A multicoloured sea slug discovered off the coast of Western Australia has been named for the state’s fly-in, fly-out mining workforce after a judging panel ruled that Sluggy McSlugface breached the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.
The slug, which is a species of nudibranch, was discovered in 2000 off the coast of Dampier, about 1,500km north of Perth, by the WA scientist Dr Nerida Wilson.
Wilson will apply for it to be officially named Moridilla fifo after a public competition to name the nudibranch received more than 4,500 entries.
A significant number of those entries suggested either Sluggy McSlugface or Nudie McNudeface, but Dr Amber Beavis, who was on the judging panel, said that breached international rules against “frivolous” scientific names, as well as a few other regulations.
“Sluggy McSlugface – there’s no way to Latinise that,” Beavis said. “You can do the ‘sluggy’ bit but to get the spirit of that would be impossible.”
Beavis said Moridilla fifo was the clear winner after Patrick Dwyer made a compelling argument likening the nudibranch’s toxic secretions to the transient workforce.
The logic, as explained by Dwyer, is that nudibranches eat jellyfish and other animals with stingers and then secrete those same toxins out of its cerata, the blue and orange sausage-shaped appendages that line its back, as a form of self-defence. Fly-in fly-out (fifo) workers, Dwyer told Radio National, were similarly “an important resource also brought in from elsewhere”.
It helped that the animal’s blue and orange colour scheme matched the high-vis cotton drill uniform of the fifo workforce, and is quintessentially West Australian.
Beavis said Dwyer had clearly thought deeply about the biology of the animal. “A really good species name tells you something about the animal or where it was found,” she said. “While Sluggy McSlugface and Nudie McNudeface is hilarious … they don’t actually tell you anything about the species and that’s a really important part.”
Fifo beat shortlisted names of Moridilla pindan blue, named for the characteristic red-dirt soil of the Kimberley; Moridilla musa, named for the banana-like cerata (musa is the scientific genus for bananas); Moridilla favilla, which is Latin for glowing embers; Moridilla zissou, a reference to the blue overalls and red beanies of the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; and Moridilla hipster, because the slug wears “ironically clashing colours” and has a moustache.
Also nominated were Moridilla finger bun (“It resembles a bakery product with the tan body and sprinkles on top,” said Ian Buckley); Moridilla carlotta, for the Australian showgirl and trans pioneer; and Moridilla karlakarlem, which means “dusk” in Worrorra, one of the Indigenous languages of the Kimberley.
