A Beetle By Any Other Name

A tiny, unremarkable beetle hiding in the caves of Slovenia has an infamously unfortunate name—one that has sparked heated debates in the scientific world.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:29Roman Mars?

  That is British expat and 99PI's Slovenia correspondent, Will Aspinall.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I recently met up with Andre Kapler from the Slovenian National Institute of Biology. Andre studies the ecology of caves, and today he is taking me spelunking. I'm not naturally inclined to go into caves. Is it safe?

• 1:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Okay. We're in the cave. 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. Oh, it's beautiful.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is, but wet.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  You aren't scared of caves? Never was. Actually, I'm more comfortable in a cave than with people.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Andre and I are not exploring a cave called hell just for fun. We're on a mission to catch an elusive insect that Andre studies. A week earlier, he left seven traps inside the cave and baited them with a special recipe.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  It is a nice mixture of beef liver, fish, and gorgonzola. You put them in a vase and marinate them for a few days on sun.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely disgusting. I'm trying to like these creatures.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Oh, it's easy. They're beautiful.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  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 fifty-one known beetles called Anophthalamus, Greek for "without eyes".

• 3:24Speaker 02

  These are not very big beetles, nothing special about them. More or less all look the same, so nothing special about other beetles. Just the name is special.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  The beetle is notorious because it is named after arguably the worst human being in history. We are hunting for Anophthalamus hitlery, 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.

• 4:04Roman 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.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:38Roman Mars?

  The practice of naming species after humans goes back to the 18th century in a man named Carl Linnaeus.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Linnaeus was a really interesting character, so he was a Swedish botanist.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Sandy Knapp is also a botanist and the author of In the Name of Plants: Remarkable Plants and the Extraordinary People Behind Their Names.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:31Roman Mars?

  Before Linnaeus, the names of organisms were really more like sentences.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:45Roman 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.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:22Roman Mars?

  This became Linnaeus's binomial system, and over time, this concise piece of information design was picked up by scientists all across Europe.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  But it wasn't inevitable that Linnaeus's binomial system would become the standard. At the time, there were lots of weird and frankly confusing alternatives.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  My favorite is one that was published in, oh, I don't know, about 1760 by someone called Bergeret in France.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  The name of the plant was the combination of those letters, so it was B R Q X W.

• 7:24Roman Mars?

  You know, I just love it when the B R Q X Ws are flowering in the spring.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Is that easier to remember than Atropa belladonna for the deadly nightshade? And you can see why Linnaeus's system caught on.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:03Roman Mars?

  His apostles traveled the world on dangerous scientific missions: to Java in 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.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  To use Sandy's analogy, not only were there red bicycles and yellow bicycles, but there were now wheels bicycles and Romans bicycles too.

• 8:27Roman Mars?

  And it wasn't just his apostles. Linnaeus also named plants after scientists he admired. Take for example the magnolia.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Pierre Magnol was a botanist who wrote a flora of the area around Montpellier 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 magnols, so he named magnolia for Magnol.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  But Linnaeus was clear that not just anyone should be given the honour of having a species or a genus named after them. He even wrote down guidelines about what type of person was acceptable.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  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 favour 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.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:37Roman Mars?

  And Linnaeus's 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.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Slovenia's infamous beetle was very nearly given a different name. The insect was discovered in 1932 by a Slovenian naturalist named Vladimir Codric in a cave very close to the one I visited with Andrej. Codric 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 Oscar Schäuble.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Oscar Schäuble was actually very good, an entomologist. He had money, so he could afford to go to trips, he could afford to buy specimens from people like Mr. Codric, and he had vast knowledge about this.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Schäuble confirmed that the beetle was a new species, and adhering to Linnaeus's guidelines, he initially agreed to name the new beetle Anophtamus Codrici to honour the discoverer. But then, he had a radical change of heart, because in addition to being a world-famous bug collector...

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, he was a passionate Nazi.

• 10:58Roman Mars?

  And so Schibell's formal submission of "Anaphtomus Hitleri" in a German scientific journal in 1937, combined his two great loves: entomology and Adolf Hitler.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  This part, "Den Herrn Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler als Ausdruck meiner Verehnen zugeeignet." So, he gives this species to Adolf Hitler as his devotion to him.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Hitler was apparently quite tickled by this gesture. According to some sources, he sent a personal letter to Schibell thanking him for the honor.

• 11:34Roman 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, which has led to some, shall we say, interesting choices?

• 11:54Speaker 04

  We did so much fieldwork 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.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  This is Derek Henan. 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.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:35Roman Mars?

  They named some millipedes for the location where they were found, like Nanaria scholastica, discovered on the campus of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Others got names related to how they looked, like Nanaria serpens, a millipede with distinctly snake-like features.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  When Derek named a millipede Nanaria swifti after the world's biggest pop star, he became perhaps the first diplodologist to be featured in the pages of Rolling Stone.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  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 mariani, named after Derek's wife.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  My wife often goes out with me when I want to 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.

• 14:20Roman Mars?

  These days, lots of scientists are pulling stunts like this. There's a horsefly named Scaptia beyoncei and a tiny Mexican moth named Wakia chubaca.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Arnold Schwarzenegger has two insects named after him, a beetle called Aggra Schwarzeneggeri and a tiny fly with oversized legs called Megapro podifora Arnoldi. And not all the names are cute and fun. Some scientists clearly have a political agenda.

• 14:49Roman Mars?

  In 2005, entomologists 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.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  People thought they're slime mold 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.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:38Roman Mars?

  Which brings us back to Hitler's beetle.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Twenty years ago, Andre Kapler made a grim discovery in the cave where Anothalmas Hitleri was first found. Poachers had destroyed the fragile cave ecosystem and the ground was littered with beetle traps.

• 15:56Roman 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.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:17Roman 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.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Andre 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 Anothalmas 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.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Okay, now the moment of truth. Andre and I are back in the cave called Hell, and we're checking his beetle traps. Okay, it's the first trap. This is the first?

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Nothing?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  But sadly, we are striking out.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Andrey 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.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  This one has got water in it?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Okay, is that number five? Number five has got water in it. But the others were dry, just didn't have any of Hitler's beetle. Okay. This is the last one. The last one? And it's empty.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Does that surprise you? No, no. You have to be extremely patient with the cave beetles. So it takes, sometimes it takes years and years just to catch one. So, um, so it's not a tragedy, it's just misfortune.

• 18:21Roman Mars?

  Coming up after the break, should Hitler's beetle get a new name?

• 18:33Roman Mars?

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• 19:04Roman Mars?

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• 20:41Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:53Roman 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 in Yaupang, Long Island, might be blissfully unaware that Nazi sympathizers once named it Adolf Hitler Street.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:40Speaker 06

  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.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Richard Ladel 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 Anna Thalmann's Hitlerries should be changed, but we should also stop the practice of naming animals after humans entirely.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  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 salivated.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  I remember going to London Zoo and seeing Lady Amherst's pheasant, which is just the most amazing-looking bird. And 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 Englishwoman.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  At which time I started to panic, because then I realised, I realised that the was really going to hit the fan.

• 23:44Roman Mars?

  When the article finally came out in March 2023, many of his peers were outraged.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  I was totally stunned how passionate some taxonomists were against this idea.

• 24:00Roman 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 want to disrupt the chain of scientific knowledge that goes all the way back to Linnaeus.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  For Richard, that feels like an excuse for inaction. He says that too often, scientists regard themselves as being above politics.

• 24:31Speaker 06

  The fundamental aspect of this, that naming something is a political act, and, you know, pretending that it isn't, is not particularly intellectually honest. And for any political act, we, we need to think about the, the potential consequences, not just now, but in the future.

• 24:51Roman Mars?

  At the very least, Richard thinks scientists should challenge themselves to get more creative and specific when naming new species.

• 24:58Speaker 06

  If you have to name 200 new species, that's, that's difficult. Yeah, but it's not that difficult. Get them out. There are, there are ways to do this. Crowdsourcing, use local words, use local landmarks. There's countless possibilities.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Richard is not short of ideas, and throughout our lively Zoom call, I have to say, he made a convincing advocate for change.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I really feel we ought to give a bit more respect to, to nature and, and especially when we're naming it.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  But botanist Sandy Knapp is not totally convinced by Richard Laddell's proposal. She believes that changing all the species that are named after people would be a monumental undertaking.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  There are thousands of names of things that are named for people, thousands and thousands.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Time is a resource, and there's way more important things to do than changing all the names. I mean, we're 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.

• 26:24Roman Mars?

  Currently, the ICZN have no appetite for taxonomical revolution, but the ICZN, 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.

• 26:48Speaker 03

  And one of the proposals that was voted in is to take all of the species names which are based on the epithet "cafra."

• 26:56Roman Mars?

  "Cabra" is derived from a word that is a racial slur in South Africa.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  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."

• 27:15Roman 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.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Everyone was very respectful. You know, well, if they weren't respectful, I would have kicked them out. But they were very respectful. And then we ran it, I ran it as a secret ballot. So there was a, 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 sixty-three percent.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  It was an historic moment. For the first time since Linnaeus came up with his binomial system, the offensive names of more than two hundred plants, fungi and algae were changed.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  As for Anophtalus hitlery, I was surprised to learn that Andrej is actually not all that concerned about the name.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  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, what it is, its position in ecology and everything.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Andrej was more interested in the beetle itself. I wasn't able to see one alive, but he had some dead Anophtalus hitlery 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 colour of aged bronze.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  So if you can see, it's a small, unremarkable, nothing to see actually. Just a small beetle. Some, some, some people say, oh, it's just a, it's just an ant. But it's not, it's a beetle.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  They couldn't live anymore in the, in the soil, in the gravel or whatever. So they moved underneath.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  And looking at this creature close up, you can appreciate how it evolved to suit a life in perpetual darkness.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  If you live in a cave, you don't need ice. It's just waste of energy to produce ice. And they don't have pigment. They're all, all this, this, the colour of them is brownish-yellow.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  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 two million years.

• 29:54Roman Mars?

  So two million years of life and then in the last, you know, less than a hundred years, it's named after the worst human in, in history.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it's not its fault.

• 30:21Roman Mars?

  Ninety-nine percent invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall, produced and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Hesha. Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLio, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Laish Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. But ninety-nine percent visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM Podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us all on Blue Sky, which is kind of like Twitter, but for people who don't think things should be named after Nazis, we're also hanging out on our own Discord server.

• 31:06Roman Mars?

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