Kamala is brat. Kamala is a joyful warrior. And now, Kamala is a bug.
Brad Balukjian, an entomologist and research associate with San Francisco’s California Academy of Science, has honored the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee by naming a newly discovered species of yellow-green insect after her.
Pseudoloxops kamalaharrisae might not be coconut-pilled exactly, but it’s a type of “plant bug” — the technical term — in the palm-filled South Pacific. The yellow-green insects are 3 to 4 millimeters in length.
Balukjian didn’t just identify one species of plant bug, either. He’s got 17 to his credit, most of which he opted not to name. “On most of them, I worked with fifth-graders in Tahiti to name them in Tahitian,” he said. “I kept a couple back, including one for Kamala Harris because of the work she did with the Biden administration on building the American Climate Corps.”
That environmental job-training initiative is essentially the national version of the Natural History and Sustainability Program that Balukjian founded at Oakland’s Merritt College. Throw in Harris’ East Bay roots, and the choice was obvious. The process of naming the veep’s eponymous arthropod, from discovery through peer review, began years before her bid for the presidency, he added.
Balukjian decided to name another species Pseudoloxops harrisonfordi, after the actor known for playing a roguish, globe-trotting archaeologist — and, once, a U.S. president. “I think Harrison Ford’s great,” he said, citing “The Mosquito Coast” and “Blade Runner 2049” as his favorite “non-franchise” movies. “But more pertinent is the work he’s done for Conservation International. He’s on the board there, and he’s made lots of commitments over the years.”
Plant bugs are part of an order of insects known as “true bugs,” distinguished by the straw-shaped mouths they insert into plant or animal tissue to slurp up nutrients. Of the 80,000 known species, many are parasites or agricultural pests. Consequently, Balukjian considers them to be six-legged underdogs of the insect world, critters in need of a champion who will help them “exist in the context.”
“After butterflies, beetles, flies, and wasps, they’re the most numerous on the planet,” he said. “But they have a PR problem: The two best known are stink bugs and bed bugs.”