Praying mantis, clearly, but possibly Sir David to friends
BELGIAN scientists have named a new “very large and robust” Vietnamese subspecies of praying mantis after Sir David Attenborough.
According to the Royal Belgian Entomological Society, a recent expedition to the Annamite mountains in central Vietnam uncovered a mantis now known as Titanodula attenboroughi.
The Belgian Journal of Entomology describes the 94-year-old television presenter as “one of the world’s most beloved naturalists”.
It describes the newfound insect as a “very large and robust praying mantis. Head triangular, antennae filiform. Long but robust pronotum, with smooth dorsal surface.”
Mantises were once assigned to the catch-all Herodula genus – dubbed a “wastebasket taxon” by the journal, a term used for species that do not fit anywhere else – but species of this group display a great variety of male genitalia, suggesting they are separate.
The research has allowed scientists to assign Attenborough’s eponymous mantis to a new group, Titanodula.
Sir David was director of programming for the BBC in the Seventies, but is best known for presenting his ambitious series of wildlife documentaries, beginning with Life on Earth in 1979. In 2016, a polar research vessel was named the RRS Sir David Attenborough despite an online poll voting for it to be called “Boaty Mcboatface”.
This is not the first animal to be named after the naturalist. Other species include Sir David’s rubber frog, a fleshbelly frog from Peru; a longbeaked echidna – a spiny mammal from New Guinea; and a goblin spider just 1mm long that lives on Horn Island in the Torres Strait of Queensland, Australia.
Commenting on his spider namesake, Sir David said: “I take it that it is careful in its judgment, merciless, certainly beautiful and I will treasure it.”
Also named after him are the Blakea attenboroughii tree in Ecuador, a 430-million-year-old crustacean related distantly to modern shrimps, and a fossil found in Dorset in the 19th century of what was once believed to be a plesiosaur that was later dubbed the Attenborosaurus conybeari.