BEIJING: A Chinese scientist has named 16 new spider species after the songs of popular ‘mandopop’ musician Jay Chou.
Mi Xiaoqi, 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 in December, has gone viral since being discovered by netizens this year, with a related hashtag on microblogging platform Weibo garnering more than 26 million views as of Wednesday.
Weibo users have since dubbed the Mi 44 the “ultimate fan”.
One of the arachnids – the 3.5 mm long Cyclosa xingqing sp. November or “Starry Mood Spider” – is named after a hit love song from Cho’s debut album “Jay” released in 2000.
Others are named after similarly cute tunes, including “Rainbow Spider”, “Dragon Fist Spider”, and “Accuse Spider”.
Born in Taiwan, Cho is known for his dramatic romantic ballads and pop beats, and 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 on the Chinese mainland and beyond for two decades.
Now his songs will be immortalized as the names of the eight-legged critters that Mi and his colleagues recently discovered in China’s Yunnan Province.
The Secret Code Spider, a 2.36 mm yellow-brown web-weaving arachnid, is named after Cho’s 2002 love song from his hit album “The Eight Dimensions”.
It’s unclear if the song, in which Cho croons “Never leaving, you’re missing the missing piece in my world,” is related to the spider.
Excuse Spider, a fuzzy brown and white critter, shares its name with a track on Cho’s 2004 album “Common Jasmine Orange,” according to Guinness World Records the best-selling physical album in China this century.
According to the official media outlet, Mi, who published the paper with fellow researchers Wang Cheng and Li Shuqiang, has been a fan of Jay Chu since his undergraduate days. Shinhua.
“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 environmental protection,” he said. Shinhua.
This is not the first time that Chu’s name has been used for scientific discoveries. In 2011, astronomers in Taiwan named an asteroid after the singer.