Bid for organism named after you

Free enterprise cashes in on the unexpected, from shampoo sachets to private space flight, bottled water to botox, pasa-loads to personal robots. And now this: Bolivian conservationists ran an on-line auction for the highest bidder to name a newly discovered monkey species. It’s no fluke. The discoverers earned $650,000 from a Canadian internet casino called Golden Palace. The primate is now named after it: Callicebus aureipalatii. And the auction has set a capitalist trend – noticed by Economist magazine – in branding nature’s new finds.

A market beckons. Millions of long ascertained species are still waiting to be named. Many more will be unearthed. Only recently scientists identified dozens of pristine types of sea animals in Tubbataha Reef, a once unknown damselfly in Cebu, and fresh plant varieties in other Pacific isles. Taxonomists, whose job is to describe, classify and name organisms, are in for the big time.

Specie baptism used to spark inspiration, thus the many grand names for majestic fauna and flora. Aptly fierce Tyrannosaurus rex is of worldwide fame, rivaled in the Philippines only by Aedes aegypti, the dengue-spreading mosquito. When imagination ran out, taxonomists christened their finds after each other, their patrons, or family members. Of late it has been for political figures. Orchid breeds were named after Cory Aquino when she was President, and Ming Ramos when First Lady. A blind cave beetle, Anophthalmus hitleri, had honored Adolf Hitler in 1933. Last year the US president, vice president and defense chief each got a beetle too (Agathidium bushi, A. cheneyi, A. rumsfeldi), courtesy of two Republican coleopterists. Democrat-leaning counterparts snickered upon learning that the beetles eat slime mold, but that’s another story. Entertainers also get their just share. Rock musician Sting has a tree frog to his credit, Hyla stingi, and there are spiders called Calponia harrisonfordi and Pachygnatha zappa, obviously by taxonomist-fans.

But the Bolivians who sold off naming rights were on to something. If internet geeks patiently can create and reserve website names to be sold later at top rates, like boeing.com, arroyo.net or free_iraq.gov, then taxonomists too have a right to big bucks. An airline may wish to itself immortalized via a new honeyeater bird found recently in New Guinea, or if it’s low budget, after any of yet unnamed butterflies. Shell Oil may want to pick from any of the many new mollusks. It’s unlikely that Wrigley’s chewing gum would want to adopt a worm at any price, but heavy-equipment firm Caterpillar might bid for a larva of a giant moth. Notice to lawyers: dozens of leeches, little known outside laboratories, are waiting for sponsors.

A boom faces the emerging naming industry. But biologists will have to wait till they sort things out. At the moment, taxonomists are devising a new way to identify and classify creatures. London’s Natural History Museum, for one, is rebuilding a center erected after Carl von Linné, a Swedish naturalist, invented 250 years ago the style of giving two-part Latin names to insects. Linné had named 10,000 species of animals and plants that way, but the subsequent discovery of six million more varieties have rendered the binominal method confusing. ZooBank, a project of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, is studying several naming systems to serve as taxonomy’s "single telephone directory". Maybe a few naming auctions can help them fund the worldwide search.

Meanwhile, discoverers with no capitalist savvy will have to amuse themselves in thinking up memorable specie names. As Economist reported, some of them already named a beetle Colon rectum, a salamander Oedipus complex, a snail Ba hambugi, and another beetle Ytu brutus.

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Partisans on one side brand President Arroyo’s E.O. 464 an affront to check and balance. Those on the other view it as a signal to senators to stop rabble-rousing.

It all started when congressmen quashed Arroyo’s impeachment in September. Charges of election rigging, jueteng payola, and fertilizer-fund misuse never reached Senate trial. But a bipartisan group of senators, fused by common hatred for Arroyo or her husband, found a way: they parceled off the cases for inquiries by their respective committees.

Malacañang felt stung. For Arroyo, a political game of numbers had dumped impeachment fair and square. Trial by publicity – from inquiries that don’t produce reports – would shake her reign anew. Already Arroyo’s net approval rating was at -30 percent, and investors were restive. So came E.O. 464, requiring her consent for executive officials to appear before Congress, except for budget hearings.

The exception was Arroyo’s gesture of goodwill. The executive and legislative branches needed to pull together for a 2006 budget. But senators nonetheless used the budget hearings as extensions of the stalled committee inquiries. One waved CDs before TV-news cameras, warning he would grill Press Sec. Ignacio Bunye on the two versions of the Garci tapes during the budget meet on his office. So came an amendment to E.O. 464, requiring Arroyo’s nod as well for Cabinet men to attend Senate budget hearings.

Malacañang quickly saw its mistake and revoked the addendum. But the senators, for total victory, petitioned the Supreme Court to restrain E.O. 464 even before presentation of arguments next week. And so it’s now up to the Tribunal to break the deadlock. But will it?

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