How does a scientist honor a president who happens to be a distant relative? By naming a turtle parasite after him.
Baracktrema obamai isn't just any parasite. It's so distinctive that it represents not just a new species but an entirely new genus, according to a new report in the Journal of Parasitology. That hasn't happened with this type of turtle parasite in 21 years, experts say.
B. obamai is a flatworm that infects black marsh turtles and southeast Asian box turtles in Malaysia. Scientists study turtle parasites because they are believed to be the ancestors of the flatworms that cause schistosomiasis, a disease that kills between 20,000 and 200,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization.
It might be hard for most people to warm up to an organism that can cause so much suffering, but parasitologists are different. These scientists admire the way that parasites are able to make a living in the most foreboding environments. B. obamai, for instance, is able to penetrate the circulatory system of a turtle host and deposit dozens of eggs in the small blood vessels inside turtle lungs, according to the study.
The newly discovered species was discovered by Thomas R. Platt, who spent decades studying turtle viruses before retiring recently from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind. Over the course of his career, he has named parasites after his friends, his graduate school adviser at the University of Alberta in Canada and even his father-in-law, according to a statement from the journal.
The idea of naming a parasite after the 44th president of the United States came to Platt after he learned he was the fifth cousin, twice removed, of Barack Obama, the study explained.
This isn't the first parasite to be named in Obama's honor. In 2012, a team of researchers from the University of New Mexico, Oklahoma State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany christened a hairworm species Paragordius obamai because it was discovered about 12 miles from where the president's father was raised in Kenya. P. obamai infects crickets, not humans, and is the first hairworm of its type known to reproduce asexually, according to a report in the journal PLOS ONE.
Scientists have also named a fish (Etheostoma obama), a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus barackobamai), a lichen species (Caloplaca obamae) and an extinct insect-eating lizard (Obamadon gracilis) after the current commander in chief.
Platt explained why it's so tempting to enshrine Obama's name in the lexicon of living things.
"Baracktrema obamai will endure as long as there are systematists studying these remarkable organisms," he said in the statement.
No word yet from the White House on how the human Barack Obama feels about the new honor.
Jackson Roberts, Raphael Orelis-Ribeiro and Stephen "Ash" Bullard of Auburn University's Aquatic Parasitology Laboratory in Alabama were Platt's co-authors of the new study.
