Having a newly discovered parasitic flatworm named after you may not be the world’s most illustrious honor, but it’s something Barack Obama nonetheless has the pleasure of adding to his presidential legacy.

Enter Baracktrema obamai, the flatworm that infects Malaysian freshwater turtles, a species and genus of parasite discovered by Dr Thomas R Platt, an expert on turtle parasites, who wanted to bestow the president with a gift of adding his namesake to the animal kingdom.



“This is clearly something in my small way done to honor our president,” Platt, who recently discovered that he was also a distant relative of Obama, told the Associated Press.



“I have named a number of species after people I admire, from my father-in-law, my PhD adviser, and good friends who are academics and/or amateur naturalists,” Platt said in a press release. “Baracktrema obamai will endure as long as there are systematists studying these remarkable organisms.”

The findings about the parasites, which are found in black marsh turtles native to Malaysia, were presented and discussed in a new paper Platt co-authored in the Journal of Parasitology with Jackson Roberts, Dr Raphael Orélis-Ribeiro, and Dr Ash Bullard, of Auburn University in Alabama.

Discovering and naming the new parasite, one of the 30 that he has discovered over the course of his career, was one of Dr Platt’s last acts before he retired this year from teaching at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.

“The new species is so unusual and distinctive that the research team has named a new genus to include the new species,” said Michael Sukhedo, the editor of the Journal of Parasitology. “This is the first time such an action has been taken for this group of turtle parasites in 21 years.”

Despite their bad reputations, Sukhedo said that many people who study parasites “see them as beautiful and resilient”, a crucial understanding to the life in our planet. According to Sukhedo, some 70% of all animals on Earth are parasites.

Parasites “face incredible obstacles to complete their journey (life cycle) and must contend with the immune system of the host in order to mature and reproduce”, Platt said.

Understanding their evolutionary background and discovering such new parasites can also be essential in better understanding dangerous ailments.

The Baracktrema obamai are a distant relative of the parasitic flatworm which causes schistosomiasis, a destructive human ailment which affects millions of people, particularly in the developing world.

Meanwhile, the Baracktrema obamai should be welcomed like a steadily growing list of friends. Including more than a dozen schools who have taken his moniker, Obama has also named after him an Antiguan mountain, a species of lichen, a spider, an Amazonian puffbird and an extinct group of polyglyphanodontian lizard from the late Cretaceous epoch dubbed the Obamadon.