From Meme to Marine Crisis: The People’s Mollusk Gets a Name (and a Warning)

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—It looks like the love child of a snail and a beetle, lives exclusively on sunken wood in total darkness, has an iron-coated tongue, and hosts a tiny colony of worms near its tail that survive by eating its excrement.

Naturally, the internet fell in love with it.

The creature is a chiton, a type of marine mollusk armored with eight overlapping shell plates, first discovered in 2024 in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off Japan at a depth of 5,500 meters (about 3.4 miles). It belonged to Ferreiraella, a genus so rare and poorly studied that scientists at the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance decided to try something unusual: let the public name it.

The campaign launched after science YouTuber Ze Frank featured the chiton in an episode of his long-running True Facts series. Within a week, more than 8,000 name suggestions flooded in through social media.

"We were overwhelmed by the response and the massive number of creative name suggestions," said Prof. Julia Sigwart, co-chair of SOSA at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt.

The winning name: Ferreiraella populi—Latin for "of the people." Eleven different contributors independently suggested it.

Other standouts included Ferreiraella stellacadens ("shooting star chiton") and Ferreiraella ohmu, a nod to a chiton-like creature from a Studio Ghibli film—and to Japan, where the species was found. The formal description was published in the Biodiversity Data Journal.

What makes the story more than cute is the clock it's racing against. Naming a new species typically takes a decade or more. This one was described just two years after discovery—speed that matters as deep-sea mining threatens the very ecosystems where creatures like F. populi quietly exist.

"This is crucial for the conservation of marine diversity," Sigwart said, "especially in light of the threats it faces, such as deep-sea mining."

The people's mollusk now has a name, but whether its newfound fame can protect its fragile home remains uncertain.