 99PI’s Slovenia correspondent Will Aspinall.
WILL ASPINALL: I recently met up with Andrej Kapla from the Slovenia National Institute of Biology. Andrej studies the ecology of caves. And today, he’s taking me spelunking.
WILL ASPINALL: I’m not– I’m not naturally, uh, inclined to go into caves. Is it safe?
ANDREJ KAPLA: Ah, 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.
[RUNNING WATER]
WILL ASPINALL: Okay. We’re in the cave.
WILL ASPINALL: The cave is narrow–only about a meter wide in places–but it’s, like, 15 meters high. It’s a chasm, and it’s flooded.
WILL ASPINALL: Oh, it’s beautiful!
ANDREJ KAPLA: Yeah, it is… But wet! [CHUCKLES]
WILL ASPINALL: You aren’t scared of caves?
ANDREJ KAPLA: Never was. Actually, I’m more comfortable in a cave than with people.
WILL ASPINALL: Andrej and I are not exploring a cave called hell just for fun. We’re on a mission to catch an elusive insect that Andrej studies. A week earlier, he left seven traps inside the cave and baited them with a special recipe.
ANDREJ KAPLA: It is a nice mixture of beef liver, fish, and gorgonzola. You put ’em in a vase and marinade them for a few days in the sun.
WILL ASPINALL: Absolutely disgusting. I’m trying to like these creatures.
ANDREJ KAPLA: Oh, it’s easy. They’re beautiful. [LAUGHS]
WILL ASPINALL: 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 an “anophthalmus,” Greek for “without eyes.”
ANDREJ KAPLA: These are not very big beetles. Nothing special about them. More or less, they all look the same. So, nothing special about the beetles. Just the name is special.
ROMAN MARS: The beetle is notorious because it is named after arguably the worst human being in history.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: The practice of naming species after humans goes back to the 18th century–and a man named Carl Linnaeus.
SANDY KNAPP: Linnaeus was a really interesting character. So, he was a Swedish botanist.
WILL ASPINALL: Sandy Knapp is also a botanist and the author of In the Name of Plants: Remarkable Plants and the Extraordinary People behind Their Names.
SANDY KNAPP: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: Before Linnaeus, the names of organisms were really more like sentences.
SANDY KNAPP: 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.
ROMAN MARS: 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.”
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: This became Linnaeus’ binomial system. And over time, this concise piece of information design was picked up by scientists all across Europe.
SANDY KNAPP: 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.”
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: My favorite is one that was published in–oh, I don’t know–about 1760 by someone called Bergeret in France.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: The name of the plant was the combination of those letters, so it was B-R-Q-X-W.
ROMAN MARS: You know, I just love it when the BRQXWs are flowering in the spring.
SANDY KNAPP: Is that easier to remember than “Atropa belladonna” for the deadly nightshade? And you can see why the Linnaeus’ system caught on.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: 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.
ROMAN MARS: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: To use Sandy’s analogy, not only were there “red bicycles” and “yellow bicycles,” but there were now “Will’s bicycles” and “Roman’s bicycles,” too.
ROMAN MARS: And it wasn’t just his apostles. Linnaeus also named plants after scientists he admired. Take, for example, the Magnolia.
SANDY KNAPP: Pierre Magnol was a botanist who wrote a flora of the area around Montpelier 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 Magnol’s. So, he named “Magnolia” for Magnol.
WILL ASPINALL: But Linnaeus was clear that not just anyone should be given the honor of having a species or a genus named after them. He even wrote down guidelines about what type of person was acceptable.
SANDY KNAPP: 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 favor 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.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
ROMAN MARS: And 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Slovenia’s infamous beetle was very nearly given a different name. The insect was discovered in 1932 by a Slovenia naturalist named Vladimir Kodrič in a cave very close to the one I visited with Andrej. Kodrič 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.
ANDREJ KAPLA: Oskar Scheibel was an 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. Kodrič. And he had vast knowledge about this.
WILL ASPINALL: Scheibel confirmed that the beetle was a new species and, adhering to Linnaeus’ guidelines, he initially agreed to name the new beetle “Anophthalmus kodriči” to honor the discoverer. But then, he had a radical change of heart because, in addition to being a world famous bug collector…
ANDREJ KAPLA: Unfortunately he was a passionate Nazi.
ROMAN MARS: And so Scheibel’s formal submission of Anophthalmus hitleri in a German scientific journal in 1937 combined his two great loves: entomology and Adolf Hitler.
ANDREJ KAPLA: Aha this part “Dem Herrn Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler als Ausdruck meiner Verehrung zugeeignet.” So, he gives this species to Adolf Hitler as his devotion to him.
WILL ASPINALL: Hitler was apparently quite tickled by this gesture. According to some sources, he sent a personal letter to Scheibel thanking him for the honor.
ROMAN MARS: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Which has led to some, shall we say, interesting choices?
DEREK HENNEN: We did so much field work and went to so many different sites that, you know, those first few months, when we first started, we’re like, “Oh man, look at this new species!” We were really excited, but we just kept finding more and more and more.
WILL ASPINALL: This is Derek Hennen. He’s a diplodologist. That’s a 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.
DEREK HENNEN: 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.
ROMAN MARS: They named some millipedes for the location where they were found, like “Nannaria scholastica,” discovered on the campus of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Others got names related to how they looked, like “Nannaria serpens,” a millipede with distinctly snake-like features.
WILL ASPINALL: 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?
DEREK HENNEN: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: When Derek named a millipede “Nannaria Swiftae” after the world’s biggest pop star, he became perhaps the first diplodologist to be featured in the pages of Rolling Stone.
DEREK HENNEN: Which was great because, you know, normally millipedes don’t make front page news too often. So, it was a fun experience. And, you know, I was just glad to have people excited about millipedes.
WILL ASPINALL: 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 Marianae, named after Derek’s wife.
DEREK HENNEN: My wife often goes out with me when I wanna 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.
ROMAN MARS: These days, lots of scientists are pulling stunts like this. There’s a horse fly named “Scaptia beyoncaea” and a tiny Mexican moth named “Wockia Chewbacca.”
WILL ASPINALL: Arnold Schwarzenegger has two insects named after him: a beetle called “Agra Schwarzeneggeri” and a tiny fly with oversized legs called “Megapropodiphora arnoldi.” And not all the names are cute and fun. Some scientists clearly have a political agenda.
ROMAN MARS: In 2005, entomologist 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.
SANDY KNAPP: People thought, “They’re slime mode 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 beetles to honor those men.
WILL ASPINALL: 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 glowworm 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.
ROMAN MARS: Which brings us back to Hitler’s beetle.
WILL ASPINALL: 20 years ago, Andrej Kapla made a grim discovery in the cave where Anophthalmus hitleri was first found. Poachers had destroyed the fragile cave ecosystem, and the ground was littered with beetle traps.
ROMAN MARS: It turns out Hitler’s beetle is in high demand from far-right extremists, who are buying up dead specimens like tiny Nazi trophies.
ANDREJ KAPLA: 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.
ROMAN MARS: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Andrej 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 Anophthalmus 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.
[RUNNING WATER]
ANDREJ KAPLA: Okay, now the moment of truth…
WILL ASPINALL: Andrej and I are back in the cave called Hell, and we’re checking his beetle traps.
WILL ASPINALL: Okay. It’s the first trap.
ANDREJ KAPLA: This is the first… Nothing.
WILL ASPINALL: But sadly, we are striking out.
ANDREJ KAPLA: Ah, god damn it. Nothing.
WILL ASPINALL: Andrej 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Oh no.
ANDREJ KAPLA: This one got flooded?
WILL ASPINALL: Okay, is that number five? Number five has got water in it. But the others were dry. They just didn’t have any of Hitler’s beetles. This is the last one.
ANDREJ KAPLA: The last one… And it’s empty.
WILL ASPINALL: Does that surprise you?
ANDREJ KAPLA: No. No. You have to be extremely patient with the cave beetles. So, it may take– Sometimes it takes years and years just to catch one. So, it’s not a tragedy. It’s just misfortune.
ROMAN MARS: Coming up after the break, should Hitler’s beetle get a new name?
[AD BREAK]
WILL ASPINALL: Everyone who I interviewed for this story more or less agreed that the name “Hitler’s beetle” was an unfortunate historical relic, which begs the question, “Why not just change it?
ROMAN MARS: 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 Yaphank, Long Island, might be blissfully unaware that Nazi sympathizers once named it Adolf Hitler Street.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
RICHARD LADLE: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Richard Ladle 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 Anophthlamus hitleri should be changed, but we should also stop the practice of naming animals after humans entirely.
RICHARD LADLE: Do you want a species to be a living reminder? Because that’s what it is! You know, it’s a living reminder of something that maybe doesn’t deserve to be celebrated.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
RICHARD LADLE: 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.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
RICHARD LADLE: At which time I start to panic because then I realized that the [BLEEP] was really gonna hit the fan.
ROMAN MARS: When the article finally came out in March, 2023, many of his peers were outraged.
RICHARD LADLE: I was totally stunned how passionate some taxonomists were against this idea.
ROMAN MARS: 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 wanna disrupt the chain of scientific knowledge that goes all the way back to Linnaeus.
WILL ASPINALL: For Richard, that feels like an excuse for an action. He says that too often scientists regard themselves as being above politics.
RICHARD LADLE: The fundamental aspect of this is that naming something is a political act. And 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.
ROMAN MARS: At the very least, Richard thinks scientists should challenge themselves to get more creative and specific when naming new species.
RICHARD LADLE: If you have to name 200 new species, that’s difficult. 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.
WILL ASPINALL: Richard is not short of ideas. And throughout our lively zoom call, I have to say he made a convincing advocate for change.
RICHARD LADLE: Yeah, I really feel we ought to give a bit more respect to nature, and especially when we’re naming it.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: There are thousands of names of things that are named for people–thousands and thousands.
WILL ASPINALL: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: Time is a resource, and there’s way more important things to do than changing all the names. I mean, we are 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.
ROMAN MARS: 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: And one of the proposals that was voted in is to take all of the species names, which are based on the epithet “Caffra.”
ROMAN MARS: “Caffra” is derived from a word that is a racial slur in South Africa.
SANDY KNAPP: 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.”
ROMAN MARS: 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.
SANDY KNAPP: Everyone was very respectful. Well, if they weren’t respectful, I would’ve kicked them out. But they were very respectful. And then I ran it as a secret ballot. 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%.
WILL ASPINALL: 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 Anophthalmus hitleri, I was surprised to learn that Andrej is actually not all that concerned about the name.
ANDREJ KAPLA: 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 is its position in ecology and everything…
WILL ASPINALL: Andrej was more interested in the beetle itself. I wasn’t able to see one alive, but he had some dead Anophthalmus hitleri 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.
ANDREJ KAPLA: So, if you can see, it’s a small, unremarkable… Nothing to see actually–just a small beetle. Some people say, “Oh, it is just an ant.” But it’s not; it’s a beetle.
WILL ASPINALL: Under a microscope, it was possible to see their slender, almost elegant features. Andrej says that the beetle evolved after an ancient ice age when living above ground became impossible.
ANDREJ KAPLA: They couldn’t live anymore in the soil, in the gravel, or whatever. So, they moved underneath.
WILL ASPINALL: And looking at this creature close up, you can appreciate how it evolved to suit a life in perpetual darkness.
ANDREJ KAPLA: If you live in a cave, you don’t need ice. It is just a waste of energy to produce ice. And they don’t have pigment. They’re all… The color of them is brownish yellow.
WILL ASPINALL: 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 2 million years.
WILL ASPINALL: That’s amazing. So, 2 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.
ANDREJ KAPLA: [CHUCKLES] Yeah… Well, it’s not its fault.
ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall, produced and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.
Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California.
You can find us all on Bluesky, which is kind of like Twitter for people who don’t think things should be named after Nazis. We’re also hanging out on our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.
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