LOS ANGELES: Jeff Goodhartz is single
and has no children. But he wanted to ensure the family name would live on after
he's gone.
So he paid $5,000 to have a newfound sea worm given the
Goodhartz name, "goodhartzorum".
"This really jazzes me up," said the
55-year-old high school math teacher whose namesake is translucent with a
flamboyant blue tuft. "It will be out there, the family name." And it will be
swimming in the Belize mangroves where someone else discovered
it.
Goodhartz bought the naming rights from the Scripps Institution
of Oceanography, which unveiled its name-a-species program earlier this year.
This modern twist on taxonomy is a way to raise research money, and lots of
groups have been doing it.
But its growing popularity has rekindled a
debate over whether the practice invites fake discoveries and has led to a push
for oversight.
"It is conceivable that someone could fabricate a new
species in order to make money, if it were shown to be lucrative," said Andrew
Polaszek, an entomologist at the Natural History Museum in
London.
Taxonomy ranks among the world's oldest professions, dating
back to 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who popularized the
classification system still in use today. Of the 30 million or so species of
animals, plants and microbes on Earth, only about 1.8 million have been named
and identified so far.
Traditionally, the discoverer gets to christen
the new organism. All living things have a two-part scientific name, usually in
Latin. It's common for discoverers to name a new species after themselves or in
honor of their spouses, children, colleagues, benefactors or even
celebrities.
In recent years, species names have gone from finders
keepers to being auctioned off or sold to donors to support research as other
funding has dried up. Not all species are created equal. The rarer and more
evolved the organism, the more money it tends to fetch.