Around 2002, biologists in Slovenia noticed something strange. They studied troglobiions,

animals that live in caves, and they were finding traps in local caves that had captured a

certain beetle. It's a pretty ugly buck. It's tiny and amber colored with no eyes. It looks like a termite or a cockroach. Yet people

were paying thousands of dollars per specimen. And no matter how many hundreds of traps biologists

confiscated, new ones would appear. Poachers pursued this bug as relentlessly as elephants are hunted

for ivory and rhinoceruses for their horns.

But why? What's so special about this beetle?

It's name, an a thalamus Hitleri.

That's Hitleri as in Adolf Hitler.

The biologist who discovered it in 1933 named it after Hitler to celebrate Der Fuhr's rise to power in Germany.

Now, given that it's an ugly, blind cave bug, that doesn't seem like much of an honor,

but that was his intention.

Nowadays, of course, Hitler's name is a byword for evil, except among neo-Nazis.

For them, the Hitler beetle is a collector's item. And relentless

poaching has driven this bug to the brink of extinction. So why haven't biologists just changed its

name? If only things were that simple. Changing the name of a species is a surprisingly fraught

topic. So today we're going to examine this underbelly of biology

and explain why we might be stuck with a Hitler bug for a long time.

From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Keene and The Disappearing Spoon,

a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

People have always given animals names, raccoon, musk-racked, kookabura.

These are sometimes called common names.

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