A Chinese scientist has named 16 new spider species after songs by popular Taiwanese musician Jay Chou (周杰倫).
Mi Xiaoqi (米小其), a professor at Tongren University in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province, listed the newly discovered arachnids in a paper published in the academic journal Zoological Research: Diversity and Conservation.
The paper, published last month, has gone viral since being discovered by Internet users, with a related hashtag on microblogging social media racking up over 26 million views since Wednesday last week. Internet users have since dubbed Mi, 44, the “Ultimate Fan.” One of the arachnids — the 3.5mm long Cyclosa xingqing sp. nov. or “Starry Mood spider” — is named after a hit love song from Chou’s debut album Jay released in 2000.
Photo: CNA
Others are named after similarly beloved tunes, including “Rainbow spider,” “Dragon Fist spider”, and “Excuse spider.”
Taiwanese Chou, renowned for his dramatic romance ballads and pop beats, is one of the world’s most popular Mandarin-language artists, having sold more than 30 million records.
The 45-year-old has been a household name in China and beyond for more than two decades.
Now his songs would be immortalized, as the names of the eight-legged critters that Mi and his colleagues recently discovered in Yunnan, China.
The “Secret Code spider,” a 2.36mm yellowish brown web-weaving arachnid, is named after Chou’s 2002 love song featured on his acclaimed album The Eight Dimensions.
It is unclear how the song, in which Chou croons “Don’t ever leave, you are missing the missing piece in my world,” relates to the spider.
Excuse spider, a fuzzy brown and white critter, shares its name with a track from Chou’s 2004 album Common Jasmine Orange, the best-selling physical album in China this century according to Guinness World Records.
Mi, who published the paper with fellow researchers Wang Cheng (王成) and Li Shuqiang (李樞?), has been a Jay Chou fan since his undergraduate days, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua.
“Naming spiders after Jay Chou’s songs brings scientific research closer to the public. I hope more people will pay attention to scientific research and support ecological protection,” he told Xinhua.
This is not the first time Chou’s name has been used for scientific discoveries. In 2011, astronomers in Taiwan named an asteroid after the singer.
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