Four New Insect Species Have Been Named After Taylor Swift, and One Is Called Poetorum

There are now four species of insect named after Taylor Swift, and they are distinct enough from everything around them to have been given a genus of their own.

The genus is Swiftiephylus. The entomologist responsible is Sarah Schroeder of the University of California, Riverside, and her paper appears in the journal Insect Systematics and Evolution. The naming, she writes, is in recognition of the singer's show-stopping talent, heart-wrenching lyrics, and the joy and comfort she has brought to so many.

What they actually are

They are true bugs, which is a narrower category than most people assume. An insect is not automatically a bug. A bug is an insect with a straw-like mouth and partly translucent wings, and these belong to a family within that group called plant bugs.

They are native to Australia and very small, a fraction of an inch long, with colouring that only really announces itself under a microscope. Their lives are short and busy, running one or two months. They feed by pushing their mouthparts into plant stems and shoots and drinking the juice, find mates using chemical pheromones, and otherwise concentrate on not being eaten by birds or lizards.

They are unusually good at that last part. The reddish-pink markings and blonde body disappear against the flowers of the plants they live on, which are called sheoaks.

Sheoaks are not oaks. They look more like pines, with long drooping needles and reddish-orange flowers, and they host a considerable variety of insects. The name is a piece of colonial contempt: early European settlers in Australia had a habit of putting she in front of a word to indicate inferiority, in this case regarding the timber. The trees have not lived down to it.

Named in recognition of her show-stopping talent and heart-wrenching lyrics

The specimens had been waiting twenty years

The discovery did not require an expedition. It required somebody to open a drawer.

Christiane Weirauch, Schroeder's mentor and co-author, had collected 593 specimens on trips to Australia more than two decades earlier. Weirauch had sorted them roughly into groups that looked similar, and there they stayed.

Schroeder started on them in 2022, in her first year as a doctoral student, and it took years. She compared the DNA and the physical characteristics of every specimen against material held in museums around the world before concluding that four closely related but genuinely separate species were sitting inside the collection, and that together they warranted a new genus.

She was 27 when she began. What drew her eye in the first place was the colouring: bright blonde with red splashes, which put her in mind of her favourite performer's lipstick.

The names

The type species, the one with red across the middle of its back, is Swiftiephylus taylorae.

The other three are named for albums. S. amator, from the Latin for lover, is for the 2019 record. S. intrepidus is for Fearless, from 2008. S. poetorum is for The Tortured Poets Department, from 2024.

The part the paper leaves open

The four are separated by subtle differences, but they share one defining feature: spines near the tip of the penis.

Nobody yet knows what the spines are for. Schroeder's study did not include behavioural work, so the question of what these structures actually do during mating is unresolved and will stay that way until somebody looks.

Weirauch has a suggestion, and it is a genuine technique rather than a joke. Someone, she says, should deep freeze them in copula and actually look at the structures. Freezing insects mid-mating in order to examine which parts are doing what is standard practice in the field.

It is also, for a genus named after a songwriter whose entire body of work is about examining a relationship in forensic detail after the fact, a reasonably fitting research method.