What do you do to keep yourself in good spirits while burning the midnight candle finishing up your paperwork?
If you ask a group of scientists who discovered a new water mite species, they would tell you they crank up the music and jam to Jennifer Lopez.
Apparently, their soundtrack helped them get through their writing; and so, in gratitude, they honored the artist whose music kept them in a good mood by naming the creature after her -- even if the bug doesn't bear any resemblance to the pop star.
"Pop singer Jennifer Lopez may be thinking life is funny after a group of scientists named a water mite in her honor after discovering a new species near Puerto Rico," ABC News said. "The music of the Bronx, New York-born entertainer who has Puerto Rican roots was a hit with the group while they wrote about their findings."
"The reason behind the unusual choice of name for the new species is ... simple: J.Lo's songs and videos kept the team in a continuous good mood when writing the manuscript and watching World Cup soccer 2014," explained biologist and author of the study, Vladimir Pesic, according to The Guardian.
Perhaps those bouncy beats kept the team from nodding off and losing their train of thoughts.
"Pesic calls it a small token of gratitude for the singer of hits such as 'Ain't It Funny,' ''I Luh Ya Papi' and his personal favorite, 'All I Have,'" Mashable noted. "Pesic and other scientists collected the newly baptized Litarachna lopezae mite from a coral reef in Mona Passage, a treacherous body of water that separates Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic."
"The species was found at a depth of nearly 230 feet, the greatest depth that pontarachnid mites have been found until now," the site added.
This is not the first time that men of science have named their discoveries after musicians, The Guardian observed.
"A blood-sucking marine parasite, Gnathia marleyi, honours reggae legend Bob Marley; Queen's Freddie Mercury has a species of isopod that lives on coral reefs off the coast of Zanzibar named Cirolana mercuryi in tribute to him; while Mick Jagger has a type of trilobite named Aegrotocatellus jaggeri named after him," the British news source said. "There's even a Joshua Tree spider named Aptostichus bonoi after U2's Bono."
Based on these factoids, it can be safely said that one doesn't necessarily need to be a renowned scientist in order to be immortalized in the annals of science via a biological discovery.
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