Shine on you crazy prog-rock scientists...

In an era where you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, it’s both heartening and disturbing to discover that ‘New shrimp species named after Pink Floyd’ is real and not fake news. The name of the shrimp, synalpheus pinkfloydi was reportedly the result of a pact between prog rock-loving scientists, or a jolly jape by overgrown students, to put it another way.

To be fair, this seems to have been something of a romantic lifelong quest and almost worthy of a major motion picture.

The BBC reports: “The team vowed years ago that if it ever found a new pink shrimp, it would honour the rockers.”

Head shrimp hunter Sammy De Grave declared: “We always said if we would find a pink one, a new species of pink shrimp, we would name it after Pink Floyd.”

Must have been quite a meeting, although if your job is looking for new species of shrimp, while listening to guitar-based rock from the 1970s, I guess it makes a perverse sort of sense.

If the newly-discovered shrimp turned out to be a disappointing shade of red, presumably they would have had to settle for naming it after King Crimson.

The synalpheus pinkfloydi sounds like a quite an anti-social crustacean, using a large claw to make a noise “so loud that it can kill small fish”. It can reach a volume of 210 decibels, one of the loudest noises in the ocean. Typical Pink Floyd fan.

Many would still find this intolerable claw sound preferable to listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Maybe even the small fish in question would rather take their chances with the Pink Floyd shrimp than the real thing. At least it would be over with quickly and you wouldn’t have to endure any indulgent guitar solos.